Page:What Religion Is (1920).djvu/85

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70
RELIGION

child sitting up in the bed hale and fair. . .”[1]

The religious unity of spirit and its maintenance is thus coming to be broken up under the influence of various demands construed according to analogies imported into the matter by natural efforts to explain and interpret. With the growing distinction and remoteness of the human and divine factors the whole nature of prayer and worship transforms itself. It comes to be modelled on the normal relations between an inferior and a superior in the asking of favours and the rendering of honour.

Now here as throughout it is for the sincere mind to judge what incidents of hope and belief — what shapes of the answer to prayer — are really involved in his religion. We are only concerned to note the warning that prayer and

  1. Heart of Midlothian.