m could take part, could not be
addressed to the god of the community. The idea of God thus was
defined negatively: there were wishes which could not be communicated
to him--those which were repugnant to the well-being of the community.

The prayers of savages, that is of the men who are probably still
nearest to the circumstances and condition of primitive man, furnish
the material from which we can best infer what was the idea of God
which was present in their consciousness at those moments when it was
most vividly present to them. In view of the infinite number and
variety of the forms of religion and religious belief, nothing would
seem, _a priori_, more reasonable than to expect an equally infinite
number of various and contradictory ideas. Especially should this seem
a reasonable expectation to those who consider the idea of God to be
fundamentally, and of its very nature, impossible and untenable. And
so long as we look at the attempts which have been made, by means of
reflection upon the idea, to body it forth, we have the evidence of
all the mythologies to show the infinite variety of monstrosities,
which reflection on the idea has been capable of producing. If then we
stop there, our _a priori_ expectation of savage and irrational
inconsistency is fulfilled to abundance and to loathsome excess. But
to stop there is to stop short, and to accept the speculations of the
savage when he is reflecting on his experience, instead of pushing
forward to discover for ourselves, if we may, what his experience
actually was. To discover that, we cannot be content to pause for
ever on his reflections. We must push back to the moment of his
experience, that is to the moments when he is in the presence of his
gods and is addressing them. Those are the moments in which he prays
and in which he has no doubt that he is in communion with his gods. It
is, then, from his prayers that we must seek to infer what idea he has
of the gods to whom he prays.

When, however, we take his prayers as the evidence from which to infer
his idea of God, instead of the luxuriant overgrowth of speculative
mythology, we find everywhere a bare simplicity, and everywhere
substantial identity. If this is contrary to our expectation and at
first seems strange, let us bear in mind that the science of morals
offers a parallel, in this respect, to the science of religion. At one
time it was, unconsciously but none the less decidedly, assumed that
savages