it turns away from the heart, which prayer
expresses pathetically, to a fabulous cosmos where aspirations have been
turned into things and have thereby stifled their own voices.

[Sidenote: A real efficacy would be mechanical.]

The situation would not be improved if we surrendered that mystical
optimism, and maintained that prayer might really attract super-human
forces to our aid by giving them a signal without which they would not
have been able to reach us. If experience lent itself to such a theory
there would be nothing in it more impossible than in ordinary telepathy;
prayer would then be an art like conversation, and the exact personages
and interests would be discoverable to which we might appeal. A
celestial diplomacy might then be established not very unlike primitive
religions. Religion would have reverted to industry and science, to
which the grosser spirits that take refuge under it have always wished
to assimilate it. But is it really the office of religion to work upon
external powers and extract from them certain calculable effects? Is it
an art, like empiric medicine, and merely a dubious and mystic
industry? If so, it exists only by imperfection; were it better
developed it would coincide with those material and social arts with
which it is identical in essence. Successful religion, like successful
magic, would have passed into the art of exploiting the world.

[Sidenote: True uses of prayer.]

What successful religion really should pass into is contemplation,
ideality, poetry, in the sense in which poetry includes all imaginative
moral life. That this is what religion looks to is very clear in prayer
and in the efficacy which prayer consistently can have. In rational
prayer the soul may be said to accomplish three things important to its
welfare: it withdraws within itself and defines its good, it
accommodates itself to destiny, and it grows like the ideal which it
conceives.

[Sidenote: It clarifies the ideal.]

If prayer springs from need it will naturally dwell on what would
satisfy that necessity; sometimes, indeed, it does nothing else but
articulate and eulogise what is most wanted and prized. This object will
often be particular, and so it should be, since Socrates' prayer "for
the best" would be perfunctory and vapid indeed in a man whose life had
not been spent, like Socrates', in defining what the best was. Yet any
particular good lies in a field of relations; it has associates and
i