THE following pages represent, with slight modifications of arrangement and the omission of a few paragraphs, my Prælections delivered at Hereford Cathedral in the Lent of 1921. The first and last chapters formed also the substance of my Murtle Lecture before the University of Aberdeen in February, 1922. It was only after the lectures had been written and delivered that I first learned, through my friend Baron Friedrich von Hügel, of the existence of Friedrich Heiler's Das Gebet, published at the beginning of 1918. If I had known Heifer's comprehensive and masterly study earlier, I could not, of course, have mentioned as a desideratum (p. 9) that which had been already most amply provided. But I have allowed what I had written to stand as a confession of my ignorance at the time.

      Christianity, said Döllinger, and later Wilhelm Bousset said the same thing, is most adequately characterised as the religion of prayer. It is no doubt a phrase which might be picked up anywhere from among the faded flowers of pulpit rhetoric. But used by the competent and conscientious scholar, it represents a deliberate and intensive judgment. That judgment of Döllinger's [ix] and Bousset's seems to me to be the key to a right reading of the history of the Christian religion, of its successes and its failures, its achievements and its defeats. My lectures were an attempt both to illustrate and to test that judgment at certain critical moments of Christian history and through the writings of those who seemed to me most representative of those moments. The wisdom of my selection may be questioned. But in a course of lectures which had to be fitted into the weeks of Lent, a few names only could be chosen, and I was guided in my choice by the sole desire to present the real continuity of the specifically Christian doctrine of prayer.

A. L. L.

November 6, 1924. [x]

[PCT ix-x]