purifies his heart and sets him on the right road to the development of human faculties; but it goes a step further and, levelling all differences, brings about love, concord and a true union of humanity. This last object, it can be easily seen, cannot be achieved without a regularly instituted form of prayer, so that all men should gather together in mosques at the stated times and should stand up reverently, bow down and prostrate themselves before their great Maker as one. But even apart from that consideration, it was necessary that permanence should be given to the institution of prayer by requiring its observance at stated times and in a particular manner. The truth is that the grand idea of holding communion with God or realizing the Divine within man, which is so essential to the moral elevation of man, could not have been kept alive unless there was an outward form to which all people should try to conform. In the first place, no idea can live unless there is an institution to keep it alive. Secondly, the masses in any community, even though it may be educated, can be awakened to the recognition of a truth only through some outward form, which reminds them of the underlying idea. And thirdly, there can be no uniformity without a form and without uniformity the community or nation, as a whole, cannot make any progress, the end in view being the moral elevation of the community as a whole and not the elevation of particular individuals. It is a fact that Muslims as a nation have a more vital faith in God than the followers of any other religion. It is this faith in God that accounts for the early Muslim conquests, before which the mightiest empires were swept away like a straw; it is this same faith in God that enabled the Muslims to hold their own against the onslaughts of Christian Europe during the Crusades; and it is this faith in God again that enables Muslims today to carry on the spiritual contest with Christianity, in spite of the fact that all the material forces in this contest, such as wealth, power and organization, are on the side of Christianity. The Islamic institution of prayer which keeps the spirit of the Muslim in touch with the Divine spirit is without doubt the basis on which this strong faith in God rests, and the value of prayer in the formation of this noble trait in the Muslim national character is incalculable.

It must, however, be added that prayer in Islām is not so rigid as it is generally thought to be. It is true that all Muslims are required to