This surely is the lesson which we may draw from that touching story related by John Cassian of the monk Serapion, which Auguste Sabatier once told to his pupils. In his old age the good monk had suddenly been brought to realise, by the preaching of two missioners, the error which he had committed in thinking of the Eternal as a being like himself, fashioned in human form. His friends gathered round him to thank God for his deliverance from the grievous anthropomorphic heresy, when, in the midst of their prayers, the old man fell in tears to the ground with the pathetic cry: "Woe's me, wretched man that I am! they have taken away my God and I have none to hold to or worship or pray to now." In our work of thought or of practical endeavour we shall need above all to realise the value of humble reverence for truth for its own sake, and of the recognition that wherever goodness is, there is that which the theist knows as the Divine, which others my speak of as the enduring spiritual [p.13] ideal, but which, by whatever name we call it is the inspiring and illuminating reality which shines through every unselfish deed and thought, and makes our lives of worth. We are sensible of this uniting force, however much our ethical ideals may differ. We cannot explain the common principles which justify the ideal of a Gordon and that of a Tolstoy, but we must surely feel that those ideals are in some way branches from the same good tree; it may well be that just as in the intellectual world different bents of genius each have their place and justification, so too in the moral have different types of the ethical ideal. The scientific mind, the practical, executive talent of the businessman, the speculative powers of the metaphysician and the creative gifts of the poet and artist, each have their place, and no one human mind can combine them all. So, too, it may be with the moral ideals realised here in our human lives. Because one is good, another is not wholly wrong. There may be varieties of goodness just as there are differences of shape and beauty between flower and flower. But while we recognise this, we surely need too to realise that there must ultimately be some vital connection between these different ideals, although we ourselves may not be able to perceive the unifying influence or principle. Is it not here that the Union of Ethical Societies fails, in that after insisting upon "the supreme importance of the knowledge, love and practice of the Right," [p.14] their manifesto goes on to disclaim "the acceptance of any one ultimate criterion of right" as a condition of ethical fellowship? Yet unless there be some such criterion, can we speak of "the Right" at all? The capital "R" is an unconscious survival of the theistic expression of thought, or rather the expression of the essentially religious spirit of man, which in spite of a creed of intellectual agnosticism, recognises the Divine in life and does obeisance to it under another name.