We have pointed out that, as religion became more idealistic in its conception of deity, magic tended to drop into the background. Moral motives were considered the sole motives capable of moving him to beneficent action. Prayer came to be thought of as a petition for the good, and it was even admitted that this omniscient being knew better than the petitioner what was best. We who have been brought up in the Christian belief have been too much inclined to belittle the character and intellect of races with a different heritage. It may be well, then, to point out that problems which are being thrashed over to-day in Christian communities were discussed and answered in much the same way by other peoples in less enlightened times. Ancient Greece reached the spiritual level expressed in the conclusion of the Lord's Prayer, "Thy will be done." The prayer of Socrates was: "Grant me to become noble of heart." The prayer of Epictetus was: "Do with me what thou wilt: my will is thy will: I appeal not against thy judgments." Is this not the inevitable deduction from an ethical monotheism? Any noble believer in a good god would look at prayer in this way. It is not surprising, then, that the more philosophic adherents of early Christianity questioned the validity of prayers for favors. Take away the support of science, with its healthy scotching of superstition, from the mind of the modern Christian and I doubt whether he would rise to higher ethical levels than any of his forbears. {56} But the growth of moral idealism in religion does not involve the rational overthrow of magic. So long as all the events in the world are not assigned directly to God as the sole active agent at work, the basis of magic remains. Moral idealism condemns only black magic, that is, an immoral use of magical powers. But moral condemnation is not a rational denial of the existence of magic. Carried to its logical extreme, ethical monotheism could discredit magic only by substituting personal for impersonal agency, and then proclaiming a monopoly of personal agency. It is evident, then, that science, rather than religion, has been the real foe of magic, because it grappled with it empirically, and in a detailed fashion, in the midst of the here and now of human events. Ethical monotheism is abstract, deductive and dogmatic. What was necessary was a critical movement at once concrete, inductive and empirical. Religion develops only the moral reason and tends to leave the wider reaches of reason an uncultivated field. Hence the traitor of superstition was never far from it, thunder as the preacher would from the pulpit. Victory over darkness requires the spread of light into every nook and cranny of the human soul.