minds.”[210.1] But even when the prayer is personal and materialistic a real fervour and a genial poetic freshness is often to be found. Here is a beautiful prelude to a prayer for long life proffered to the ancient heaven-god: “Many dawns have not yet dawned: grant me to live in them, O Varuna.” And often the worshipper rises above mere material aspirations, as in such appeals to Agni as the following: “May we be well-doers before the gods.”[210.2] “Give us not up, oh Agni, to want of thought.”[210.3] “Mayest thou bestow splendour, renown, and (wise) mind upon such mortals as satisfy thee with refreshment, oh Agni.”[210.4] “Drive far from us senselessness and anguish: drive far all ill-will from whom thou attendest.”[210.5] {211} At times also the hymns reveal a deep consciousness of sin and a desire for divine forgiveness. “Through want of strength, thou strong and bright god, have I gone astray. Have mercy, Almighty, have mercy!”[211.1] “Agni, drive away from us sin, which leads us astray.”[211.2] “By the earth’s greatness, oh Agni, forgive us even committed sin, that we may be great.”[211.3] “Whatever sin we have committed against thee in thoughtlessness, men as we are, make thou us sinless before Aditi.”[211.4] Yet we may suspect that the term sin is not always used in these prayers in its modern ethical sense, not for instance in the prayer, “From the sins which knowingly or unknowingly we have committed, do ye, all gods, of one accord release us”;[211.5] and the primitive concept on which the old magic of sin-transference was based survives in such passages as the following: {212} “Pass far away, oh sin of the mind: why dost thou utter things not to be uttered? Pass away, I love thee not: to the trees and the forests go on!”[212.1] “Enter into the rays, into smoke, oh sin; go into the vapours, and into the fog.”[212.2] The context discloses only an indirect appeal to a personal deity, though the term sin in the former passage is clearly applied to what we should call moral offences. In the Vedic ritual, then, we find a pure and spiritual form of prayer; yet a certain spell-power may attach even to the highest types, for we find not infrequently the conception that not only the power of the worshipper but the power of the deity also is nourished and strengthened by prayer;[212.3] and the prayer itself is usually accompanied by a potent act. With this aspect of Vedic prayers we may associate {213} the fact that Agni, the fire-god, appears as the chief divinity to whom they are addressed; for his ritual is purificatory, and the prayers are thus based on a liturgy of purification which stimulates the mental or spiritual force of the worshipper.