Most of the conceptions of immortality which accompany belief in a purely personal Deity trend towards an actual epitomised realisation of all that appears possible to obtain from God through the medium of prayer. The savage, attributing to his deity the power of capriciously inflicting upon him pain and pleasure, misery and happiness, prays for the satisfaction of his personal desires, and for immunity and protection from bodily harm. His ideas of immortality hover consequently about the imagined summarised reality of his prayers--Heaven being conceived of as a place where the human joys for which he has prayed can be realised in a magnified degree for ever; and Hell as the threatened compendium of all his fears, the culmination of pains and perils, to escape which he offers up propitiatory and supplicating prayer.
In order to guard as far as possible against verbal misunderstanding, it is perhaps as well to offer a definition of the sense in which the word prayer is here used.
_The expression of the desire to correspond with the will of God._
Have we not here a basic point of spiritual correspondence, from which man's hope of immortality may be seen to justify its conception?
Careful consideration of the many and apparently conflicting methods of enunciating prayer leads to the observation that there exist practically but two great categories into which all varieties of prayer naturally fall:--
1. "Prayer of Specific Petition"--the outcome of the physical susceptibilities of men.
2. "Prayer of Spiritual Acquiescence"--the expression of the psychical apprehensions of men working through the medium of sense into perception of God as the supreme Spirit of Life, revealed in form, and present as the Spirit of Truth in knowledge.
The one is antecedent to the other. That is to say, prayer of spiritual acquiescence is a natural growth from prayer of specific petition, observation of which fact offers striking evidence of the evolution of the soul of man.
It is one of the foremost characteristics of youth to demand from established authority satisfaction of those mental and physical desires which growth of consciousness entails. A child naturally attributes to his parents the ability to grant or to deny his requests. He receives from them all the necessaries of life; reward and punishment are in their keeping; and he therefore conceives the idea of propitiating their good-will towards him, trying by his conduct to rouse the approval and pleasure and avert the wrath of the parental government. He is disappointed when his requests are refused or ignored, and grateful when they are granted, perceiving himself at the mercy of a strength and power greater than his own.