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 196 HENRY RUTGERS MARSHALL : could have been that has led to the persistence of habits of prayer, our attention is again directed to the fact that all the bodily attitudes connected with prayer amongst devotees in the past, and amongst religious peoples of our own day, imply restraint and the listening for command ; the calling for help and the awaiting for answer and direction ; and we perceive that the mental attitude which these expressions involve is, as we have seen, the very one that would tend to subordinate the individual variant tendencies to the racial tendencies, that would lead to the suppression of individual- istic reaction, and thus give opportunity for the slower acting racial impulses of broader scope to make themselves felt. I think then that it may be held to be in the highest degree probable that the advantage connected with the hearing of the "voice," with the accompanying emphasis of racial impulses within us, must have led to the persistence of habits of prayer, whatever may have been the origin of these habits. 8. Sacrifice is a religious custom which I do not need to tell my reader has been fixed in the race from the earliest days of which history and archseology tell us. The human sacrifice, the sacrifice of bull, of ram. of lamb, of precious goods involving destruction in all cases of what is valuable and useful ; these and closely allied sacrificial customs have indeed tended gradually to disappear with the advance of civilisation. But the sacrificial custom remains with us in its essentials, expressed in the actions connected with the belief that the giving up of valued goods, and the voluntary relinquishment of that in life which we value most highly, are acts of worship that please our God and that are effica- cious to our salvation. We may take it for granted I think that in all probability these habits had their origin in attempts by men to gain individualistic advantage ; to appease the wrath of enemies, and to ward off dangers that appeared in connexion with the action of their neighbours. But it is very clear that when these actions were undertaken in order to satisfy the wrath not of a conquering foe but of a supposedly irate Deity, as we know them to have been, they could not have had the same direct individualistic, or less direct racial, ad- vantage ; those who performed the sacrificial rite could not have gained for themselves or for their children the benefits they imagined they were thus to obtain. It is probable then that these habits would not have tended to be impressed upon the race by Nature, unless they had been in themselves