Of the regularly recurring occasions of public worship I will select, to begin with, the rites which are associated with harvest time. And I will do so partly because the science of religion provides us with very definite particulars both as to the sacrifices and as to the prayers which are usually made on these occasions; and partly because the prayers that are made are of a special kind and throw a fresh light on the nature of the communion that the tribe seeks to effect by means of the sacrificial offering.
At Saa, in the Solomon Islands, yams are offered, and the person offering them cries in a loud voice, "This is yours to eat" (Frazer, _G. B._^2, II, 465). In { 181} the Society Islands the formula is, "Here, Tari, I have brought you something to eat" (_ib._, 469). In Indo-China, the invitation is the same: "Taste, O goddess, these first-fruits which have just been reaped" (_ib._, 325). There are no actually expressed words of thanks in these instances; but we may safely conjecture that the offerings are thank-offerings and that the feeling with which the offerings are made is one of gratitude and thankfulness. Thus in Ceram we are told that first-fruits are offered "as a token of gratitude" (_ib._, 463). On the Niger the Onitsha formula is explicit: "I thank God for being permitted to eat the new yam" (_ib._, 325). At Tjumba in the East Indies, "vessels filled with rice are presented as a thank-offering to the gods" (_ib._, 462). The people of Nias on these occasions offer thanks for the blessings bestowed on them (_ib._, 463). By a very natural transition of thought and feeling, thankfulness for past favours leads to prayer for the continuance of favour in the future. Thus in Tana, in the New Hebrides, the formula is: "Compassionate father! here is some food for you; eat it; be kind to us on account of it" (_ib._, 464); while the Basutos say: "Thank you, gods; give us bread to-morrow also" (_ib._, 459); and in Tonga the prayers { 182} made at the offering of first-fruits implore the protection of the gods, and beseech them for welfare generally, though in especial for the fruits of the earth (_ib._, 466).
The prayers of primitive man which I quoted in my last lecture were in the nature of petitions or requests, as was natural and indeed inevitable in view of the fact that they were preferred on occasions when the tribe was in exceptional distress and required the aid of the gods on whose protection the community relied. But the prayers which I have just quoted are not in their essence petitions or requests, even though in some cases they tend to become so. They are essentially prayers of thanksgiving and the offerings made are thank-offerings. Thus our conception of primitive prayer must be extended to include both mental attitudes--that of thankfulness for past or present blessings as well as the hope of blessings yet to come. And inasmuch as sacrifice is the concomitant of prayer, we must recognise that sacrificial offerings also serve as the expression of both mental attitudes. And we must note that in the regularly recurring form of public or tribal worship with which we are now dealing the dominant feeling to which expression is given is { 183} that of thankfulness. The tribe seeks for communion with its god for the purpose of expressing its thanks. Even the savage who simply says, "Here, Tari, I have brought you something to eat," or, still more curtly, "This is yours to eat," is expressing thanks, albeit in savage fashion. And the means which the savage adopts for securing that communion which he seeks to renew regularly with the tribal god is a sacrificial meal, of which the god and his worshippers partake. Throughout the whole ceremony, whether we regard the spoken words or the acts performed, there is no suggestion of magic and no possibility of twisting the ceremony into a piece of magic intended to produce some desired result or to exercise any constraint over the powers to which the ceremony is addressed. The mental attitude is that of thankfulness.