g them when anything great is to be done. What god are you
praying to, we ask in dismay, when you lift up your hands and your
eyes, or turn to east or west, or kneel or lie? Is there any god in
the wastes of infinity, in a sunstar, a swarm of worlds, who is not in
that miraculous soul of yours? Is there aught anywhere greater than a
son of God? Is a stone, a star, a heaven studded with infinite
glories, a greater place than your eternal soul? Then look within you.
Speak with yourself, commune with your own heart, summon up the
irresistible energies of your nature and nothing shall be impossible to
you. This is "the prayer of faith" that never shall, that never can,
go unanswered, the concentration of the myriad energies of our souls to
meet an attack, to prosecute an enterprise, to overcome obstacles, aye,
to make our lives sublime with a heroism that men shall call divine.
"The less I pray, but the more I think!" Aye, it is not prayer in the
old sense, the cry of the soul that believes itself craven, weak and
wanton, because it has always been told so by blind guides; it is not
this aimless outpouring of energy directed towards a Divinity in the
skies, when the very Life and Mind Divine are the endowments of every
rational creature, that has made man great; but thought, concentration,
the serious, resolute application of the powers that man does possess,
the bending of the iron energies to the accomplishment of the
individual task--this it is which has "conquered kingdoms, wrought
righteousness, obtained the promises," riveted man's dominion over
nature and made him what he was intended to be--the crown and glory of
the universe.

And at this point we may make a further suggestion towards explaining
the genesis and the continued maintenance of vocal prayer as a part of
religious worship. The practice would seem to be due not merely to
ignorance or disregard of the obvious law of cause and effect, by which
material phenomena are necessarily controlled, but to less worthy
conceptions of the Divine Mind governing all things. The Deity of the
Christian and Mohammedan worlds is a Being eternally dissevered from a
world which he has by an omnipotent effort evoked from nothingness--a
conception now regarded as impossible. Consequently, while God is in
his high heaven, surrounded by his court, the world holds on its
courses, and is periodically corrected by special interferences,
generally said to be due to the int