'Oh, Lord, thy servant, cast him not away,
The sins which I have committed, transform by thy grace!'
The attitude of mind, the relation in which the worshipper finds himself to stand towards his God, is the same as that revealed in the Psalm of David:
'Wash me throughly from mine iniquity,
And cleanse me from my sin.
For I acknowledge my transgressions:
And my sin is ever before me.
Against thee, thee only, have I sinned.
Cast me not away from thy presence.'
The earliest prayers offered by any community probably were, as we have already seen, those which were sent up in time of trouble and inspired by the conviction that the community's god had been justly offended. The psalms, from which quotations have just been given, show the same idea of God, conceived to have been justly offended by the transgressions of his servants. The difference between them is that, in the later prayers, the individual self-consciousness has come to realise that the individual as well as the community exists; that the individual, as well as the community, is guilty of trespasses; and that the individual, as well as the community, needs forgiveness. 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 offered for daily bread. In the Lord's Prayer, the order of these petitions is exactly reversed. A fresh basis, or premiss, for them, is supplied. They are still petitions proper to put forward, if put forward in the consciousness of a fact, hitherto not revealed—that man may do not his own will but the will of Our Father, who is in heaven.
Prayer is thus, at the end, what it was at the beginning, the prayer of a community. But whereas at the beginning the community was the narrow and exclusive community of the family or tribe, at the end it is a community which may include all mankind. Thus, the idea of God has increased in its extension. In its intension, so to speak, it has deepened: God is disclosed not as the master and king of his subjects and servants, but as the Father in heaven of his children on earth. It has however not merely deepened, it has been transformed, or rather it is to be approached in a different mood, and therefore is revealed in a new aspect: whereas in the beginning the body of worshippers, whether it approached its god with prayer for deliverance from calamities or for material blessings, approached him in order that their desires might be fulfilled; in the end the worshipper is taught that approach is possible only on renunciation of his own desires and on acceptance of God's will. The centre of religion is transposed: it is no longer man and his desires round which religion is to revolve. The will of God is to be the centre, to which man is no longer to gravitate unconsciously but to which he is deliberately to determine himself. As in the solar system the force of gravity is but one, so in the spiritual system that which holds all spiritual beings together is the love which proceeds from God to his creatures and may increasingly proceed from them to Him. It is the substitution of the love of God for the desires of man which makes the new heaven and the new earth.
From the point of view of evolution the important fact is that this new aspect of the idea of God is not something merely superposed upon the old: if it were simply superposed, it would not be evolved. Neither is the disclosure, to the soul, of God as love, evolved from the conception of Him as the being from whom men may seek the fulfilment of their desires. To interpret the process of religious evolution in this way would be to misinterpret it, in exactly the same way as if we were to suppose that, only when the evolution of vegetable life had been carried out to the full in all its forms, did the evolution of animal life begin. Animals are not vegetables carried to a rather higher stage of evolution, any more than vegetables are animals which have relapsed to a lower stage. If then we are to apply the theory of evolution to spiritual life, as well as to bodily life, we must apply it in the same way. We must regard the various forms, in the one case as in the other, as following different lines, and tending in different directions from a common centre, rather than as different and successive sections of one and the same line. Spell no more becomes prayer than vegetables become animals. Impelled by the force of calamity to look in one direction—that of deliverance from pestilence or famine—early man saw, in the idea of God, a refuge in time of trouble. Moved at a later time by the feeling of gratitude, man found in the idea of God an object of veneration; and then interpreted his relation as that of a servant to his lord. Whichever way this interpretation was pushed—whether to mean that the servant was to do things pleasing to his lord, in order to gain the fulfilment of his own desires; or to imply that his transgressions stood ever between him and his offended master—further advance in that direction was impossible. A new direction, and therefore a fresh point of departure, was necessary. It was forthcoming in the Christian idea of God as the heavenly Father. That idea when revealed is seen to have been what was postulated but never attained by religion in its earlier stages. The petitions for our daily bread, for forgiveness of sins, and for delivery from evil, had as their basis, in pre-Christian religions, man's desire. In Christianity those petitions are preferred in the conviction that the making of them is in accordance with God's will and the granting of them in accordance with His love; and that conviction is a normative principle of prayer.