what is right, or there is no right to be known even by the
gods. From this confusion the only mode of escape, which is
satisfactory both to religion and to morality, is to recognise that
the unity of morality and the unity of the godhead mutually imply one
another. But so long as a plurality of gods, with a shifting standard
of morality, is believed in, the distinction between admissible and
inadmissible petitions cannot be firmly or correctly drawn.

A tribal god is petitioned to slay the tribe's enemies, because he is
conceived as the god of the tribe and not the god of its enemies. If
the declaration, that 'I am thy servant,' is affirmed with emphasis on
the first personal pronoun, so as to imply that others are no servants
of thine, the implication is that thy servants' enemies are thy
enemies; whereas if there is, for all men, one God only, then all men
are his servants, and not one person, or one tribe, alone. The
conception of God as the god of one tribe alone is an imperfect and
confused apprehension of the idea of God. But it is less so than is
the conception of a god as belonging to one individual owner, as a
fetish does. To a fetish the distinctive, though not the only, prayer
offered, precisely is 'Slay mine enemies'; and therein it is that lies
the difference between a fetish and a god of the community. The
difference is the same in kind as that between a tribal god and the
God of all mankind. The fetish and the tribal god are both inadequate
ideas of God; and the inadequacy implies confusion--the confusion of
conceiving that the god is there only to subserve the desires and to
do the will of the individual worshipper or body of worshippers.

Escape from this confusion is to some extent secured by the fact that
prayers to the community's god are offered by the community aloud, in
public and as part of the public worship; and, consequently, with the
object of securing the fulfilment of the desires of the community as a
community. The blessing on the community is, at this stage, the only
blessing in which the individual can properly share, and the only one
for which he can pray to the god of the community. Thus the nature of
the petitions, and the quarter to which permissible petitions can be
addressed, are determined by the fact that prayer is an office
undertaken by the community as a community. If the desires which an
individual entertains are such as would be repudiated by the
community, because injurio