Prayer for love and charity tends increasingly to find vent in action: a verification of this fact may be found in history. Formerly, in a moment of distress, a pagan woman would have thought only of appeasing the anger of the Gods by some blood sacrifice, by the murder of some innocent member of the larger mammals; in the Middle Ages she would have made a vow or founded a chapel—things still vain and powerless to alleviate the misery of this world; in our days she would think rather, if she were a person of some elevation of spirit, of giving money in charity, of founding an establishment for the instruction of the poor or the care of the infirm. One sees in that fact the march of progress in religious ideas; the time will come when such actions will no longer be accomplished for a directly interested end but as a sort of exchange with the divinity, a traffic of kindness; they will constitute a recognized part of public worship, the essence of worship will be charity. Pascal asks, somewhere, why God has bestowed prayer upon man, why God has commanded man to pray; and he replies profoundly enough: “To give him the dignity of seeing himself as a cause”; but if he who demands benefits by prayer possessed formerly the dignity of being, in his own right, a cause, how much greater is the dignity of him who by the exercise of his own moral will procures the object of his desire? And if to be the cause of one’s own well-being be thus the essence of prayer, of that which brings man nearest to God, of that which lifts man nearest to His level—may one not say that the most disinterested, the most sacred, the most human, the most divine of prayers is moral conduct? In Pascal’s opinion, it is true, moral conduct presupposes two terms, duty and power, and man cannot always do what he should; but one must break with the antique opposition established by Christianity, between the sentiment of duty and the practical powerlessness of a man shorn of all adventitious aid—shorn of grace. In reality the sentiment of duty is, in and of itself, the first vague consciousness of a power existent in us, of a force which tends to achieve its own realization.[67] Consciousness of his power for good and of the power of the ideal unite in man, for this ideal is no more than the projection, the objectification, of the highest power within, the form that that power takes in reflective intelligence. Every volition is at bottom no more than a capability of some sort in labour, an action in the stage of germination: the will to do good, if it is conscious of its own power, has no need to await the prompting of external grace; it is itself its own grace; by the very fact of its birth it becomes efficacious; by the very fact of wishing, nature creates. Pascal conceived the moral end, which duty places before us, too much after the manner of a physical and external object, that one might be able to look upon but not to attain. “One directs one’s looks