charge that his God is impersonal: he may insist that it is
either superpersonal or interpersonal, or both.' The worship of Nature
appears to be discouraged, and to be considered as of comparatively
little worth. 'We dare never forget that moral qualities stand to us
in a {45} different dynamic relation from the grass and the stars and
the sea--no effects upon us or upon these will result from petitions
even of a most righteous man to them. But no one can deny that prayers
to Purity, Serenity, Faith, Humanity, England, Man, Woman, to Milton,
to Jesus, do create a new moral heaven and a new earth for him who
thirsts after righteousness.' Leaving the name of our Lord out of the
discussion, why should a prayer to Serenity have more moral influence
than a prayer to the Sea? Why should a prayer to the Stars be less
efficacious than a prayer to Milton, whose soul was like a star and
dwelt apart? We have only to invest the stars and the sea with certain
qualities evolved from our own imagination to make them as worthy of
worship as either Milton or Serenity. Dr. Coit is scathing in his
criticism of the Positivist prayers, whether of Comte or of Dr.
Congreve: they are 'screamingly funny': 'the most monstrous {46}
absurdity ever perpetrated by a really good and great man.' The
epithets are possibly justified; but are they quite inapplicable to one
who supposes that an invocation of the Living and Eternal God means no
more than an invocation of England, or Faith, or Woman? It is only
when God has become to us an abstraction that an abstraction can take
the place of God.

A manual of services fitted to a nation's present needs is what,
according to Dr. Coit, is required to ensure the progress and triumph
of the ethical movement. 'Until the new idealism possesses its own
manual of religious ritual, it cannot communicate effectively its
deeper thought and purpose. The moment, however, it has invented such
a means of communication, it would seem inevitable that a rapid moral
and intellectual advancement of man must at last take place, equal in
speed and in beneficence to the material advancement which followed
{47} during the last century in the wake of scientific inventions.'
The ritual of ethical societies will not outwardly differ much from the
ritual to be found in existing religions. Its details have yet to be
arranged or 'invented.' The only things certain are that a book of
prayers ought to be provided at once, an