s. That
is to say, the idea of God has taken more definite shape: God has been
revealed to the individual worshipper to be 'My God'; the worshipper
to be 'Thy servant'; and what is feared is not merely that the
worshipper should be excluded from the community, but that he should
be cast away from communion with God. The communion, aspired to, is
however still such communion as may exist between a servant and his
master.

Material and external blessings, further, are, together with
deliverance from material and external evil, still the principal
subjects of prayer in the Psalms both of the Old Testament and of the
cuneiform inscriptions; and, so far as this is the case, the
worshipper's prayer is that his individual will may be done, and it is
because he has received material and external blessings, because his
will has been done, that his joyful lips praise and bless the Lord.
That is to say, the idea of God, implied by such prayer and praise, is
that He is a being who may help man to the fulfilment of man's desires
and to the realisation of man's will. The assumption required to
justify this conception is that in man, man's will alone is operative,
and never God's. This assumption has its analogy in the fact, already
noticed, that in the beginning the individual is not self-conscious,
or aware of the individuality of his own existence. When the
individual's self-consciousness is thus but little, if at all,
manifested, it is the community, as a community, which approaches its
god and is felt to be responsible for the transgressions which have
offended him. As self-consciousness comes to manifest itself, more and
more, the sense of personal transgression and individual
responsibility becomes more and more strong. If now we suppose that at
this point the evolution, or unfolding, of the self ceases, and that
the whole of its contents is now revealed, we shall hold that, in man,
man's will alone can operate, and never God's. It is indeed at this
point that non-Christian religions stop, if they get so far. The idea
of God as a being whose will is to be done, and not man's, is a
distinctively Christian idea.

The petition, which, as far as the science of religion enables us to
judge, was the first petition made by man, was for deliverance from
evil. The next, in historical order, was for forgiveness of sins; and,
then, when society had come to be settled on an agricultural basis and
dependent on the harvest, prayer was off