In the light of that first principle it is manifest that prayer and sacrifice are not fundamentally unrelated and accidentally juxtaposed:  a sacrifice accompanied not even by unspoken prayer, prompted by no desire, no wish for anything whatever, is a meaningless concept.  Equally unmeaning and unintelligible is the idea of a prayer which involves no sacrifice—­whether by sacrifice we understand the offering of gifts or the sacrifice of self.  But perhaps it may be said that, even though love alone can lead to sacrifice of self, still it is undeniable that prayers may be put up and sacrifices be offered by a man for the sake of what he is going to get by doing so; and that that is what Sir James Frazer means when he sees in religion the belief that beings superior to man may be induced by prayer so to order things that man may get his heart’s desire.  Then, indeed, we get a continuity of evolution, a continuity between magic and religion, which Frazer perhaps did not intend wholly to deny:  that is to say the continuous thread running through both magic and religion and uniting them is desire.  Desire is continuous, though the means of gratifying it change.  In one stage of evolution magic is the means; in another, religion.  But throughout we find the process of evolution to be continuous—­change in continuity and continuity in change.

Now it is indeed undeniable that prayer and sacrifice may be made by a man for the sake of what he is going to get, and may from the beginning have been made, partly at least, from that motive.  But if evolution in one of its aspects is change, then one of the changes brought about by evolution in religion is precisely that prayer and sacrifice come to be regarded as no longer a means whereby a man can get his desires accomplished—­his will done—­but as the indispensable condition for doing God’s will.  Prayer then becomes communion with God, and the sacrifice of self the living exhibition of love—­the first principle of religion, the principle which manifests itself now in prayer and now in sacrifice.

From this point of view, then, Sir James Frazer’s account of religion will be considered unacceptable:  it makes religion and magic alike but means whereby man has—­vainly—­sought to satisfy desire.  And the implication is that the day of both alike is over.  But if Frazer’s account of religion is unacceptable, his account of magic also is open to criticism.  He wavers between two opinions about magic:  at one time he regards it as all falsehood and deception, at another as the source from which science springs, just as at one time he considered magic fundamentally the same as religion and then again as fundamentally different from religion.  When Frazer is bent upon identifying magic and science, he attributes to primitive man a theory of causation (that like produces like):  magic is based, he says, upon ’the views of natural causation embraced by the savage magician’.  On the other hand,