run the risk of throwing out the
baby with the bath-water.

Take the case of a very similar personification with which we are all
familiar--to wit, John Bull. Is he a helpful or a detrimental
"synthesis"? It is not quite easy to say. There is a certain
geniality, a bluff wholesomeness, a downright honesty about him, which
has doubtless its value; but on the other hand he is the incarnation
of Philistinism and Toryism, the perfect expression of the average
sensual man. I am told that in one of his avatars he has something
like two million worshippers, on whom his influence is of the most
questionable, precisely because they have implicit "faith" in him, and
regard him as a "Friend behind phenomena," a "great brother," a
"strongly marked and knowable personality, loving, inspiring, and
lovable." That is an illustration of the dangers which may lurk in
prosopopoeia. But in the main we can regard John Bull without too
much misgiving, because we cannot regard him seriously. His worship
will always be seasoned with the saving grace of humor. He can do
service in two capacities--sometimes as an ideal, often as a
deterrent. Whatever religious revolutions may await us, we are not
likely to see St. Paul's Cathedral solemnly re-dedicated to the
worship of John Bull. He and his sister divinity, Mrs. Grundy, have
never lacked adorers in that basilica; but their cult is probably not
on the increase.

The Invisible King, on the other hand, is a personage to be taken with
the utmost seriousness. If he has anything like the success Mr. Wells
anticipates for him, it is quite on the cards that he might oust the
present Reigning Family from one or all of the cathedrals. It is true
that Mr. Wells deprecates any ritual worship; but "religious thought
finely expressed" would always be in order; and he "does not see why
there should not be, under God, associations for building cathedrals
and such like great still places urgent with beauty, into which men
and women may go to rest from the clamor of the day's confusions" (p.
168). If cathedrals may be built, all the more clearly may they be
appropriated--if you can convert or evict the dean and chapter. If the
Invisible King should take the fancy of the nation and the world, as
Mr. Wells would have us think that he is already doing, he is bound to
become the object of a formal cult. We shall very soon see a
prayer-book of the "modern religion" with marriage, funeral and
perhaps baptismal serv