But in each case the God that has heard and answered has been the deeper possibilities of these men’s own life—their ideal life—which they, by their loyal devotion, have wrought out of mere possibility into some manner of actuality. II This in part is what prayer must mean when the old devotion to the personal God has vanished. The last shred of its supernatural, semi-magical connotation will have disappeared. If things worth while are to be done; if life values are to be accomplished and preserved, it must be by a knowledge and control of the conditions of their accomplishment. The devotion to the ideal in us presupposes therefore the most strenuous and persistent effort to learn these modes of control, to understand the deep and intricate ways of life, and to bend every power—of mind and body, of science and art—to bring life into harmony with their fundamental demands. The situation may be illustrated by the contrast between the older and the newer ways of offering thanks to God for great benefits received. In the older days a man would pray, “O God, if thou wilt save the life of my child, there shall be so many candles burning before thine altar”; or “There shall be a new chapel added to thy house of prayer.” The burning candles and the new chapel may have served human purposes,—certainly the candle-makers had their small benefit of it; but the essential thought was not service to mankind, but tribute to God. When, however, the personal God has vanished and there is no divine life but our own deeper and more ideal existence, how shall a man give thanks for deliverance? Any man who has helped wife and nurse and doctors to fight with all the power that human knowledge and skill can command for the life of his child, knows that out of the deep thanksgiving of his heart the thing that he would most wish to do thereafter would be to bend every effort to make such saving knowledge and skill accessible to fathers and mothers of other children, or to extend that knowledge and develop that skill to the saving of lives from still deeper distresses. He will build a hospital or endow a chair in medical research, or he will send his small contribution to some agency that makes for the amelioration of life conditions. And he will do this not as a tribute to a God who delights in adoration, but in simple devotion to the ideal of a more adequate human life.