But it is a blundering, unbusinesslike way of managing things if the missionary has to go out to his work unprepared in this essential matter, and has to find out these things for himself--and perhaps not find them out at all. The applied science of religion should equip him in this respect; it should be able to take the facts and truths established by the science of religion and apply them to the purposes of the missionary. But it is a striking example of the youth and immaturity of the science of religion that no attempt has yet been made by it to collect the facts, much less to coördinate and state them scientifically. If a thing is clear, when we come to think of it, in the history of religion, it is that the gods are there to be prayed to: man worships them because it is on their knees that all things lie. It is from them that man hopes all things; it is in prayer that man expresses his hopes and desires. It is from his prayers that we should be able to find out { 141} what the gods really are to whom man prays. What is said about them in mythology--or even in theology--is the product of reflection, and is in many cases demonstrably different from what is given in consciousness at the moment when man is striving after communion with the Highest. Yet it is from mythology, or from the still more reflective and deliberative expression of ritual, of rites and ceremonies, that the science of religion has sought to infer the nature of the gods man worships. The whole apparatus of religion, rites and ceremonies, sacrifice and altars, nature-worship and polytheism, has been investigated; the one thing overlooked has been the one thing for the sake of which all the others exist, the prayer in which man's soul rises, or seeks to rise, to God.
The reason given by Professor Tylor (_Primitive Culture_, II, 364) for this is not that the subject is unimportant, but that it is so simple; "so simple and familiar," he says, "is the nature of prayer that its study does not demand that detail of fact and argument which must be given to rites in comparison practically insignificant." Now, it is indeed the case that things which are familiar may appear to be simple; but it is also the case that sometimes things { 142} are considered simple merely because they are familiar, and not because they are simple. The fact that they are not so simple as every one has assumed comes to be suspected when it is discovered that people take slightly different views of them. Such slightly different views may be detected in this case.