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 services, with daily lessons, and with suitable forms of prayer for persons who cannot trust themselves to extempore communings even with a "great brother." Well, there might be no great harm in this. Some solemn form for the expression of cosmic, and even of mundane or political, emotion would doubtless be useful; and if the "modern religion" could be saved from degenerating into a hysterical superstition on the one hand, or a petrified, persecuting orthodoxy on the other, it would certainly be a vast improvement on many of the religions of to-day.