[Footnote 1: A. Sabatier: Esquisse d'une Philosophie de la Religion (ed. 1897), pp. 24-26.]
In prayer, furthermore, we may hope to find not the fulfillment of our desires, but what our desires really are. We are released temporarily from tension of temporal and selfish longings. We hold a tranquil and reverential speech with a power not ourselves, and in communion with the infinite purge ourselves of the dross of immediate personal needs. In such a peaceful interlude we may find at once clarity and rest. Prayer, at its highest, might be defined as audible meditation, controlled by the sense of the divinity of the power we are addressing. So that the truly spiritual man prays not for the fulfillment of his own accidental longings, but pleads rather: "Let the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable in thy sight, 0 Lord, my strength and my redeemer."
Fear and awe. Man's attitude toward the divine was noted to have arisen partly in his feeling of dependence on personal forces incomparably superior to himself, and in his urgent need for winning their favor. In primitive man this sense of dependence was certainly bound up with a feeling of fear.
It must be borne in mind that uncivilized peoples had pathetically little understanding or control of the forces of Nature. In consequence on being afflicted with some sudden catastrophe of famine or disease, on experiencing a sudden revelation in storm, wind, or volcanic eruption, of the terrible magnificence of elemental forces, he must have been struck with dread. He was living in a world that appeared to him much less ordered and regular than ours appears to us. His prayers and sacrifices were not always friendly and confidential intercourse with the gods; they were as often ways of averting the evils of malicious and terrifying demons. The enemies of religion have been fond of pointing out how much of it has been a quaking fear of the supernatural. It is in this spirit that Lucretius's bitter attack is conceived.
When the life of man lay foul to see and grovelling upon the earth, crushed by the weight of religion, which showed her face from the realms of heaven, lowering upon mortals with dreadful mien, 't was a man of Greece who dared first to raise his mortal eyes to meet her, and first to stand forth to meet her; him neither the stories of the gods nor thunderbolts checked, nor the sky with its revengeful roar, but all the more spurred the eager daring of his mind to yearn to be the first to burst through the close-set bolts upon the doors of nature.[1]
[Footnote 1: Lucretius: De Rerum Natura, book I; lines 28-38.]
Primitive man feared the gods as much as he needed them. Jane Harrison points out, for example, that as great a part of Greek religion was given over to the exorcising of the evil and jealous spirits of the underworld, as in friendly communion with the beautiful and gracious Olympians.
But what appears in the ignorant and harassed savage as fear may be transformed in civilized man into awe. Long after man's crouching physical terror of the divine has passed away, he may still live awed by the ultimate power that orders the universe. He may, "at twilight, or in a mountain gorge," at a cañon or waterfall, experience an involuntary thrill and breathlessness, a deepened sense of the divinity which so orders these things. He may have the same feeling at the crises of life, at birth, disease, and death. He may sense on occasion that overwhelming and infinite power of which Job becomes aware, as he listens to the voice out of the whirlwind:
Who hath divided a water course for the overflowing of waters, or a way for the lightning of thunder?
To cause it to rain on the earth, where no man is; on the wilderness, wherein there is no man;
To satisfy the desolate and waste ground; and to cause the bud of the tender herb to spring forth? ...
Canst thou bind the sweet influences of the Pleiades, or loose the bands of Orion? ...
Knowest thou the ordinances of Heaven? Canst thou set the dominion thereof in the earth? ...
Canst thou send lightnings, that they may go and say unto thee, Here we are?
Who hath put wisdom in the inward parts? Or who hath given understanding to the heart?
Where man experiences such awe, he will become reverential, and, if articulate, will express his reverence in prayer, again not the prayer of practical requests for favors from God, but a hushed meditation upon the assured eternity in which the precarious and finite lives of men are set.