power upon which it feels itself to depend, and
upon which its fate is contingent. This intercourse with God is
realized by prayer. Prayer is religion in act; that is, prayer is real
religion. It is prayer that distinguishes the religious phenomenon
from such similar or neighboring phenomena as purely moral or aesthetic
sentiment. Religion is nothing if it be not the vital act by which the
entire mind seeks to save itself by clinging to the principle from
which it draws its life. This act is prayer, by which term I
understand no vain exercise of words, no mere repetition of certain
sacred formula, but the very movement itself of the soul, putting
itself in a personal relation of contact with the mysterious power of
which it feels the presence--it may be even before it has a name by
which to call it. Wherever this interior prayer is lacking, there is
no religion; wherever, on the other hand, this prayer rises and stirs
the soul, even in the absence of forms or of doctrines, we have living
religion. One sees from this why "natural religion, so-called, is not
properly a religion. It cuts man off from prayer. It leaves him and
God in mutual remoteness, with no intimate commerce, no interior
dialogue, no interchange, no action of God in man, no return of man to
God. At bottom this pretended religion is only a philosophy. Born at
epochs of rationalism, of critical investigations, it never was
anything but an abstraction. An artificial and dead creation, it
reveals to its examiner hardly one of the characters proper to
religion."[309]

[309] Auguste Sabatier: Esquisse d'une Philosophie de la Religion. 2me
ed., 1897, pp. 24-26, abridged.

It seems to me that the entire series of our lectures proves the truth
of M. Sabatier's contention. The religious phenomenon, studied as in
Inner fact, and apart from ecclesiastical or theological complications,
has shown itself to consist everywhere, and at all its stages, in the
consciousness which individuals have of an intercourse between
themselves and higher powers with which they feel themselves to be
related. This intercourse is realized at the time as being both active
and mutual. If it be not effective; if it be not a give and take
relation; if nothing be really transacted while it lasts; if the world
is in no whit different for its having taken place; then prayer, taken
in this wide meaning of a sense that SOMETHING IS TRANSACTING, is of
course a feeling of wha