A third natural force which everywhere attracted the devotional instincts of the primitive man was motion. It is, indeed, the common resultant of all force, but this is the last word of modern science, not the early observation of man. It is most abstractly typified in the wind, which seems to be incorporeal force in motion. " Whence it cometh and whither it goeth " was the unanswerable question which in the book of Job the Almighty is represented as putting to man, and from earliest times it occupied his intellect and imagination. He could see that it brought the clouds, the cold, the changes of the weather, and the seasons —matters that in his naked and defenceless condition touched him most nearly. His scanty harvests depended upon them, and the most terrify ing exhibition of power he ever saw, the deafening thunder and the forked lightning, came upon "the wings of the wind." Hence in all early faiths meteorological phenomena occupy a prominent position.
The Aim of these objects of reverence—be they fetiches or natural forces typified under one or another symbol—interested man solely as they concerned his welfare—his own or that of his tribe. Those who would attempt to explain early religions as a kind of natural philoso phy devised to account for the existence of things have no idea of the lack of curiosity among savages, and their prevailing indifference to what does not concern their bodily comfort. Any such application was a much later one in the history of religious thought. That idol or fetich attracted his worship who, he believed, could help him the most effectively. Thus among the Fantees of Africa it is common to buy fetiches, and one is let out on trial to the purchaser, like a horse, to be returned after a certain time if it does not prove effective (Waitz). The Neapolitan peasant will cuff or stamp upon the figure of his saint (which is nothing but a fetich) if he misses the lucky number in the lottery, and even if he wins he may cheat his patron out of the promised taper (passato iljerielo, gabbato it santo). The Peruvians seized the idols and gods of the nations they con quered, and, carrying them to Cuzco, shut them up so that they could do no harm, but were afraid to injure them. All such actions show that the first impulse and the sustaining motive of religion is a desire, a wish, either to obtain or to avoid something, not any recondite instinct of rev erence nor any haunting sense of divinity, as many writers of the mystical school have argued.
Prayer and becomes still more plainly manifest when we critically examine the sources of two most important and universally prevalent expressions of the religious sentiment—Prayer and Sao-I:lice.
"Prayer," wrote the thoughtful Novalis, " is to religion what thought is to philosophy; the religious sense prays with like necessity that the rea son thinks." It always has relation to supplying the wants of the peti tioner. In the Psalms the Lord is spoken of as the one who " satisfies the desire " of every living thing; the favorite title of Buddha is Sidartha, " the accomplisher of the wish." All prayers of primitive people and of uncultivated minds show this in its naked materialism. They are pretty much all summed up in one which occurs in the Rig Veda: " O. Lord Varuna! grant that we may prosper in getting and keeping." To be relieved from pain and death, to enjoy life—these exhaust the tenor of all the petitions of lower forms of religion and of nine-tenths of those of the highest. They are all of the general drift of the naïve prayer which the missionary Brebeuf heard his Huron canoeman offer to the presiding deity supposed to dwell in one of the rocks of a perilous rapid. The native laid some leaves of tobacco on the rock and said, " 0 thou god who dwellest in this spot, accept this tobacco; help us on our voyage, save us from shipwreck, defend us from our enemies, give us a prosper ous trade, and bring us back safe and sound to our village." This is not a whit inferior in its tenor to the model of prayer which is set up by Xenophon in his Economics as that of the cultivated Greek. He says, speaking in the person of Ischomachus, " I seek to obtain from the gods by proper prayers strength and health, the respect of the community, the love of my friends, an honorable termination to my combats, and riches the fruit of honest industry." The higher religions, as Christian ity and Afoliammedanism, took a long step in advance when they taught —at least in theory—that all such material benefits are unworthy objects of prayer, and that it should be wholly directed to obtaining spiritual enlightenment and resignation to the will of God. Confucius and Buddha went still farther, and in their own teachings discarded prayer altogether. But, properly speaking, neither of these sages set out to teach a religion, but rather the vanity of all religions. Buddha taught that the perfected sage will have extinguished all desire, and hence is above any favor which the gods, if there are any, can confer; while Confucius advised his disci ples to limit their wishes to the attainable, as thus they could avoid dis appointment and need ask no aid of unknown agencies.