To most persons the conception of a godless world is the conception of a world with the bottom dropped out. It is a world from which all the high values, all the splendid consolations have disappeared. This is true even for many who feel that they cannot, in reason, any longer believe in a personal God. For all their honest disbelief, the world has turned grey for them. It has lost its old wonder and joy. It has become a dead world. It is interesting to ask ourselves whether all this need be true; whether the high values and the finer consolations may not be just as real when the belief in a personal God has vanished. With the vanishing of that belief, of course, the whole attitude toward the universe is altered. Hopes and comforts that were deeply and warmly of the older order of beliefs have no place in the new order; while loyalties and aspirations that were the breath of its life are become meaningless and without force. But may not new loyalties and aspirations, hopes and comforts find their place strongly and inspiringly in the later order of belief? It will be interesting, as an answer to this question, to ask how differently a society would behave all of whose members, disbelieving utterly in the reality of a personal God, had no other thought of the divine life than that it was their own larger and more ideal existence. I remember at the time of the San Francisco earthquake passing one of the cathedrals of the city and finding its broad stone steps, covering a goodly portion of a city square, black with kneeling worshippers. There could be no question of their reason for being there. They were setting themselves right with their God, hoping that in the fervor of their devotion he would have mercy upon them and save them from destruction. So on shipboard in times of great danger one will find the passengers gathered in the cabin praying to God for deliverance,—always, to be sure, with the proviso, “Yet if it be thy will that we perish, thy will be done!” These are dramatic but typical instances of what occurs constantly in homes and churches where people pray to a personal deity. Could such an attitude of prayer have any meaning for a man who disbelieved in a personal deity? Obviously not. Would he cease to pray? It all depends upon what one is to mean by prayer.