Prayer, in the sense that it is understood and performed by you, we regard as mere superstition. It is an outcome of your lowest stages of mental evolution. It is the spirit of that willing self-abasement and fear, which prostrates the savage before his idol, soliciting aid in his works of carnage, or immunity from some violated law of nature, or safety from some convulsion of the air, land or sea. Carried forward into your civilization, it has become no less unreasonable. For thousands of years you have been daily calling on the Deity for favors, not one of which has been granted, except seemingly by a coincidence. The most conclusive tests have failed to convince the devout among you of the fallacy of prayer, because, as an institution of your churches, under their theory of atonement, it furnishes a ready escape to the conscience; and for the reason also that it affords to the imagination, in its striking and novel situations of converse with the author of worlds, a semblance of that pleasure which the lowly feel for concessions from the great. It is quite in keeping with your conceptions of the Deity that you should grovel and debase yourselves before Him. The whole tenor of your religious thought has been made to take on this color of self-degradation, which, while serving to throw you more completely into the hands of your theological superiors, is not warranted by any possible relations with the being you address. You represent upon the Earth, as we do on our planet, the very highest form of life. We both are the triumphant outcome of a process established by the great Author infinite ages ago. On us only, among all beings, has He bestowed the wonderful attributes of thought and reason, which make us a part of Himself. We are the only inheritors, by his own beneficial act, of the power to discover and enjoy his beautiful methods of work, and those magical transformations of mind and matter which convert, out of the dead ashes of the past, the blooming present, with its assuring hope of a fruition to come. What hint have we, therefore, in all his works, that He has created us otherwise than as a labor of love, and as the fullest expression of an evolutionary skill, which marks all things about us? By what authority, then, are you called to bow yourselves in constant self-abasement before your great Father, who, with parental solicitude, has thrown open the whole Earth for your household, has given you the power of domination over all creatures upon it, and has taught you to make playthings of the very elements which surround you? By what authority, except the unworthy example of your own barbarian instincts, which demand for place and power a homage, whose degree of prostration marks, with a singular exactness, your career all along, from the savage ruler to the cultivated monarch?