* * * * * [Sidenote: Prayer.] III. Morality and religion are inseparable in all historical faiths, and the essential act of subjective worship, the fundamental rite commanded by religious morality, is prayer. [Sidenote: Kinds of prayer distinguished.] To analyze prayer into all its component elements would be very difficult and far from simple. Prayer may be an almost mechanical accomplishment of the rite, the babbling of vain words, and as such it is despicable even from the point of view of religion. It may be an egoistic demand, and as such it is mean, simply. It may be an act of naïve faith in beliefs more or less popular and irrational, and on this score its value is so slight that it may be neglected. But it may be also the disinterested outpouring of a soul which believes itself to be in some fashion or other serving someone else, acting upon the world by the ardour of its faith, conferring a gift, an offering, devoting something of itself to someone else. Therein lies the grandeur of prayer: it is then no more than one of the forms of charity and the love of mankind. But suppose it should be demonstrated that this especial form of charity is illusory, does one imagine that the very principle of charity itself will by that fact receive a check? [Sidenote: Superficiality of most pleas in its behalf.] Many arguments have been urged in favour of prayer, but the majority of them are quite external and superficial. Prayer, it has been said, as being a demand on a special Providence, is sovereignly consoling; it is one of the sweetest of the satisfactions incident to religious faith. One who had been converted to free-thought said to me recently, “There is but one thing in my former faith that I regret, and that is that I can no longer pray for you and imagine that I am serving you.” Assuredly it is sad to lose a faith which consoled one; but suppose that someone believed himself to possess the fairy-wand and to be able to save the world. Some fine morning he finds himself undeceived, he finds himself alone in the world with no power at his disposal more mysterious than that of his ten fingers and his brain. He cannot but regret his imaginary power, but he will labour nevertheless to acquire a real power and the loss of his illusions will but serve as a stimulus to his will. It is always dangerous to believe that one possesses a power that one has not, for it hinders one in some degree from knowing and exercising those that one has. The men of former times, the times of absolute monarchy, who had access to the ear of princes, possessed a power analogous to that which the believers on their knees in temples still believe themselves to possess; this power, in the case of kings, their confidential ministers have lost as the result of purely terrestrial revolutions; and have they thereby been diminished in their dignity as moral beings? No, a man is morally greater as a citizen than