The answers to prayer. As a form of Expectant Attention, it exerts much subjective power. Can it influence external phenomena? It is possible. Deeply religious minds reject both these answers, however. They claim the objective answer to be Inspiration. All religions unite in this claim. Inspirations have been contradictory. That is genuine which teaches truths which cannot be doubted concerning duty and deity. A certain mental condition favors the attainment of such truths. This simulated in religious entheasm. Examples. It is allied to the most intense intellectual action, but its steps remain unknown. CHAPTER IV. THE PRAYER AND ITS ANSWER. The foregoing analysis of the religious sentiment results in finding it, even in its simplest forms, a product of complicated reasoning forced into action by some of the strongest emotions, and maintaining its position indefeasibly through the limitations of the intellect. This it does, however, with a certain nobleness, for while it wraps the unknown in sacred mystery, it proclaims man one in nature with the Highest, by birthright a son of the gods, of an intelligence akin to theirs, and less than they only in degree. Through thus presenting at once his strength and his feebleness, his grandeur and his degradation, religion goes beyond philosophy or utility in suggesting motives for exertion, stimuli to labor. This phase of it will now occupy us. The Religious Sentiment manifests itself in thought, in word and in act through the respective media of the Prayer, the Myth and the Cult. The first embraces the personal relations of the individual to the object of his worship, the second expresses the opinions current in a community about the nature and actions of that object, the last includes the symbols and ceremonies under and by which it is represented and propitiated. The first has the logical priority. Man cares nothing for God--_can_ care nothing for him practically--except as an aid to the fulfilment of his desires, the satisfaction of his wants, as the “ground of his hopes.” The root of the religious sentiment, I have said, is “a wish whose fruition depends upon unknown power.” An appeal for aid to this unknown power, is the first form of prayer in its religious sense. It is not merely “the soul’s sincere desire.” This may well be and well directed, and yet not religious, as the devotion of the mathematician to the solution of an important problem. With the desire must be the earnest appeal to the unknown. A theological dictionary I have at hand almost correctly defines it as “a petition for spiritual or physical benefits which [we believe] we cannot obtain without divine co-operation.” The words in brackets must be inserted to complete the definition.