In these cases, adoration is worship; and worship is adoration--and little more. Judging them by their fruits, we cannot say that the Mexican rites, or even the Greek mysteries, encourage us to believe that adoration is all that is required to make worship what the heart of man divines that it should be. Doubtless, this is due in part to the fact that the idea of God was so imperfectly disclosed to the polytheists of Mexico and Greece. Let us not therefore use Greece and Mexico as examples for the disparagement of mysticism or for the depreciation of man's tendency to seek communion with the Highest. Let us rather appeal at once to the reason which makes mysticism, of itself, inadequate to satisfy all the needs of man. The reason simply is that man is not merely a contemplative but an active being. If action were alien to his nature, then man might be satisfied to gaze, and merely gaze, on God. But man is active and not merely contemplative. We must therefore either hold that religion, being in its essence adoration and nothing more, has no function to perform, or sphere to fill, in the practical life of man; or else, if we hold that it does, or should, affect the practice of his life, we must admit that, though religion implies adoration always, it cannot properly be fulfilled in quietism, but must bear its fruit in what man does, or in the way he does it. The being or beings whom man worships are, indeed, the object of adoration, an object _quo nihil maius_; but they are something more. To them are addressed man's prayers. It is vain to pretend that prayer, even the simple petition for our daily bread, is not religious. It may perhaps be argued that prayer is not essential to religion; that it has not always formed part of religion; and that it is incompatible with that acquiescence in the will of God, and that perfect adoration of God, which is religion in its purest and most perfect sense. Whether there is in fact any incompatibility between the petition for deliverance from evil, and the aspiration that God's will may be done on earth, is a question on which we need not enter here. But the statement that prayer has not always formed part of religion is one which it should be possible to bring to the test of fact.