ry in the highest, one worthy of all
trust, love, and adoration--of an adoration, too, inclusive not more of
praise than prayer.

If the divine claim to the last-named tribute be disputed, it had better
be by arguments other than those on which certain writers, with Mr.
Galton for their leader and Professor Tyndall for their backer, have
been recently expending much misapplied ingenuity. If the efficacy of
prayer be, as the foremost of these declares it to be, 'a perfectly
appropriate and legitimate subject of scientific enquiry,' the enquiry
ought at least to be conducted according to scientific rules. On this
point Mr. Galton himself lays much stress, intimating that whereas an
unscientific reasoner may be expected to be 'guided by a confused
recollection of crude experience, a scientific reasoner will scrutinise
each separate experience before he admits it as evidence, and will
compare all the cases he has selected on a methodical system.'
Nevertheless, a brief examination of the experiences on which he and his
principal associate rely, may suggest some doubt as to which of the two
specified classes of reasoners it is that they themselves belong.

The facts or fancies cited by Mr. Galton in proof that praying is of no
use are the following: 1. 'Sick people who pray or are prayed for do not
on the average recover more rapidly than others.' 2. Although 'the
public prayer for the sovereign of every state, Protestant or
Catholic, is and has been in the spirit of our own--"Grant her in health
long to live"--sovereigns are literally the shortest-lived of all
persons who have the advantage of affluence.' 3. The 'clergy are a far
more prayerful class' than either lawyers or medical men, it being
'their profession to pray,' and 'their practice that of offering morning
and evening family prayers in addition to their private devotions,' yet
'we do not find that the clergy are in any way more long-lived in
consequence;' rather, there is room for believing their class to be the
'shortest-lived of the three.' Nay, even missionaries, eminently
prayerful as they are themselves, and prayed for as they are with
especial earnestness by others, 'are not supernaturally endowed with
health,' and 'do not live longer than other people.' 4. 'The proportion
of deaths at the time of birth is identical among the children of the
praying and the non-praying classes.' 5. Though 'we pray in our Liturgy
that "the nobility may be endowed with grace,