2. "Prayer of Spiritual Acquiescence"—the expression of the psychical apprehensions of men working through the medium of sense into perception of God as the supreme Spirit of Life, revealed in form, and present as the Spirit of Truth in knowledge. The one is antecedent to the other. That is to say, prayer of spiritual acquiescence is a natural growth from prayer of specific petition, observation of which fact offers striking evidence of the evolution of the soul of man. It is one of the foremost characteristics of youth to demand from established authority satisfaction of those mental and physical desires which growth of consciousness entails. A child naturally attributes to his parents the ability to grant or to deny his requests. He receives from them all the necessaries of life; reward and punishment are in their keeping; and he[127] therefore conceives the idea of propitiating their good-will towards him, trying by his conduct to rouse the approval and pleasure and avert the wrath of the parental government. He is disappointed when his requests are refused or ignored, and grateful when they are granted, perceiving himself at the mercy of a strength and power greater than his own. Under precisely the same circumstances of ignorant youth, the so-called "uncivilised man" bows to the authority of what he believes to be supernatural power exerted upon him by the gods. He is, apparently, the plaything of a capricious deity, who holds as clay within his hands those conditions of life which bind him to his fate. Surely he does wisely to propitiate this authoritative power by gifts, vows, and supplications; by thank-offerings for danger averted; by petitions for the deliverance from threatened evil. Before all serious undertakings he tries by means of omens to read the will of his god towards him, even as[128] the little children, studying their parents' faces, hope to discern thereon the propitious moment for the voicing of a particular request. But there comes a time when the child ceases to be a child; when he puts aside childish things—idle questions and unreasoning entreaties; when he no longer asks in words for the satisfaction of each transitory desire; when he acquiesces with perfect confidence in that loving wisdom of his father, which experience has proved to him to be a will for his own good in conjunction with the good of the whole of life; when the reasonableness of such acquiescence with his father's will controls his thoughts and pervades his consciousness; when the maturing man, looking out with awakened perceptions of the order of the world, recognises the will of God, written upon the face of Nature, as the true revelation of his own will. His mode of prayer has changed. Spiritual acquiescence has taken the place of specific petition. He enters into fuller understanding of the works of his Father; he[129] approaches communion of consciousness with the supreme Spirit of Life.