lled your
attention principally in the last lecture. But they are, when we come
to think of it, essentially occasional prayers, prayers that are
offered at the great crises of tribal life, when the very existence of
the tribe is at stake. Such crises, however, by their very nature are
not regular or normal; and it would be an error to suppose that it is
only on these occasions that prayers are made by savage or barbarous
peoples. If we wish to discover the earliest form of regularly
recurring public worship, we must look for some regularly recurring
occasion for it. One such regularly recurring occasion is harvest
time, another is seed time, another is the annual ceremonial at which
the boys who {180} attain in the course of the year to the age of
manhood are initiated into the secrets or "mysteries" of the tribe.
These are the chief and perhaps the only regularly recurring occasions
of public worship as distinguished from the irregular crises of war,
pestilence, drought, and famine which affect the community as a whole,
and from the irregular occasions when the individual member of the
community prays for offspring or for delivery from sickness or for
success in the private undertaking in which he happens to be engaged.

Of the regularly recurring occasions of public worship I will select,
to begin with, the rites which are associated with harvest time. And I
will do so partly because the science of religion provides us with very
definite particulars both as to the sacrifices and as to the prayers
which are usually made on these occasions; and partly because the
prayers that are made are of a special kind and throw a fresh light on
the nature of the communion that the tribe seeks to effect by means of
the sacrificial offering.

At Saa, in the Solomon Islands, yams are offered, and the person
offering them cries in a loud voice, "This is yours to eat" (Frazer,
_G. B._^2, II, 465). In {181} the Society Islands the formula is,
"Here, Tari, I have brought you something to eat" (_ib._, 469). In
Indo-China, the invitation is the same: "Taste, O goddess, these
first-fruits which have just been reaped" (_ib._, 325). There are no
actually expressed words of thanks in these instances; but we may
safely conjecture that the offerings are thank-offerings and that the
feeling with which the offerings are made is one of gratitude and
thankfulness. Thus in Ceram we are told that first-fruits are offered
"as a token of grati