It is noteworthy that most interpretations of the function of prayer, although acknowledging its fundamental purpose to be that of providing a means of direct communication between God and man, vary according to the different conceptions of the nature of God of which prayer is the logical corollary, and from which all ideas of immortality are derived. For instance, the notion of God as a Person, made in the image of man, and endowed with his characteristics and powers in a superlatively human degree, is naturally accompanied by belief in the efficacy of prayer as a means of modifying the circumstances of life by permitting them to deviate from the normal operating sequence of cause and effect, into irregular acquiescence with the particular and changing[124] desires of individuals. Such an interpretation of the use of prayer is chiefly characteristic of the religious history of the childhood of the human race; but it also represents a type of mind surviving to-day under the domination of ecclesiastical Christianity which, inculcating the theory that the government of God in the world is directed towards the especial benefit of mankind at the expense of the so-called "lower creation," is largely responsible for those ideas of inconsistency between the principles of religion and science which have led to controversial warfare between these two educative influences of the human mind. Most of the conceptions of immortality which accompany belief in a purely personal Deity trend towards an actual epitomised realisation of all that appears possible to obtain from God through the medium of prayer. The savage, attributing to his deity the power of capriciously inflicting upon him pain and pleasure, misery and happiness, prays for the satisfaction of his personal desires, and for[125] immunity and protection from bodily harm. His ideas of immortality hover consequently about the imagined summarised reality of his prayers—Heaven being conceived of as a place where the human joys for which he has prayed can be realised in a magnified degree for ever; and Hell as the threatened compendium of all his fears, the culmination of pains and perils, to escape which he offers up propitiatory and supplicating prayer. In order to guard as far as possible against verbal misunderstanding, it is perhaps as well to offer a definition of the sense in which the word prayer is here used. The expression of the desire to correspond with the will of God. Have we not here a basic point of spiritual correspondence, from which man's hope of immortality may be seen to justify its conception? Careful consideration of the many and apparently conflicting methods of enunciating prayer leads to the observation that there exist[126] practically but two great categories into which all varieties of prayer naturally fall:— 1. "Prayer of Specific Petition"—the outcome of the physical susceptibilities of men.