First, there are to be the public addresses by the teachers, having for their main object to arouse or intensify a certain kind of spiritual distress, and then as far as possible to appease it. Every religion in my judgment originates in a particular kind of anguish, and is an attempt to assuage it. The spiritual distress in which the ethico-religious society has its origin is the agonizing consciousness of tangled relations with one’s fellow-beings, and the inexpressible longing to come into right relations with them. He is fit to be a public teacher of this religion who profoundly experiences this distress, who desires nothing so much as to cease to be, for his part, a thorn in his neighbor’s side. We are that, each of us, inevitably. The more this feeling is strong in him the more will he arouse similar feelings in others, and thus awaken those who are spiritually asleep, the self-righteous, the self-satisfied, and he will then indicate to the utmost of his power, the way of relief. The specific ethical ideals of life are also to be presented in public assemblies—the ideals of private ethics, of marriage, friendship, and the rest. These expressions of the specific ideals, charged with feeling, and taking on appropriate imagery, will gradually attain a certain classical fitness—classical at least for a time—and may be used as public readings. But is there a substitute for prayer? Among the advantages of prayer is often mentioned this: that in it the soul reaches out towards its source, and in so doing wonderfully recruits its spiritual energy. It finds, ethically speaking, its second wind. It reaches down beneath its utmost strength to find an increment of strength not previously at its disposal. The question is whether this increment of strength cannot be obtained more surely and to better purpose in another way, namely, by concentrating attention on the spiritual need of the fellow-beings with whom we are in daily touch, and by becoming aware to what an extent the finer nature imprisoned in them is dependent for its release upon our exertions. The appeal of the God in our neighbor is the substitute for the appeal in prayer to the God in heaven, the call of the stifled spiritual nature in the men and women at our side, is to draw out of us our utmost latent force, the strengths underneath the strength. The common life we share with our fellow-members in the religious society demands expression in song and in responsive services. The high wave of this common life welling up in us, rising to the surface, makes the glow of religious meetings, gives them fervor, and a touch of rapture, not indeed the common life conceived as a uniform life, but as the life we live in others, and they in us.