Prayer in the lower culture is rarely individualised. It is almost always a social act. Common prayers for food or rain, for protection against danger, the removal of pestilence, victory over enemies, represent the wants of all. The group may be the family, as in the evening worship of the { 150} Samoan householder, who pours a little of his cup of ava on the ground, and prays for health, productive plantations, and plenty of fruit. On the Lower Niger Major Leonard found worship offered daily before an image or emblem believed to contain the spirits of more immediate ancestors: "Preserve our lives, O Spirit Father, who hast gone before, and make thy house fruitful, so that we thy children shall increase and multiply and so grow rich and powerful."
Such prayers may be traced through many expanding phases up to the higher petitions which seek to place the civic and moral life under the guidance of the heroic dead. The element of bargain or contract which Socrates so sarcastically emphasised, here drops away. "To what god or what hero shall we pray," inquired the people of Corcyra, weary of internal strife, at the oracle of Dodona, "in order to obtain concord, and to govern our city fairly and well?" Chinese statecraft well understood the significance of such worship as a social bond. The ancient author of the _Lî Chî_, or "Book of Rites," laid it down that "the prayers of the principal in the sacrifice to the spirits, and the benedictions of the representatives of the departed, are carefully framed. The object of all ceremonies is to bring down the spirits from above, even their ancestors; serving also to rectify the relations between ruler and minister, to maintain the generous feeling between father { 151} and son, and the harmony between elder and younger brother, to adjust the relations between high and low, and to give their proper places to husband and wife. The whole may be said to secure the blessing of Heaven."
Attention is thus concentrated upon common sentiments and universal relationships, and prayer acquires a deeper ethical meaning. It then comes to rest upon devout experience, which seeks to interpret life in relation to the permanent forces of justice which are believed to rule the world. The hymns of Egypt celebrate in lofty terms the majesty and beneficence of the gods, and the psalmists of the Nile sang of the divine love encompassing all lands, setting every man in his place, and amid diversities of colour and speech supplying all human needs. The Babylonian poets addressed Shamash or Sin, sun or moon, as the symbols of the universal order of nature, the witnesses of thought and deed over the wide earth, the rulers on whom man could place unchanging reliance. The Vedic singer found a similar figure of moral sovereignty in Varuna (p. 106). Out of the depths of her distress Hecuba (in the "Trojan Women") appeals to the mysterious Power whom she can still glorify in her anguish: "Thou deep base of the world, and thou high throne above the world, whoe'er thou art, unknown and hard of surmise, chain of things to be, or reason of our reason, God, to thee I lift my praise, seeing the silent road { 152} that bringeth justice ere the end be trod to all that breathes and dies." With a yet firmer confidence could the Peruvian in the sixteenth century record this prayer to the "World-animating Spirit": "O Pāchacāmac, thou who hast existed from the beginning, and shalt exist unto the end, who createst man by saying "Let man be," who defendest us from evil, and preservest our life and health, art thou in the sky or in the earth, in the clouds or in the depths? Hear the voice of him who implores thee, and grant him his petitions. Give us life everlasting; preserve us, and accept this our sacrifice."