pelled to suggest that the prayer to the
sun is a prayer that he will give effect to the charm, and is perhaps a
later addition. But independently of the possibility that the actions
performed are explanatory of the words, or rather that words and
actions both are intended to make clear to the sun precisely {158} what
the petition is, what tells against Dr. Frazer's suggestion is that the
women want the bullets to bounce off, and it is the power of the god to
which they appeal and on which they rely for the fulfilment of their
prayer.

There is, however, a further consideration which we should perhaps take
into account. Man, when he has a desire which he wishes to
realise,--and the whole of our life is spent in trying to realise what
we wish,--takes all the steps which experience shows to be necessary or
reason suggests; and, when he has done everything that he can do, he
may still feel that nothing is certain in this life, and the thing may
not come off. Under those circumstances he may, and often does, pray
that success may attend his efforts. Now Dr. Frazer, in the second
edition of his _Golden Bough_, wishing to show that the period of
religion was preceded by a non-religious period in the history of
mankind, suggests that at first man had no idea that his attempts to
realise his desires could fail, and that it was his "tardy recognition"
of the fact that led him to religion. This tardy recognition, he says,
probably "proceeded very slowly, and required long ages for its more or
less perfect accomplishment. For the recognition of man's
powerlessness to influence the course of {159} nature on a grand scale
must have been gradual" (I, 78). I would suggest, however, that it
cannot have taken "long ages" for savage man to discover that his
wishes and his plans did not always come off. It is, I think, going
too far to imagine that for long ages man had no idea that his attempts
to realise his desires could fail. If religion arises, as Dr. Frazer
suggests, when man recognises his own weakness and his own
powerlessness, often, to effect what he most desires, then man in his
most primitive and most helpless condition must have been most ready to
recognise that there were powers other than himself, and to desire,
that is to pray for, their assistance. Doubtless it would be at the
greater crises, times of pestilence, drought, famine and war, that his
prayers would be most insistent; but it is in the period of savage