inuance of prosperity generally. Or the purpose of
prayer may be to ask for deliverance from material evils, such as
famine or plague. Or it may be to ask for deliverance from moral evils
and for power to do God's will. In a word, if man had no prayer to
make, the most powerful, if not the only, motive inciting him to seek
communion would be wanting. Now, to some of us it may seem _a priori_
that there is no reason why the communion thus sought in {176} prayer
should require any external rite to sanction or condition it. If that
is our _a priori_ view, we shall be the more surprised to find that in
actual fact an external rite has always been felt to be essential; and
that rite has always been and still is sacrifice, in one or other of
its forms. Or, to put the same fact in another way, public worship has
been from the beginning the condition without which private worship
could not begin and without which private worship cannot continue. To
any form of religion, whatever it be, it is essential, if it is to be
religion, that there shall be a community of worshippers and a god
worshipped. The bond which unites the worshippers with one another and
with their god is religion. From the beginning the public worship in
which the worshippers have united has expressed itself in rites--rites
of sacrifice--and in the prayers of the community. To the end, the
prayers offered are prayers to "Our Father"; and if the worshipper is
spatially separated from, he is spiritually united to, his
fellow-worshippers even in private prayer.

We may then recognise that prayer logically and ultimately implies
sacrifice in one or other of its senses; and that sacrifice as a rite
is meaningless and impossible without prayer. But if we recognise
{177} that sacrifice wherever it occurs implies prayer, then the fact
that the observers of savage or barbarous rites have described the
ritual acts of sacrifice, but have not observed or have neglected to
report the prayers implied, will not lead us into the error of
imagining that sacrifice is a rite which can exist--that it can have a
religious existence--without prayer. We may attend to either, the
sacrifice or to the prayer, as we may attend either to the concavity or
the convexity of a curve, but we may not deny the existence and
presence of the one because our attention happens to be concentrated on
the other. The relation in primitive religion of the one to the other
we may express by sa