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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 77050 ***
+
+
+
+                            DOES CIVILIZATION
+                             NEED RELIGION?
+
+                    _A Study in the Social Resources
+                       and Limitations of Religion
+                             in Modern Life_
+
+
+                                   BY
+                            REINHOLD NIEBUHR
+
+
+                                NEW YORK
+                          THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
+                                  1927
+                          _All rights reserved_
+
+
+                            Copyright, 1927,
+                        By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
+
+                        Set up and electrotyped.
+                        Published December, 1927.
+
+
+                  SET UP BY BROWN BROTHERS, LINOTYPERS
+              _Printed in the United States of America by_
+                  THE FERRIS PRINTING COMPANY, NEW YORK
+
+
+
+
+                       TO THE MEMORY OF MY FATHER
+
+                     WHO TAUGHT ME THAT THE CRITICAL
+                      FACULTY CAN BE UNITED WITH A
+                             REVERENT SPIRIT
+
+                                  _and_
+
+                              TO MY MOTHER
+
+                     WHO FOR TWELVE YEARS HAS SHARED
+                          WITH ME THE WORK OF A
+                           CHRISTIAN PASTORATE
+
+
+
+
+                                CONTENTS
+
+
+       CHAPTER                                                  PAGE
+
+    I. The State of Religion in Modern Society                     1
+
+   II. Nature and Civilization as Foes of Personality             19
+
+  III. The Social Resources of Religion                           35
+
+   IV. The Social Conservatism of Modern Religion                 63
+
+    V. Religion and Life: Conflict and Compromise                 79
+
+   VI. Social Complexity and Ethical Impotence                   124
+
+  VII. Transcending and Transforming the World                   165
+
+ VIII. A Philosophical Basis for an Ethical Religion             190
+
+   IX. Conclusion                                                220
+
+
+
+
+                    DOES CIVILIZATION NEED RELIGION?
+
+
+
+
+                    DOES CIVILIZATION NEED RELIGION?
+
+
+
+
+                               CHAPTER I
+
+                THE STATE OF RELIGION IN MODERN SOCIETY
+
+
+Religion is not in a robust state of health in modern civilization.
+Vast multitudes, particularly in industrial and urban centers, live
+without seeking its sanctions for their actions and die without
+claiming its comforts in their extremities. While its influence is
+still considerable among agrarians and the middle classes of the city,
+an ever-increasing number of the privileged classes are indifferent to
+its values. Spiritual and moral forces have always been in a perennial
+state of decay in those circles of society in which physical ease and
+cultural advantages combine to make intellectual scruples more pressing
+than moral ones. But modern scientific education has greatly multiplied
+the intellectual difficulties of religion and the increasing opulence
+of Western life has rendered its moral problems more perplexing.
+Industrial workers, in as far as they are socially self-conscious,
+are almost universally inimical to religion, and their opposition
+represents a type of anti-religious sentiment which is entirely new in
+history.
+
+Since the dawn of the modern era the tides of faith have ebbed and
+flowed so that it is not easy to chart their general course; but it
+is difficult to escape the conclusion that each new tide has barely
+exceeded the mark left by a previous ebb. The stream of religious life
+has been deepened at times, as in the Protestant Reformation, but the
+impartial observer will note that it has been narrowed as well. A
+psychology of defeat, of which both fundamentalism and modernism are
+symptoms, has gripped the forces of religion. Extreme orthodoxy betrays
+by its very frenzy that the poison of scepticism has entered the soul
+of the church; for men insist most vehemently upon their certainties
+when their hold upon them has been shaken. Frantic orthodoxy is a
+method for obscuring doubt. Liberalism tries vainly to give each new
+strategic retreat the semblance of a victorious engagement. To retreat
+from untenable positions is no doubt a necessary step in preparation
+for new advances; but this necessary strategy has not been accompanied
+by the kind of spiritual vigor which would promise ultimate victory.
+The general tendencies toward the secularization of life have been
+consistent enough to prompt its foes to predict religion’s ultimate
+extinction as a major interest of mankind and to tempt even friendly
+observers to regard its future with grave apprehension. There are
+indeed many forms of religion which are clearly vestigial remnants of
+another day with other interests. They have no vital influence upon
+the life of modern man, and their continued existence only proves that
+history, like nature, is slow to destroy what it has found useless, and
+even slower to inter what it has destroyed. Scattered among the living
+forms of each civilization are the whitened bones of what was once
+flesh and blood.
+
+The sickness of faith in our day may be the senility which precedes
+death; on the other hand, it may be a specific malady which time
+and thought can cure. If history is slow to destroy what has become
+useless, it may be as patient and persistent in reviving what is
+useful but seems dead. Five hundred years are but a short span in
+history, and a constant tendency over such a period may lead to
+premature conclusions. If religion contains indispensable resources
+for the life of man, its revival waits only upon the elimination of
+those maladjustments which have hindered it from making its resources
+available for the citizen of the modern era. Whatever may be said of
+specific religions and religious forms, it is difficult to imagine
+man without religion; for religion is the champion of personality in
+a seemingly impersonal world. It prompts man to organize his various
+impulses, inherited and acquired, into a moral unity; it persuades
+him, when its vitality is unimpaired, to regard his fellows with an
+appreciation commensurate with his own self-respect; and it finally
+discovers and creates a universe in which the human spirit is
+guaranteed security against the forces of nature which always seem to
+reduce it to a mere effervescence unable to outlast the collocation of
+forces which produced it. The plight of religion in our own day is due
+to the fact that it has been more than ordinarily pressed by foes on
+the two lines on which it defends the dignity and value of personality.
+The sciences have greatly complicated the problem of maintaining the
+plausibility of the personalization of the universe by which religion
+guarantees the worth of human personality; and science applied to the
+world’s work has created a type of society in which human personality
+is easily debased. The pure sciences have revealed a world of nature
+much more impersonal and, seemingly, much less amenable to a divine
+will and to human needs than had been traditionally assumed; and the
+applied sciences have created an impersonal civilization in which human
+relations are so complex, its groups and units so large, its processes
+so impersonal, the production of things so important, and ethical
+action so difficult, that personality is both dwarfed and outraged in
+it.
+
+Personality is that type of reality which is self-conscious and
+self-determining. The concept of personality is valid only in a
+universe in which creative freedom is developed and maintained in
+individual life as well as in the universe. Religion therefore needs
+the support of both metaphysics and ethics. It tries to prompt man to
+ethical action by the sublime assumption that the universe is itself
+ethical in its ultimate nature whatever data to the contrary the
+immediate and obvious scene may reveal; and through the cultivation
+of the ethical life in man it seeks to make such a personalization
+of the universe both necessary and plausible. It teaches men to find
+God by loving their brothers, and to love their brothers because
+they have found God. It inspires a mystical reverence for human
+personality, prompted by the discovery and creation of a universe in
+which personality is the supreme power and value; and it persuades men
+to discover personal values in the universe because they have first
+come upon clues to the transcendent value of personality in the lives
+of their fellows. Its ethics is dependent upon its metaphysics and its
+metaphysics is rooted in its ethics. Religion is thus obviously placed
+in a desperate plight when its metaphysics and its ethics are imperiled
+at the same time. It must face and do battle with two hosts of enemies,
+those who do not believe in men because they do not believe in God, and
+those who do not believe in God because modern civilization has robbed
+them of their faith in the moral integrity of men.
+
+Since it is difficult to fight on two fronts at the same time,
+the forces of religion have been forced to choose one of the two
+fronts for their major defensive effort. Perhaps it was inevitable
+that they should choose the easier task. It is easier to challenge
+the idea of an impersonal universe than to change the fact of an
+impersonal civilization. That is what the modern church has done and
+is doing. It is spending all its energy in discounting the excessive
+claims of a deterministic science. It has exhausted its ingenuity
+in retreating from the untenable positions of an orthodoxy which
+overstated the freedom and the virtue in the physical universe and
+therefore aggravated the very determinism by which it was defeated.
+Outraged truth has a way of avenging itself. The idea of a capricious
+God working his will in the universe without the restraint of law or
+the hindrance of any circumstance helped to create the concept of a
+mechanistic world in which all freedom is an illusion and therefore all
+morality a sham. Thus the strategic retreats of religion in the field
+of metaphysics have been the necessary prelude to any new religious
+advance. Religion may in fact be forced to make some concessions
+which even modern liberalism seems still unwilling to make. Modern
+religionists, particularly popular apologists are inclined to add the
+word creative to the word evolution, and assume that their problem is
+solved. The modern church has very generally borrowed its apologetic
+strategy from John Fiske and Henry Drummond, and has tried to
+visualize a God who differed from older conception only in this—that
+he took more time to gain his ends than had once been assumed. The
+important fact which has escaped many modern defenders of the faith is
+that the patience of the creative will is a necessary characteristic
+rather than a self-imposed restraint. There is a stubborn inertia in
+every type of reality which offers resistance to each new step in
+creation, so that an emerging type of reality is always in some sense
+a compromise between the creative will and the established facts of
+the concrete world. Whether we view the inorganic world, organic life
+or the world of personal and moral values, each new type of reality
+represents in some sense a defeat of God as well as a revelation of
+him. Religious apologetics will probably be forced to concede this fact
+more generously than has been its wont before it can bring religious
+affirmations into harmony with scientific facts. Modern liberalism is
+steeped in a religious optimism which is true to the facts of neither
+the world of nature nor the world of history. The ultimate worth of
+human personality in the universe may not be guaranteed as immediately
+nor as obviously as liberal religion seems inclined to assume. Liberal
+religion may be forced to discard its metaphysical and theological
+monisms, which have been its support even more than orthodoxy’s, and
+concede that freedom and creativity in both man and the cosmic order
+are more seriously circumscribed than religion had assumed. But after
+that concession is made it is not likely that the idea of freedom, and
+the dignity of personality which is associated with it, will ever be
+completely discredited, whatever may be the deterministic obsessions of
+modern science. The various sciences can momentarily afford to indulge
+in their various determinisms because the prestige of metaphysics as
+a coördinator of the sciences has been destroyed for the time being.
+Each science is therefore able to disavow the authority of metaphysics
+and work upon the basis of its own metaphysical assumptions, which
+are usually unreflective and generally deterministic. But the bulk
+of new knowledge which has momentarily destroyed the authority of
+any unifying perspective must in time be mastered by philosophical
+thought; and absolute determinism is bound to be discredited in such a
+development.[1]
+
+There can be no question but that the development of the physical
+sciences has permanently increased the difficulty of justifying the
+personalization of the universe upon which all religious affirmations
+are based. Every new form of reality is so closely linked to every
+preceding form out of which it emerges that it is not easy to discern
+the place where free creativity functions. Yet no total view of reality
+can ever be permanently mechanistic, for new types of reality do emerge
+and science is able to explain only the process and not the cause of
+their emergence.
+
+Important, then, as the metaphysical problem of religion is, it is
+not the only problem which it faces. Though it is a real task to
+reinterpret religious truth in the light of modern science, it is by
+no means a hopeless one; and though it is necessary, it is not the
+only necessary task. In the light of modern philosophical inquiries it
+is justifiable to assume that the most needed hypotheses of religion
+are metaphysically defensible. In the present situation of religion
+in civilization, it is more necessary to inquire if and how the
+peculiar attitudes and the unique life which proceeds from a religious
+interpretation of the universe may be made to serve the needs of men in
+modern civilization. The fact is that more men in our modern era are
+irreligious because religion has failed to make civilization ethical
+than because it has failed to maintain its intellectual respectability.
+For every person who disavows religion because some ancient and
+unrevised dogma outrages his intelligence, several become irreligious
+because the social impotence of religion outrages their conscience.
+Religion never lacks moral fruits so long as it has any vitality. It
+has been placed in such a sorry plight in fulfilling its ethical task
+in modern civilization because the mechanization of society has made
+an ethical life for the individual at once more necessary and more
+difficult, and failure more obvious, than in any previous civilization.
+If we are not less ethical than our fathers, our happiness is certainly
+more dependent than that of our fathers upon the ethical character of
+our society. Rapid means of commerce and communication have brought
+us into terms of intimacy with all the world without increasing the
+spiritual dynamic and ethical intelligence which makes such close
+contact sufferable. We have multiplied the tools of destruction which a
+confused conscience may wield and have thus armed the world of nature
+which lives in the soul of man by the same science by which we imagined
+ourselves to have conquered nature. We have developed so complex a
+society that it cannot be made ethical by moral goodwill alone, if
+moral purpose is not astutely guided. Lacking social intelligence,
+modern civilization has thus robbed man of confidence in his own
+and his neighbor’s moral integrity even when ethical motives were
+not totally lacking. Civilization with its impersonal and mechanized
+relationships tends on the one hand to make society less ethical,
+and on the other to reveal its immoralities more vividly than in any
+previous age. Religion has a relation to both cause and effect to the
+moral life. Both its friends and its foes are inclined to judge it
+by its moral fruits, regarding it as primarily the root, fancied or
+real, of morality. Yet morality is as much the root as the fruit of
+religion; for religious sentiment develops out of moral experience
+and religious convictions are the logic by which moral life justifies
+itself. In a civilization in which the dominant motives and basic
+relationships are unethical, religion is therefore doubly affected.
+The immoralities which bring the reproach of impotence upon it are
+also the reason for the impotence. Thus modern civilization creates
+a temper of scorn for a religion which fails to challenge recognized
+social iniquities, and at the same time it destroys the vitality
+which religion needs to issue such a challenge. The defection of the
+industrial workers from religious life and institutions, one of the
+most significant phenomena of our time, has this double significance.
+The industrial worker is indifferent to religion, partly because he
+is enmeshed in relations which are so impersonal and fundamentally so
+unethical that his religious sense atrophies in him. On the other hand
+he is hostile to religion because he observes the ethical impotence of
+the religion of the privileged classes, particularly in its failure to
+effect improvement in economic and social attitudes. The industrial
+worker raises a general characteristic of modern urban man to a unique
+degree. His own experiences help him to see the moral limitations of
+modern civilization more clearly than do the more privileged classes;
+but what is true of him is generally true of all members of a complex
+society in which human relations are impersonal and complicated. If
+religion is senescent in modern civilization, its social impotence is
+as responsible for its decline as is its metaphysical maladjustment.
+
+The restoration of its vitality must wait upon the adjustment of
+its tenets and the reorganization of its life to meet the problems
+which both the pure and the applied sciences, which both the
+depersonalization of the universe and the depersonalization of
+civilization, have created. The metaphysical problem of religion cannot
+be depreciated. In the long run religion must be able to impress the
+mind of modern man with the essential plausibility and scientific
+respectability of its fundamental affirmations. But the scientific
+respectability of religious affirmations will not avail if the life
+which issues from them will not help to solve man’s urgent social
+problems. If modern churches continue to prefer their intellectual
+to their ethical problems, they will merely succeed in maintaining a
+vestige of religion in those classes which are not sensitive enough to
+feel and not unfortunate enough to suffer from the moral limitations
+of modern society. An unethical civilization will inevitably destroy
+the vitality of the religion of the victims and the sincerity and
+moral prestige of the religion of the beneficiaries of its unethical
+inequalities.
+
+The future of religion and the future of civilization are thus hung
+in the same balance. Both as a means to a moral end and as an end in
+itself, for which the moral life is the means, the future of religion
+is involved in the ethical reconstruction of modern society. Social
+and economic problems are not the only problems which fret the mind
+and engage the interest of modern men. But they are proportionately
+more important in an advanced than in a primitive society. Modern men
+face no problem that is greater than that of their aggregate existence.
+How can they live in some kind of decent harmony with their fellow men
+when the size and intricacy of their social machinery tends continually
+to aggravate the vices which make human life inhuman? How shall they
+gain mastery over the instruments by which they have mastered nature
+so that these will not become the means of projecting nature’s vices
+into human history? How shall they bring the life of great social and
+political groups under the dominion of conscience and moral law? These
+are the problems upon which hangs the future of civilization. Such
+social problems are fundamentally ethical and the intimate relation
+between religion and morality bring them inevitably into the province
+of religion. Can it help to solve them? Will their solution give
+religious idealism new vitality? Is the present social impotence of
+religion due to innate defects? Or is it due to specific and historical
+limitations which the years may change at least as quickly as they
+produced them? To such questions we must address ourselves.
+
+
+
+
+                               CHAPTER II
+
+             NATURE AND CIVILIZATION AS FOES OF PERSONALITY
+
+
+It would be extravagant to claim that the possibility of making the
+resources of religion available for the solution of social problems
+of modern civilization is absolutely determining for its future.
+Religion would continue to maintain itself in modern society even if it
+produced only the scarcest socio-ethical fruits. The problem of living
+together is not the only problem which men face, and civilization is
+not the only foe with which personality contends. At least two other
+fundamental problems engage the interest of every normal individual,
+that of developing the multifarious forces of his personality into some
+kind of harmony and unity and that of asserting the dignity and worth
+of human personality in defiance of nature’s indifference and contempt.
+If religion can render the human spirit a tolerably effective service
+in the solution of these two problems, its aid will not be scorned
+though it fail him in his social problem. It will not maintain itself
+with equal vitality in all strata of society, but it will continue some
+kind of existence in all of them, and a fairly vigorous life in those
+classes in which social problems are least urgent.
+
+Psychiatry and the psychological sciences are encroaching upon one
+service to the perplexed spirit of man which was once an almost
+exclusive province of religion. They are offering him aid in the task
+of integrating the heterogeneous forces, with which ages of human
+and prehuman history have endowed him, into the unity of dependable
+character; and there are those who think that this service will obviate
+his need for religion in this field. Undoubtedly it will be to the
+advantage of any moral or religious discipline of the individual
+life to avail itself of a more precise knowledge of the intricacies
+of human personality; yet only the most mechanistic and naturalistic
+ethical theorist would maintain that the knowledge of self is the
+only prerequisite of self-mastery, and that the eternal conflict
+between the higher will and the immediate desires, about which the
+religious of every age have testified, may be composed by nothing more
+than a better understanding of the devious ways of human intelligence
+and emotion. The psychological sciences have undoubtedly saved men
+from some morbid fears and repressions, but the most modern school
+of psychological mechanists and determinists seems more anxious to
+destroy restraints which are the product of ages of moral experience
+than to correct the defects which reveal themselves inevitably on the
+fringe of every moral discipline. The reason mechanistic psychiatry and
+psycho-analysis run easily into a justification of license is because
+they labor under the illusion that the higher self (they would scorn
+that term) is able to put all internal forces in their proper place, if
+only it knows their previous history and actual direction. Under such
+an illusion the clamant desires of man’s physical life are bound to
+be closer to the center of character than any moral discipline would
+allow. Modern determinism is too naturalistic to see or to be willing
+to regard human personality as the incarnation of moral and spiritual
+values which did not have their origin in any immediate necessity and
+which no individual will maintain if his resolution is not strengthened
+by something more than his momentary and obvious experience. This is
+not to say that moral discipline in individual life can be maintained
+by religion alone. A humanistic ethical idealism, which makes the
+experience of the race the guide and inspiration of individual
+conduct, will not fail to aid men toward some higher integration of
+personality, though it will seldom go beyond the Greek ideal of a
+balanced life which knows how to escape sublime enthusiasms as well as
+crass excesses. The value of religion in composing the conflict with
+which the inner life of man is torn is that it identifies man’s highest
+values, about which he would center his life, with realities in the
+universe itself, and teaches him how to bring his momentary impulses
+under the dominion of his will by subjecting his will to the guidance
+of an absolute will. “Make me a captive, Lord, and then I shall be
+free,” has ever been the prayer of religious people. “He who loses his
+life for my sake shall find it,” said Jesus. In such paradoxes the
+truth is revealed that the highest peace comes to men where their life
+is centered not in what is best in them but in that beyond them which
+is better than their best.
+
+Obviously this function of religion in the life of the individual
+has its social implications; but it is not to be assumed that the
+integration of personality automatically solves man’s social problem.
+That assumption, which religion invariably makes, is one of its very
+defects in dealing with the social problem. A unified personality may
+still be anti-social in its dominant desires and the very self-respect
+which issues from its higher integration may become the screen for its
+unsocial attitudes.
+
+Just as important as the problem of bringing peace to the warring
+factions within the soul of man is the task of giving human personality
+a sense of worth in the face of nature’s indifference and contempt;
+and of adjusting man’s highest values to nature’s sublimer moods. The
+significance of the religious inclinations of country people lies just
+here. The peasant is religious because man’s relation to the natural
+world about him is still the agrarian’s great interest. His ethical
+life is simple and develops in those primary or family relationships in
+which problems are comparatively few and a disturbance of the religious
+temper by unethical social facts rather infrequent. He is close enough
+to nature to be prompted to awe and reverence by her beauties and
+sublimities, to gratitude by her vast and perennial benevolences,
+and to fear by her occasional cruel caprices. He expresses his awe
+in worship, his gratitude in the spring and harvest festivals, which
+are traditional in all religions, and when her momentary atrocities
+overtake him he appeals from nature’s God to the God who is above
+nature and seeks the intervention of a supernatural ally in behalf of
+human personality. In a sense the religion of peasants remains the
+constant spring of religious sentiment in every class of society, which
+others may corrupt or refine but never quite destroy. Urban men suffer
+from an atrophy of the religious sense because they lose, as they are
+divorced from the soil, some of the reverence to which a view of the
+serene majesties of nature prompts and some of the fear occasioned by
+her elemental passions. Yet the most sophisticated and emancipated
+city dweller cannot finally escape the problem of the relation of the
+human spirit to the natural world in which it is at once child and
+rebel. Even the refinements and artificialities of urban life will not
+save man from facing nature’s last and most implacable servant—death,
+nor free him of the necessity of making some kind of appeal against
+the obvious victory which nature claims at the grave. The fight of
+personality against nature is religion’s first battle, and that is one
+reason why there is always a possibility that other struggles will
+be neglected for it. Traditional religion fails in its social tasks
+partly because men have suffered longer from the sins of nature than
+from the sins of man; and religious forms and traditions are therefore
+better adjusted to offer them comfort for these distresses than for
+any other from which they suffer. Religion is not yet fully oriented
+to the new perils to personality which are developed in civilization.
+But it may fail to meet these and yet not be totally discredited; for
+the new perils have not supplanted the old ones. At its best religion
+is both a sublimation and a qualification of the will to live. Defeated
+by nature the human spirit rises above nature through religious faith,
+discovering and creating a universe in which divine personality is
+the supreme power and human personality a cherished, protected and
+deathless reality. But this religious sublimation of the will to live
+must be balanced by a qualification of that will to live by which
+men are persuaded to sacrifice themselves for each other, that they
+may save themselves from each other and realize their highest self.
+Love is a natural fruit of religion but not an inevitable one. A high
+appreciation of personality ought to issue in a reverence for all
+personalities and in a qualification of the tendency to self-assertion
+for the sake of other personalities. But left to itself religion easily
+becomes a force which sublimates but does not qualify man’s desire for
+survival; in which case it may still function in simple societies but
+will be less useful in those which are highly complex and in which the
+problem of human relationships has become very important.
+
+Next to the faith of agrarian classes the greatest stronghold of
+religion is in the life of the middle classes of the city. This
+phenomenon is due to several causes. Ideals of self-mastery and
+personal rectitude are always strongest in those classes in which
+physical resources are not so abundant as to tempt to sensual excesses
+and not so scant as to lead to an obsession with life’s externalities.
+For that reason the resources of religion for the solution of personal
+moral problems are particularly coveted by the middle classes. On the
+other hand the middle classes are also religious because they are
+comparatively unconscious of their responsibility for society’s sins
+and comparatively untouched by the evil consequences of an unethical
+civilization. They may therefore indulge in a religion which creates
+moral respectability, and reinforces self-respect, even though it does
+not force them to share their sense of worth with all their fellows.
+There is for this reason an element of hypocrisy in all middle-class
+religion of which it never becomes clearly conscious but which helps to
+create the corroding cynicism from which the lower classes of modern
+society suffer.
+
+Since ideals of personal righteousness flourish in the genteel
+poverty of the countryside at least as well as in urban middle class
+conditions, the religion of peasants and the city’s middle classes have
+two characteristics in common: their preoccupation with problems of
+the individual life and their concern for the adjustment of the soul
+to nature’s realities. But while they share these elements the two
+types of religion are by no means identical. The simple expedient of
+claiming divine and supernatural intervention in the soul’s specific
+cases of distress does not appeal to the sophisticated intelligence of
+city people, particularly since higher learning has become so general
+and science has become the burden of this learning. They are anxious to
+correct the intellectual inadequacies of traditional religion; and if
+they are conscious of any moral defects in it, they have the easy faith
+that these will be eliminated with a proper adjustment of religious
+affirmations to the world of scientific fact.
+
+The conflict between orthodoxy and liberalism, between fundamentalism
+and modernism, is essentially a conflict between city and countryside.
+Though the Protestant Reformation was used by the rising cities
+to assert the needs of the inner life against a too artificially
+elaborated institutional religion and to express an ethic of
+individualism against the traditional loyalties of the peasants
+rather than to make a readjustment of religion to the growing demands
+of intellectual life, the humanistic revival which preceded the
+Reformation was clearly determined by this latter interest and it
+contributed to the dissolution of the medieval religious structure.
+In the recent theological controversies within Protestantism, between
+Conservatism and Liberalism, the religious naïvete of the agrarian and
+the intellectual sophistication of the city are more obvious influences
+in the conflict.
+
+The revision of ancient affirmations of faith in the light of modern
+learning was of course necessary from the point of view of the general
+needs of the age, and not required merely to satisfy the intellectual
+scruples of a particular class in society which has a preponderant
+influence in the Protestant church. It might be better to say therefore
+that the commercial middle classes appropriated as much as they
+prompted the revision of Protestant theology and religion.
+
+By doing this they have indeed created a religion capable of
+maintaining itself in urban civilization, but it develops little
+power for the ethical reconstruction of industrial society. The same
+religionists who pride themselves upon the reasonableness of their
+faith generally use their very modern and revised religion to sanctify
+a very unmodern and unrevised ethical orthodoxy, an individualistic
+orthodoxy which makes much of self-realization and comparatively little
+of the social needs of modern life.
+
+The kind of liberal religion which thrives among the privileged
+classes of the city gives them some guarantee of the worth of their
+personalities against the threats of a seemingly impersonal universe
+which science has revealed, but it does not help to make them aware
+of the perils to personality in society itself. The final test of any
+religion must be its ability to prompt ethical action upon the basis
+of reverence for personality. To create a world view which justifies a
+high appreciation of personality and fails to develop an ethic which
+guarantees the worth of personality in society, is the great hypocrisy.
+It is the hypocrisy which is corrupting almost all modern religion.
+In a sense hypocrisy is the inevitable by-product of every religion.
+Men are never as good as their ideals and never as conscious as the
+impartial observer of their divergence from them. Every religious
+person commits the error of solipsism in some form or other, the
+sin of claiming for himself what he will not grant to his brothers.
+The religion of modern men, particularly of the privileged classes,
+seems to be more than ordinarily insincere, partly because the social
+simplicity of another age obscured this inevitable hypocrisy and partly
+because the privilege of the religious classes is so great and its
+unethical basis in modern society, particularly from the perspective of
+the lowly, so patent and so destructive, that it is no longer possible
+to veil the immoral implications of a self-centered religion.
+
+The question which we really face, therefore, is whether religion is
+constitutionally but a sublimation of man’s will to live or whether
+it can really qualify the will of the individual and restrain his
+expansive desires for the sake of society. If it is only the former,
+it will continue to be the peculiar possession either of those who
+have no urgent social problems or of those who are the beneficiaries
+and not the victims of social maladjustments. If religion is not
+now functioning in the solution of social and ethical problems, its
+impotence in this field may be due to constitutional weaknesses which
+may be corrected, once they are understood, or it may be due to certain
+specific historical influences of the past centuries of Western life
+which further experience will change and qualify. If religion has
+resources for the solution of social and ethical problems which have
+not been made available for the uses of society, it is the duty of
+modern teachers of religion and of all who still have confidence
+in its social efficacy or who benefit by its comforts to work for
+the elimination of its social limitations, whether they seem to be
+incidental and casual or basic and constitutional. Even constitutional
+limitations in the social task need not discredit religion as a social
+force; for a valuable resource may be closely related to a social
+limitation and a way may be discovered to detach the one from the
+other. Men always tend to be either uncritical devotees or merciless
+critics of the various values which emerge in human life. This is
+particularly true in regard to the values of religion, the limitations
+of which are always aggravated by its unreflective champions and
+made the occasion of sweeping abuse by its critics. Religious people
+have assumed too easily that a religious life must issue not only in
+private rectitude but in perfect social attitudes. This overestimate
+of its social usefulness easily creates a reaction of criticism which
+denies that there is any useful counsel in religion for the problems of
+society or any dynamic necessary for their solution.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER III
+
+                    THE SOCIAL RESOURCES OF RELIGION
+
+
+The task of analyzing and isolating the ethical limitations and the
+social deficiencies of religion is to no purpose if there is not in
+religion itself, at its best, some resources which civilization and
+society need for the solution of their problems. Some critics of
+religion discount it entirely as a social force, or at least as a force
+of social progress. Bertrand Russell’s prejudices on this subject
+are too violent to make his testimony against religion particularly
+weighty. Yet he speaks for a large number of ethically sensitive
+individuals who share his critical attitude, if not his vehemence,
+when he declares: “Since the thirteenth century the church has
+consistently encouraged men’s blood lust and avarice and discouraged
+every approach to human and kindly feeling.... Emancipation from the
+churches is still an essential condition of improvement, particularly
+in America where the churches have more influence than in Europe....
+Of all requisites for the regeneration of society the decay of religion
+seems to me to have the best chance of being realized.”[2] The number
+of people among the middle and higher classes who would subscribe to
+such a denunciation of organized religion is probably not very large.
+But there are very many who ignore the church as a force for social
+amelioration; and in the class of industrial workers a temper against
+the church exceeding even Mr. Russell’s violence is very general.
+
+Whatever may be the facts in regard to contemporary religion and to
+other specific types of organized religious life, it is relevant to ask
+whether religion as such, freed from its specific limitations, contains
+indispensable resources for the ethical reconstruction of society.
+
+The first resource which would seem to be of social value is the social
+imagination which religion, at its best, develops upon the basis of
+its high evaluation of personality. A spiritual interpretation of the
+universe may not issue automatically in a high appreciation of human
+personality, but religion is never quite able to deny this ethical
+implication of its faith, and in occasional moments of high insight
+it revels in it. It persuades men to regard their fellows as their
+brothers because they are all children of God. It insists, in other
+words, that temporal circumstance and obvious differences are dwarfed
+before the spiritual affinities which men have through their common
+relation to a divine creator. Thus Jesus could deal sympathetically
+with the harlot of the street, the publican at the gate, the Samaritan
+woman at the well and the blinded fanatics and their dupes who
+crucified him. The apostle Paul, though he did not always understand
+the genius of his master, was nevertheless able to apprehend this
+central dogma at the heart of religion and declare: “In Christ there
+is neither Jew nor Greek, neither bond nor free.” Celsus, the critic
+of the Christian church in the first century, derides the church for
+its failure to distinguish between outcasts and respectable citizens.
+The fervor and consistency with which the church has espoused the ideal
+of the equal worth of all personalities has not always equaled that
+of the early church; many compromises with the brute facts of history
+have been made; yet the church has never been able to betray this faith
+altogether. The missionary enterprise with all its weaknesses is still
+a revelation of this power in religion. Oceans are bridged and varying
+circumstances of race and environment are ignored in order that the
+soul inspired by God may claim kinship with other souls of every race
+and every clime.
+
+The physical characteristics and outward circumstances in which men
+differ are sometimes not so great as they seem to the superficial
+observer; wherefore education may do as much as religion to cultivate
+and discover those profounder unities which made all men brothers.
+There are hatreds which are due merely to misunderstanding. They
+spring from the parochialism of the average mind, which knows no
+better than to regard with contempt what differs from the standards
+and values to which it has become habituated. Education and culture
+may emancipate men from such hatreds. Other misunderstandings which
+are caused by a superficial analysis of men’s action may be dissipated
+by a profounder appreciation of the complex life of every individual
+out of which each action emerges. Yet understanding alone does not
+solve all the problems of living together. We do not hate only those
+whom we do not know or understand. Sometimes we hate those most whom
+we know best. Love does not flow inevitably out of intimacy. Intimacy
+may merely accentuate previous attitudes, whether they be benevolent or
+malevolent. Anthropologists are easily obsessed with the inequalities
+which men reveal in their natural state, and the very abundance of
+their knowledge prompts them to an ethically enervating determinism
+when they attempt to gauge the potentialities of so-called primitive
+peoples. The modern psychologists are more inclined to accept the
+dogma of the total depravity of man than the ancient theologians were,
+and they prove thereby that a profound knowledge of human nature need
+not incline men to regard human beings with reverence and affection.
+Mr. H. L. Mencken may not speak for the scientists, but he is somewhat
+typical of the cynicism which follows in the wake of intellectualism.
+His estimate of human beings is: “Man is a sick fly taking a dizzy ride
+on a gigantic flywheel.... He is lazy, improvident, unclean.... Life
+is a combat between jackals and jackasses.” Love is always slightly
+irrational and requires an irrational urge for its support. It is at
+least as irrational as hatred and the same intelligence which mitigates
+the one may enervate the other. A highly sophisticated intelligence is
+generally unable to survey the human scene with any higher attitude
+than that of pity for human beings, and pity is a form of contempt
+under a thin disguise of sympathy.
+
+The facts of human nature are sufficiently complex to validate
+almost any hypothesis which may be projected into them. Therefore
+the assumptions upon which we essay our social contacts are all
+important. One reason why the social sciences can never attain the
+scientific prestige of the physical sciences to which they aspire is
+that the importance of hypotheses increases with the complexity and
+variability of the data into which they are projected. Every assumption
+is an hypothesis, and human nature is so complex that it justifies
+almost every assumption and prejudice with which either a scientific
+investigation or an ordinary human contact is initiated. A vital
+religion not only prompts men to venture the assumption that human
+beings are essentially trustworthy and lovable, but it endows them with
+the courage and inclination to maintain their hypothesis when immediate
+facts contradict it until fuller facts are brought in to verify it.
+Mere sentiment is easily defeated by life’s disappointing realities.
+Anatole France observed that if one started with the supposition that
+men are naturally good and virtuous, one inevitably ends by wishing to
+kill them all. Human nature is neither lovable nor trustworthy in its
+undisciplined state and a sentimental overestimate of its virtue may
+well result in the reaction to which Anatole France alludes. Yet its
+undeveloped resources are always greater than either a superficial or
+critical intelligence is able to fathom. There must be an element of
+faith in love if it is to be creative. “Love,” said Paul, “believes all
+things”; and it may be added that it saves its faith from absurdity
+by creating some of the evidence which justifies its assumptions. It
+“hopes till hope creates from its own wreck the thing it contemplates.”
+Nothing less than a religious appreciation of personality, supported
+by a spiritual interpretation of the universe itself in terms of
+moral goodwill, will make love robust enough to overcome momentary
+disappointments and gain its final victory. The injunction of Jesus
+to his disciples to forgive not seven times, but seventy times seven,
+represents the natural social strategy of a robust and vital religious
+idealism, which subdues evil by its unswerving confidence in the good.
+
+While it is true that religion does not issue automatically in an
+attitude of reverence and goodwill toward all human personalities, it
+nevertheless remains a fact that a religious world view does incline
+men to regard their fellow men from a perspective which obscures
+differences and imperfections and reveals affinities and potential
+virtue. Even if intelligence became imaginative enough to discover
+the affinities, it could not be courageous enough to challenge the
+evil in men in the name of their better selves. The art of forgiveness
+can be learned only in the school of religion. And it is an art
+which men must learn increasingly as a complex society makes human
+associations more and more intimate. Whatever improvement a growing
+social science may establish in the technique of social intercourse,
+men will never escape the necessity of overcoming the evil, which they
+inflict upon each other, by creative patience and courageous trust. A
+higher intelligence may mitigate our fears and an exacter justice may
+restrain the inclination to wreak vengeance upon the wrongdoer; but
+only the stubborn forces of religion will turn fear into trust and
+hatred into love. Sometimes mutual fear and hatred reduce themselves to
+such an absurdity (as in the late World War) that even a superficial
+intelligence can recognize it; but their absurdity does not become
+patent until they have issued in mutual annihilation. Even then the
+person with an ordinary commonsense view of life can do no better than
+to substitute partial trust for fear and partial understanding for
+hatred. So one war breeds the next. All men are potentially at once our
+foes and our friends. An unreflective social life assumes that they
+are enemies and helps to make them so. A higher social intelligence
+establishes a nicely balanced compromise between trust and mistrust so
+that the one cannot be very creative and the other not too destructive.
+Only the foolishness of faith knows how to assume the brotherhood of
+man and to create it by the help of the assumption. A religious ideal
+is always a little absurd because it insists on the truth of what
+ought to be true but is only partly true; it is however the ultimate
+wisdom, because reality slowly approaches the ideals which are implicit
+in its life. A merely realistic analysis of any given set of facts is
+therefore as dangerous as it is helpful. The creative and redemptive
+force is a faith which defies the real in the name of the ideal, and
+subdues it.
+
+Love is, in short, a religious attitude. There are circumstances in
+which it may prosper without the inspiration of religion. In the family
+relation and in other intimate circles proximity and consanguinity
+may prompt men to regard human beings as essentially good, and direct
+experience validate their faith. That is why Jesus discounted love in
+the family as a religious achievement. “If ye love those who love you,
+what thanks have ye?” In the secondary relations, which are no longer
+secondary in the matter of importance to human welfare, the matter
+is not so simple. In these only a sublime assumption will persuade
+men to embark upon the adventure of brotherhood, and only a robust
+and constantly replenished faith will inure them against inevitable
+disappointments. The religious interpretation of the world is
+essentially an insistence that the ideal is real and that the real can
+be understood only in the light of the ideal. Since the family relation
+is the most ethical relation men know, religious faith interprets all
+life in terms of that relation. In view of many of the facts of history
+which seem to reveal the world of man as but a projection of the world
+of nature in which animal fights with animal and herd with herd, this
+kind of interpretation is superficially too absurd to persuade a highly
+sophisticated intelligence. It is the truth which is withheld from the
+wise and revealed to babes. Yet it is the truth without which men will
+not be able to build a peaceful society. It is the truth which even the
+physical facts of a highly complex civilization, in which space and
+time are being annihilated, are conspiring to make true. The races and
+groups of mankind are obviously not living as a family; but they ought
+to. And as the necessity becomes more urgent the truth of the ideal
+becomes more real.
+
+It would be foolish to insist that goodwill alone will create
+conscience and that to detect the ethical core at the heart of man’s
+being is all that is required to make him ethical. It is a task to
+persuade human beings to trust their fellows; but is equally important
+to prompt their fellows to trustworthy action. If human nature is left
+unchallenged and undeveloped, it hardly qualifies the brute struggle
+for survival sufficiently to validate any religion or ethic of trust.
+Men’s actions are not as free as we have imagined. The social, economic
+and psychological sciences have restricted the concept of freedom in
+the soul of man as the physical sciences have restricted it in the
+universe. Man is not only less free than he had once imagined, but he
+is not as free as he once was. If science has discredited the idea of
+freedom, civilization has circumscribed the fact. It is easier for man
+to act as an ethical individual in a comparatively simple social group,
+such as the family, than in a very large and complex social group when
+even the most robust ethical purpose must meet the resistance and
+the corruption of the primitive and untamed desires of the group. If
+man is capable of sacrificing immediate advantages for ultimate ones
+and his own advantages for the sake of society, this capacity is an
+achievement which he gains only after much effort and preserves from
+corruption only at the price of eternal vigilance. The first requisite
+of an ethical life in modern civilization is a realization of the
+difficulties which face the human conscience in maintaining itself
+against the pressure of immediate desires to which the whole emotional
+life of man is wedded. It is not easy to sacrifice meat for beauty,
+pleasure for some seemingly ephemeral value, self-interest for the sake
+of the family, the interest of the family for the sake of society, the
+interest of our generation for the society of to-morrow. Yet only by
+such sacrifices can man prove the reality and potency of his creative
+will. If such sacrifices are not actually made, all so-called morality
+becomes in fact a device for obscuring the bestiality of man without
+overcoming it.
+
+The fact that, in spite of the pressure of the struggle for survival,
+man has created a kingdom of values in which truth, beauty and goodness
+have been made real, is proof that he is more free and more moral than
+the modern cynic is willing to concede. But his kingdom of values is
+never as uncorrupted as he imagines. The task therefore of binding
+men to spiritual values, and of prompting them to sacrifice immediate
+pleasures and physical satisfactions for them, is difficult almost to
+the point of desperation. Religion makes its contribution to it by
+giving man the assurance that the world of values really has a relevant
+place in the universe and that values are permanent and will be
+conserved. He is challenged to sacrifice in a universe in which love is
+a basic law. He is asked to prefer personal values to property values
+in a world in which personality is the highest reality. He is prompted
+to exercise his conscience under the scrutiny and with the sympathy of
+a higher conscience. Religion in its purest form does not guarantee
+man an immediate reward for every ethical achievement; indeed it may
+offer him no reward at all except the reward which inheres in the act
+itself. But it does give him the final satisfaction of guaranteeing
+the reality of a universe which is not blind to the values for which
+he must pay such a high price, and which is not indifferent or hostile
+to his struggle. It asks him to respect human personality because the
+universe itself, in spite of some obvious evidence to the contrary,
+knows how to conserve personality; and to create values in a world in
+which values are not an effervescence but a reality. Religion is in
+short the courageous logic which makes the ethical struggle consistent
+with world facts. In its most vital form religion validates its sublime
+assumptions in immediate experience and gives man an unshakable
+certainty. It thus becomes the dynamic of moral action as well as the
+logic which makes the action reasonable.
+
+The force of its faith operates not only to preserve moral vigor but to
+sensitize moral judgments. The God of religious devotion is not only
+revealed in the moral values of the universe outside of man, but he is
+revealed in the aspirations of man which are beyond his achievements.
+God insures not only the preservation of values but their perfection.
+All moral achievement is qualified by the relativities of time and
+circumstance. The worship of a holy God saves the soul from taking
+premature satisfaction in its partial achievement. It subjects every
+moral value to comparison with a more perfect moral ideal. Of course
+the absolute perfection of God is itself conditioned by the imperfect
+human insight which conceives it. A cruel age may picture God more
+cruel than itself, and to a generation lusting for power God may be
+the supreme tyrant. Thus religion may become the sanctification of
+human imperfections. Yet in its highest form religion does inculcate
+a wholesome spirit of humility which gives the soul no peace in any
+virtue while higher virtue is attainable.
+
+The force of religion in moral action and the necessity of religious
+assurance for the highest type of social life may be gauged by
+an analysis of possible alternatives to a social life which is
+oriented by a religious world view. There are two real alternatives
+to such a life. The one is based upon an ethical but unreligious
+world view, and the other scorns both ethics and religion in its
+absolute determinism. An ethical life which claims no support from
+religion may on occasion develop a very high type of social idealism,
+particularly since it escapes the ethical defects of religion even
+while it sacrifices religious resources. Stoicism is in many respects
+superior to pantheistic religions; for there are moral advantages in
+underestimating rather than overestimating the virtue of the universe.
+It is better to create a sense of tension between the conscience of
+man and a morally indifferent nature than to obscure the moral defects
+of nature by a deification of the natural order. But if men disavow
+all faith in a power not their own which makes for righteousness,
+they cannot finally save themselves from either arrogance or despair.
+Religion may destroy man’s self-reliance by an undue sense of humility,
+but even that limitation is no more destructive of moral values
+than a self-reliance which prompts the human spirit to strut for a
+while on this narrow world in the consciousness of unique virtue
+before capitulating to a world which is too blind to know what it has
+destroyed. Thomas Huxley thought he would as soon worship “a wilderness
+of monkeys” as to give himself to the worship of humanity after the
+fashion of Comte. To insist too strenuously upon the uniqueness of
+human life in the cosmic order must inevitably issue in the pride
+which such a worship implies. Since the Renaissance there has been a
+marked decay of the spirit of humility in Western civilization which
+is closely associated with the secularization of its ethical idealism.
+The difference between the pride of secular idealism and the humility
+implicit in genuine religion may be gauged, as Professor Irving Babbitt
+suggests, by comparing Confucius with Buddha and Marcus Aurelius with
+Jesus. Pascal thought the stoics were guilty of “diabolical pride.” The
+judgment may be too severe, but it must be confessed that a purely
+secular idealism has difficulty in escaping a morally destructive
+arrogance from which true religion is saved because it subjects all
+values and achievements to measurement, with its absolutes as the
+criteria. “Why callest thou me good?” said Jesus: “no one is good save
+God.” In the religion of Jesus the perfection of God is consistently
+defined as an absolute love by comparison with which all altruistic
+achievements fall short. “I say unto you, love your enemies; bless
+them that curse you; do good to them that despitefully use you and
+persecute you; that ye may be children of your Father in heaven; for he
+maketh his sun to rise on the evil and the good and sendeth rain upon
+the just and on the unjust. For if ye love them which love you, what
+reward have ye? Do not even the publicans the same?... Be ye therefore
+perfect even as your Father in heaven is perfect.”[3] Here the value
+of an absolute standard to save from undue pride in partial ethical
+achievements is particularly apparent. Prudential morality can hardly
+go beyond the encouragement of altruism within the social group, i.e.
+loving those “which love you.” That is precisely what Stoicism did.
+It is just this pride in partial achievement which complicates the
+moral problem of modern life; for our ethical difficulties are created
+by the very tendency of reasonable ethics to make life within groups
+moral and never to aspire to the moral redemption of inter-group
+relations. Humility is therefore a spiritual grace which has value
+not only for its own sake but for its influence upon social problems.
+Traditional religions, which live off of original inspirations and
+experiences without recreating them, easily fall into a pride of their
+own, the pride which comes from identifying the absolute standards of
+their inspired source with their partial achievements and inevitable
+compromises. But religion in its purest and most unspoiled form is
+always productive of a spirit of humility which regards every moral
+achievement as but a vantage point from which new ventures of faith and
+life are to be initiated toward the alluring perfection which is in God.
+
+An ethical idealism unsupported by religion is almost as certain to
+issue in final despair as in unjustified pride. A few choice spirits
+are sometimes able to imagine themselves in rebellion against the
+universe without finally succumbing to a temper of sullenness; but the
+dreadful logic of insisting upon conscience in a conscienceless world
+inevitably leaves its mark upon the multitude. Oswald Spengler, in his
+morphology of civilizations,[4] presents “religion without God” as the
+unvarying symptom of a dying civilization, too sophisticated to believe
+in the cosmic worth of its moral values but not quite ready to abandon
+them. The enervating effect of a moral idealism which has sacrificed
+its hopes with its illusions always becomes apparent in the long run,
+but frequently it reveals itself quite immediately in the very lives of
+its most robust champions.
+
+Mr. Russell may think that the “firm foundation of unyielding despair”
+is an adequate basis for an ethical life, but his own growing
+bitterness betrays how such a philosophy corrupts moral idealism
+with a sense of frustration. The idealist is put into the position of
+sacrificing everything for values which have no guaranteed reality
+in the cosmic order. Even his faith in mankind is finally destroyed;
+for however precious personal values may seem in a given moment, his
+philosophy denies him the right to attribute any lasting worth to them.
+True religion gives man a sense of both humility and security before
+the holiness which is at once the source and the goal of his virtue;
+and thus it saves him at the same time from premature complacency and
+ultimate despair. The choice between irreligious and religious idealism
+is the choice between pride which issues in despondency and humility
+which becomes the basis of self-respect. There is an irrational element
+in either alternative; but the irreligious idealist is in error when he
+imagines that he has chosen the more reasonable alternative; his choice
+is no more reasonable and morally much less potent.
+
+The absolute determinists who have as little confidence in the moral
+integrity of human nature as in any moral meaning in cosmic facts
+are more consistent than the Stoics, but they are involved in worse
+absurdities. Their cynicism robs them of both an adequate motive and an
+adequate method for social reconstruction. Discounting moral idealism
+even while they exhibit it in their social passion, they ostensibly
+desire social reconstruction only in the interest of the class to which
+they belong. But their personal interests are not frequently identical
+with those of the oppressed classes and they are moved as much by
+sympathy for the plight of the victims of our present society as by any
+selfish considerations. They profess to be prompted by the reflection
+that individual action has become useless in a capitalistic age and
+that it is possible to advance the interests of an individual only by
+making common cause with other individuals in a similar predicament.
+Meanwhile there is hardly an economic determinist, even among those
+who are actually members of the class of the oppressed, who could not
+gain higher advantages for himself by disassociating himself from his
+class than by making common cause with it. This is certainly true of
+those who are intelligent enough to evolve or elaborate the theory of
+absolute determinism.
+
+Absolute determinism, when developed consistently, must disavow all
+other methods of social reconstruction but that of ruthless conflict.
+If nothing qualifies the self-interest of men, a conflict of interests
+becomes inevitable. This defect in method is even more important than
+the defect in its motive. A ruthless struggle can result in an ordered
+society only if the victors are able to annihilate their foes. But even
+in that event the interests of the members of any class engaged in a
+social or political struggle will cease to be identical as soon as its
+foes are eliminated. Thus a new and equally ruthless struggle must
+result between the comparatively strong and comparatively weak, the
+comparatively privileged and the comparatively underprivileged victors.
+Ultimately men cannot escape the necessity of building a stable society
+by the mutual compromise and the mutual sacrifice of conflicting
+rights. The determinists have made an important contribution to the
+modern social problem by revealing the brutal nature of much of man’s
+social life. Even if the human conscience could be sensitized to a
+much greater degree than now seems probable, it will not be possible
+to eliminate conflict between various social and economic groups.[5]
+Good men do not easily realize how selfish they are if someone does
+not resist their selfishness; and they are not inclined to abridge
+their power if someone does not challenge their right to hold it.
+Religious and moral idealism cannot be expected to eliminate, but it
+can be expected to mitigate social warfare. The conscience of man
+must finally be the force which builds a new society; and a man with
+a conscience must be the end for which such a society is built. If
+there is no virtue in man which lifts him above the brute struggle for
+survival, there is no value in him to justify the effort of building
+a new and more perfect society—and he is not the stuff out of which
+such a society can be built. It is difficult to escape the conclusion
+that the reverence for personality which is implicit in religion is
+necessary to establish an adequate motive and an adequate method
+of social reconstruction. Reverence for personality qualifies the
+individual’s will to power so that his life can be integrated with
+other lives with a minimum of conflict; and it saves society from
+sacrificing the individual to the needs of the group. In the religion
+of Jesus both a social and an individualistic emphasis issues from a
+spiritual appreciation of human personality. The individual is given a
+place and prestige which he never before possessed in society. Western
+civilization owes much to the high evaluation of the individual which
+Jesus introduced into the thought of the world. On the other hand this
+emphasis is saved from mere individualism by an ethic which helps
+the individual to realize his highest self by sacrificing personal
+advantages for social values.
+
+The contribution of religion to the task of an ethical reconstruction
+of society is its reverence for human personality and its aid in
+creating the type of personality which deserves reverence. Men cannot
+create a society if they do not believe in each other. They cannot
+believe in each other if they cannot see the potential in the real
+facts of human nature. And they cannot have the faith which discovers
+potentialities if they cannot interpret human nature in the light of a
+universe which is perfecting and not destroying personal values.
+
+
+
+
+                               CHAPTER IV
+
+               THE SOCIAL CONSERVATISM OF MODERN RELIGION
+
+
+The charge against religion most frequently made by critics who are
+interested in social reconstruction is that it is a conservative
+force which impedes social progress. If it has resources which are
+indispensable for the life of society, social idealists will not
+appreciate them if its contemporary forms are invariably aligned
+with the social forces most intent upon preserving the status quo.
+Contemporary liberal Christianity refutes the charge of social
+conservatism by appealing to the social radicalism of Jesus which it
+alleges to have appropriated. By this appeal liberal Christianity
+exhibits one of the very tendencies of religion which subjects it
+to the criticism of social liberals. Religion is easily tempted to
+make devotion to the ideal a substitute for its realization and to
+become oblivious to the inevitable compromise between its ideal and
+the brute facts of life. The absolute nature of the ethics of Jesus
+and the perfect harmony between his religion and his ethics may be
+the guarantee of the perennial spiritual and ethical renewal of the
+Christian religion; but it is also occasion for the self-deception of
+many professed disciples. Many streams of thought have contributed to
+the current of modern liberal Christianity and it contains alluvial
+deposits from all Western civilizations. Yet it imagines that it
+represents a simple return to radical and dynamic ethics of the
+religion of Jesus. By this deception it easily becomes the façade
+behind which the brutal facts of modern industrial civilization may be
+obscured rather than a force by which they might be eliminated. The
+Protestant Reformation suffered from the same deception. It thought of
+itself as a return to the original ideal when it was, as a matter of
+fact, a new type of compromise.
+
+Catholicism was a compound of early Christianity and the thought and
+life of Græco-Roman civilization. The medieval church was a kind of
+ghostly aftermath of the Roman empire and the popes were inspired by
+the genius of Cæsar as much as by the spirit of Christ. The north
+European peoples first accepted this latinized Christianity, partly
+because they were attracted by those universal elements in it which
+have made their appeal to all peoples, and particularly those of
+the Western world, and partly because it was for them the symbol
+of the ordered civilization of Rome which they first envied, then
+destroyed, and finally tried to rebuild. In time they reacted against
+the ecclesiastical, international and feudal solidarities of this
+whole politico-religious world, prompted no doubt by the untamed
+spirit of liberty which characterized the northern peoples and which
+resented the tyranny by which the middle ages achieved their high
+measure of social cohesion. Thus Protestantism became the handmaiden
+of a budding nationalism which was impatient of the restraints of
+an international papacy, as it has since been impatient of every
+other type of international control. In time it also came to be the
+peculiar spiritual possession of those classes among the northern
+peoples who developed modern commerce and industry. The affinity
+between its sanctification of the principle of liberty and the
+necessary individualism of classes which were intent upon destroying
+the traditional restraints of the ancient world for the sake of giving
+unhampered play to a growing commercial and industrial life, has been
+so perfect that it is hardly possible to decide which of the two is
+cause and which effect. Max Weber[6] has made an interesting analysis
+of commercial and industrial superiority of Protestant nations. It
+may be that the aptitude for commercial and industrial pursuits and
+an inclination to the Protestant form of the Christian faith are
+concomitant characteristics of north European peoples rather than
+casually related phenomena. Yet they have become so intimately related
+in history that the most typical commercial classes and nations are
+most generally Protestant, and most uniquely Protestant. In England
+the nonconformist sects are almost identical with the commercial
+middle classes, while the established church with its semi-Catholic
+genius has spiritual affinities both with the old Tories and the
+new world of the industrial worker. In Germany there is a similar
+alignment with Catholic and agrarian Bavaria on the one hand and
+the highly industrialized and Protestant Prussia on the other. The
+contrast between Protestant and industrial Ulster and Catholic and
+agrarian south Ireland is equally significant. Everywhere in Western
+civilization, and nowhere more than in America, Protestantism with its
+individualism became a kind of spiritual sanctification of the peculiar
+interests and prejudices of the races and classes which dominate the
+industrial and commercial expansion of Western civilization.
+
+Since liberal Christianity is the product of an adjustment of the main
+tenets of orthodox Protestantism to the sophistication of the cities
+and the growing intelligence of the privileged and therefore educated
+classes, its whole moral atmosphere is much more determined by the
+special interests of these classes than it is willing to admit. The
+authority of Jesus, to which it appeals, has indeed been given a new
+emphasis, but this has been done because liberal Christianity valued
+the theological simplicity rather than the moral austerity of his
+gospel. In the same way many liberal Jews have appealed from the law
+to the prophets, not because they had a great passion for the ethical
+rigors of an Amos or Isaiah but because they found obedience to the
+minute exactions of the law too onerous in a sophisticated age. Jesus
+is valuable to the modern Christian because he offers an escape from
+the theological absurdities of the ancient creeds; meanwhile his
+ethical and religious idealism will not leave the lives of those who
+profess to follow him unaffected. In time it may become the instrument
+of the regeneration of Western society; but this will not be possible
+if the liberal church does not overcome its self-deception and realizes
+that its religious and moral life is a composite into which have
+entered the imperialism of Rome, the sophistication of the Greeks, the
+fierce tribalism and individualism of the Nordics and the prudential
+ethics of an industrial civilization.
+
+Religion can be healthy and vital only if a certain tension is
+maintained between it and the civilization in which it functions. In
+time this tension is inevitably resolved into some kind of compromise.
+The tendency of religion to become a conservative social force is
+partly derived from its ambition to defend the resultant compromise in
+the name of its original ideal. Thus all partial values, determined
+by geographic, economic, social and political forces, are given a
+pseudo-absolute character by the religious elements which entered
+into the compromise; and their defects are sufficiently obscured and
+sanctified to make them comparatively impregnable to the attacks
+of the critics of the status quo. The Russian moujik was more than
+ordinarily docile under the tyranny of the czars and more than
+ordinarily patient with the imperfections of his society, because his
+obedience was claimed not by Russia but by “holy Russia,” the historic
+incarnation of his religion. In the same way the medieval church
+became organically involved with feudalism and forced the critics of
+feudal society to undermine its influence before they could hope to
+change the feudal social order. Orthodox Protestantism is intimately
+related to this day with Nordicism, with the racial arrogance of north
+European peoples. The Ku Klux Klan, which thrives in the hinterlands
+of America, maintains its influence over simple minds by screening
+racial prejudice against Slavic, Latin and Semitic peoples behind
+a devotion to the spiritual treasures of Protestantism and their
+defense against the fancied peril of allegedly inferior religions. In
+Ireland the racial pride of Ulstermen expresses itself in a passionate
+espousal of the Presbyterian religion and a contemptuous attitude
+toward the Catholicism of the Irish. In modern prewar Germany there
+was a curious partnership between “Thron und Altar,” the interests
+of the nationalist German state, as integrated by the Prussian royal
+house, with the interests of Protestantism. To this day the fanatic
+monarchists of Germany are also Protestant extremists who imagine that
+the monarchy was undermined by religiously motivated conspiracies of
+Jews and Catholics. Incidentally the Lutheran type of Protestantism
+which flourishes in Germany has always been less intimately aligned
+with the commercial classes than the Calvinistic sects of other Western
+nations. While the German socialists include the Lutheran church among
+the forces of reaction with which they must contend, the church’s real
+strength is among the peasants and junkers, who are also the strongest
+support of monarchist opinion and who abhor the democratic liberalism
+of commercial and industrial Germany as much as they despise socialist
+radicalism; and they imagine both to be inspired by Semitic designs
+upon their national integrity. The real inspiration of this liberalism
+with its emphasis on international conciliation and coöperation is
+born out of the economic and political necessities of an industrial
+and commercial state which cannot afford to indulge in the fanatic
+nationalism to which peasants and agrarian aristocrats are prone.
+
+Liberal Christianity as it has developed in the urban centers of the
+Western world grew out of the intellectual and religious needs of
+the privileged classes and bears the marks of its social environment
+just as much as the other types of religion which have preceded it
+and with which it is historically related. It is in the same danger
+of becoming a spiritual sublimation of the peculiar interests and
+prejudices of these classes while it imagines itself the bearer
+of an unconditioned message to its day. It has preserved the same
+individualistic ethics which has characterized orthodox Protestantism
+and which is so dear to the hearts of the commercial classes, and so
+unequal to the moral problems of a complex civilization in which the
+needs of interdependence outweigh the values of personal liberty. The
+supposed devotion of the privileged classes to a religion in which the
+sacrifice rather than the stubborn preservation of individual rights is
+enjoined and in which the prudential and utilitarian root of morality
+is completely plucked out is one of the incongruities which frequently
+occur when a civilization harks back to the spiritual visions of its
+childhood in order to obscure the sober and disenchanted practicality
+of its maturity.
+
+If the modern church is really to become an instrument of social
+redemption, it must learn how to divorce itself from the moral
+temper of its age even while it tries to accommodate itself to the
+intellectual needs of the generation. The religion of Jesus is free
+of theological absurdities. Its very simplicity saves it from undue
+entanglements with discredited cosmologies. But those who espouse it
+chiefly for this reason easily miss its real genius. Its essential
+assumptions may not outrage the mind, but neither are they readily
+accepted by an age which has sanctified cool and careful, moral
+prudence. Its solemn injunction, “Take no thought for your life,
+what ye shall eat or what ye shall drink ... but seek ye first the
+kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things shall be
+added unto you,” is strangely anachronistic in a day which worships
+obvious and tangible success and appreciates virtue only as it
+insures those advantages of health and prosperity which are its
+highest desiderata. Prudential morality has its own uses. Few men have
+either the imagination or the courage to pursue an ideal if it does
+not justify itself by some fairly immediate advantage. Society is not
+altogether the loser if men discover that “Godliness is profitable
+unto all things,” and espouse an ideal because they have their eye
+upon the concrete and obvious advantages which flow from it. But a
+prudential morality has its limitations and these will prove less
+detrimental to society if they are not sanctified by religion. It is
+better therefore to seek no other basis for utilitarian ethics than the
+social experience from which it is really derived. Honesty will prove
+itself the best policy without the authority of religion. The function
+of religion is to nerve men for an ethical achievement when it promises
+no immediate returns. From the perspective of an impartial observer
+there is an element of hypocrisy in all prudential morality. The cool
+intelligence which computes selfish advantage which may flow from
+moral action is not imaginative enough to include all persons who are
+affected by an action and not dynamic enough to balance the drive of
+self-interest which influences it.
+
+In modern industrial society those who are in position of power and
+privilege are most inclined to espouse an ethical ideal because it
+tends to stabilize social life and thus insures the perpetuation of
+privilege. They are also most easily tempted to restrict ethical action
+so that it will prompt to no sacrifices which are not consistent with
+a wise self-interest. Since they are also the classes which have, for
+reasons previously discussed, maintained their loyalty to religion,
+the church can avoid connivance with their prudential morality only by
+a continual regeneration of its religious life. Failing to maintain
+a distinction between utilitarian ethics and a religiously inspired
+moral life, the church cannot escape the fate of becoming a useful
+adjunct of the forces of privilege in the social and economic conflict
+in which modern society is engaged. It may be good business to pay
+high wages, but social good may demand an increase in the wages of
+workers beyond the point where economic advantage is derived from an
+enlightened wage policy. It may be wise to share some privileges so
+that all of them will not be lost, but sensitive ethical insight will
+detect the selfishness and insincerity in such a course. A religion
+which sanctifies such social prudence is ultimately a hindrance to the
+ethical reconstruction of modern society. A religion which discovers
+and amends the limitations of prudential morality by the elements of
+its reverence for personality and its quest for the absolute is a
+necessary factor in social reconstruction.
+
+The question which faces the modern church is whether it will help
+to hide or to discover the limitations in the ethical orientation of
+modern life. Its devotion to the gospel of Jesus may serve either
+purpose. The contempt for ethical opportunism implied in the whole
+idealism of Jesus and its scorn for immediate advantages are the
+very ethical values which the generation needs, but they are also
+the values which have given the Christian religion its great moral
+authority and prestige which the church can so easily misuse. If the
+authority of Jesus prompts men to a courage and imagination which
+escapes the defects of contemporary morality, its influence will be
+redemptive; if it is used merely to hide the defects, the critics of
+the church will be justified in regarding it as detriment to social
+progress. The religion which is socially most useful is one which
+can maintain a stubborn indifference to immediate ends and thus give
+the ethical life of man that touch of the absolute without which all
+morality is finally reduced to a decorous but essentially unqualified
+self-assertiveness. The paradox of religion is that it serves the world
+best when it maintains its high disdain for the world’s values. Its
+social usefulness is dependent upon its ability to maintain devotion
+to absolute moral and spiritual values without too much concern for
+their practical, even for their social usefulness. The church is in a
+very favorable position to make a necessary contribution to social
+life, for it reveres as Lord one whose life incarnates the strategy
+which saves morality from insincerity. But its assets easily became
+moral liabilities when it compounds the pure idealism of Jesus with the
+calculated practicalities of the age and attempts to give the resultant
+compromise the prestige of absolute authority.
+
+
+
+
+                               CHAPTER V
+
+               RELIGION AND LIFE: CONFLICT AND COMPROMISE
+
+
+It is obvious that the ethical potency of religion depends largely
+upon its ability to make its ideals effective in the world and yet
+preserve a measure of detachment from those natural forces which
+express themselves in human society and offer such stubborn resistance
+to every spiritual and ethical ideal that no victory has yet been
+gained over them in which the heel of the victor has not been
+bruised. Ideal religion makes reverence for personality the end of
+human action. Society has its various secular ends the attainment of
+which necessitates the debasement of personality. Religion seeks to
+persuade men to sacrifice immediate advantages for ultimate values;
+the average man whose influence is dominant in all large social groups
+is not easily persuaded to forego immediate and concrete advantages
+for values which are too remote and too ephemeral to captivate his
+imagination. There must therefore be a tension between the spiritual
+ideal and all historic societies. The significance of Jesus for the
+religious life of the Western world is due to his attainment and
+incarnation of a spiritual and moral ideal of such absolute and
+transcendent nature that none of his followers have been able to
+compromise it by their practical adjustments to the social necessities
+of their day. There is therefore a resource in the avowed loyalty of
+Western civilization to his ideal which may yet become the basis of its
+redemption. It is the peculiar characteristic of men and societies, and
+an evidence of both their moral and immoral nature, that they reserve
+their most unqualified devotion for those ideals and personalities
+which they find difficult to realize or emulate. They pay tribute to
+the ideal even while they are corrupting it and they reward those
+who have accommodated it to their indifferent capacities with a more
+qualified respect.
+
+It was probably inevitable that the church should adjust the spiritual
+ideal, which to propagate it ostensibly regards as its very raison
+d’être, to the practical needs of the various ages and social orders
+with which it came in contact. But it is necessary that it should be
+shrewd enough to see the compromise involved in every adjustment and
+be stubborn enough to make a new bid for victory after every partial
+defeat. On the whole the Catholic church, which Protestants easily
+assume to have been more amenable to the practical demands of an
+unregenerate society than the churches of the Reformation, has really
+been much shrewder than these in gauging the hazards to virtue in the
+most natural social relationships. Some of the moral weaknesses in the
+modern church may be traced directly to the naïvete of Protestantism in
+dealing with the vagaries of human nature, and in failing to estimate
+the overt and covert peril to its values in the ordinary ways of men.
+
+Medieval Catholicism had various strategies in preserving and relaxing
+the tension between the ideal of religion and the practical needs of
+men and society. It made fewest demands upon the individual. He was
+permitted to indulge almost all the natural appetites and ambitions
+which characterize the life of the average man. For him the religion of
+the church was a magic which guaranteed divine intervention in critical
+moments and which offered a rather easy short-cut to the prizes of the
+spirit which ought to be won only by virtuous achievement. Yet this
+same church had an uncompromising attitude toward the various social
+institutions which Protestantism has never equaled. It insisted on the
+sacramental nature of the family union with such intransigeance that
+it may fairly be accused of failing to make necessary accommodations
+of its spiritual ideal to the imperfections of human nature. It dealt
+with economic relations with less severity but enforced ethical ideals
+upon them which must seem unusually exacting to an age which has become
+accustomed to the connivance of Protestantism with laissez-faire
+economics. The master of the medieval church, Thomas Aquinas, had
+elaborated a theory of the just price for all commercial transactions,
+which the church made every effort to apply and which it enforced
+through the canonical law. The church did not organize the guilds but
+it blessed them; and their efforts to regulate wages, fix fair profits,
+insure high quality of merchandise and organize mutual aid among
+their members were prompted by a religiously inspired moral idealism.
+While it dealt less successfully with the ethical implications of the
+relations between landowners and peasants, it impressed the owners
+with a sense of their obligation toward those who were economically
+dependent upon them which to this day gives the landed aristocracy
+of European nations a certain moral superiority over the industrial
+overlords who have been trained in more modern schools of thought. The
+ambition of the medieval church to dominate the life of the nations
+is well known but frequently misinterpreted. The contest between the
+papacy and the empire was indeed in some of its aspects no more than
+a conflict between two great political organizations lusting for the
+power which easily becomes the sole end of the life of social and
+political organisms. Yet there was a measure of ethical idealism in
+the political aspirations of the popes to which Protestant thought
+has given scant justice. In the two greatest exponents of the papacy
+as an international political force, Gregory VII and Innocence III,
+particularly in Gregory, the ethical ideal of a unified Christian
+society which knows how to hold the capricious self-will of nations in
+check and how to set bounds to their natural lust for power is of no
+small moment in the development of papal policy. The very autocracy of
+the papacy, which the modern world finds so little to its liking, was
+elaborated by Gregory in order to save the church from international
+anarchy and make it an instrument of international unification.
+Incidentally Gregory was neither the first nor the last great statesman
+who preferred autocracy to anarchy, and the preference is supported by
+more than one lesson of history. Free coöperation between individuals
+and groups is a high and rare political and moral achievement, and
+where men’s capacities are unequal to it there are occasions when it
+may be better to sacrifice freedom than to destroy social cohesion. At
+any rate the medieval church revealed both political shrewdness and
+spiritual idealism in its attempt to dominate the life of nations.
+Naturally its efforts did not result in any ideal society. The ambition
+of the Cæsar haunted the life of the popes and in many respects the
+work of their hands approximated the dominion of an Augustus more
+nearly than the kingdom of God of Christian dreams. The Christian ideal
+of an ethical international society was thus corrupted by imperial
+ambition in its very inception, and the historical realities which
+sprang from it diverged even farther from any conceivable ideal. Yet
+the whole political policy of the medieval church is in marked contrast
+to the easy capitulation of historic Protestantism before the force
+of economic and political groups. If Catholicism’s treatment of the
+moral problems of the individual represents the relaxation of the
+tension between religion and life, and its social and political policy
+represents the compromise which follows inevitably upon the conflict of
+the ideal with the moral inertia of life, its monasticism represents
+the strategy of religion when it seeks to maintain an absolute tension
+between its ideal and historic reality.
+
+The various ascetic movements which prospered under the general
+ægis of the medieval church represent so many different types of
+religious idealism that no generalization about them will be accurate.
+Protestantism reacted violently from the monastic ideal and therefore
+has been able to see nothing in monasticism but a selfish flight
+from life’s realities. Monasticism may be a retreat from life, but
+at its best it was not a selfish retreat. Its development of the
+arts, its emphasis on learning, its vast philanthropies and its
+religious zeal for those outside of the monastic walls are not selfish
+characteristics. It did sometimes degenerate into a very odious type
+of spiritual selfishness and pride; but if we judge it by its typical
+exemplars, we cannot accuse it of a lack of social passion. The
+religious fervor of Catholic ascetics has been matched by Protestant
+mystics, but their ethical insights have never been excelled. Their
+superior moral shrewdness was revealed in their ability to detect
+the perils to the ethical ideal which are covert in the natural and,
+from any obvious perspective, virtuous social relationships. They saw
+that the family, in itself the most virtuous of human groups, could
+easily become the occasion for disloyalty to high fealties of the
+soul. “Whoso loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of
+me,” Jesus had said, and no one in the history of the church seems
+to have understood the problem with which he dealt in those words as
+well as Catholic ascetics. It must be said that the celibacy of the
+monasteries was not prompted solely by the desire to avoid conflicting
+loyalties; it sprang partly from a morbid evaluation of the sexual
+relation. That was probably the weakest and least worthy characteristic
+of medieval asceticism. Its understanding of the perils to the spirit
+in the possessive instinct was perhaps its finest bit of insight. It
+understood how easily the privilege and power which spring from the
+possession of property may corrupt the soul with pride and destroy a
+loving relationship between individuals. It therefore insisted upon the
+vow of poverty. In all these problems the insight of asceticism was
+superior to its strategy. It saw peril in ordinary human relationships
+where most modern Christians are unable to detect them; but it knew of
+no way to overcome the peril except by destroying the relationships
+and building its unique fellowship of the spirit upon the basis of
+celibacy, poverty and absolute obedience. In asceticism the flowers of
+the spirit are cut from the roots by which they are supported and life
+is destroyed in the process of its purification. Asceticism creates a
+high type of ethical spirituality which cannot be universalized without
+completely destroying society; and the virtue which it develops can
+be maintained only in its own artificial media and therefore lacks
+redemptive force. The great medieval ascetics have always claimed
+Jesus as their authority though he was not an ascetic in their sense.
+He disassociated himself from the asceticism of John the Baptist,
+who had come “neither eating nor drinking,” and unlike the ascetics
+he had no morbid fears of natural enjoyments. Protestantism has
+therefore regarded asceticism as the result of a foolish literalism
+which failed to allow for poetic latitude in the words of Jesus.
+Nevertheless it must be admitted that both his words and his practice
+have a closer affinity to medieval asceticism at its best than to
+any modern spiritualized worldliness which tries vainly to unite the
+largest number of spiritual graces with the greatest possible temporal
+advantages. Francis of Assisi was surely more like the real Jesus than
+Bruce Barton’s modernized caricature of the original. The strategy of
+Jesus might be described as a leaning in the direction of asceticism,
+as a hovering upon its brink. He is saved from its morbid temper by
+the wholesome common sense which leavens all his attitudes. The virtue
+of asceticism lies in its ability to detect the perils to a virtuous
+life in the necessary and inevitable social relationships in which all
+individual personality must develop; its limitation is its inclination
+to destroy the relationships in order to overcome the peril. Religious
+idealism, nurtured in the individualism of Protestantism, fails to
+appreciate the virtue of asceticism, while it condemns its limitations
+because it fails to realize how fundamentally all individual ethical
+achievements are qualified by the society in which men live. Wherever
+that fact is fully understood, every honest effort to maintain
+the purity of the religious ideal will result in strategies which
+will approximate asceticism at many points and which may excel it
+only in the ability to avoid its depreciation, occasionally morbid
+depreciation, of the ordinary functions of life.
+
+Protestantism’s reactions to the problems of preserving a sense of
+tension between religion and life have been a little more varied than
+those of the medieval church because of the multifarious nature of its
+historic forms. But varied as may be the strategies of the various
+churches, they do not finally differ from the three which Catholicism
+employed, i.e., capitulation without a struggle, compromise after a
+struggle, and victory gained through the device of avoiding some of
+the issues. The marked differences between the medieval and the modern
+church lie in the areas of life where the struggle between religion
+and human inertia was attempted, where the compromises were made and
+where the victories were won. If Catholicism left the individual to his
+own devices, the churches of the Reformation followed a similar course
+in dealing with the moral problems of all human groups. The state was
+completely secularized under Protestant influence. The Reformation was
+in some of its aspects simply a simultaneous revolt of the various new
+nations of Europe against the restraints of the international papacy.
+In Germany, Scotland and finally in England, the nationalistic motive
+was a decided force in destroying the prestige of the old religion.
+Lutheranism capitulated much more easily to the secular state than
+Calvinism, which tried in fact to maintain the ancient controls upon
+political life. But once the Reformation had destroyed the old unity of
+Western society and the prestige of the organization which maintained
+it, secular nationalism became the universal characteristic of Western
+civilization. Even Calvinism, which was ambitious to dominate the
+policy of political states, hardly had the opportunity of affecting
+international relations. Its influence barely went beyond domestic
+policy, and there it was less interested in the morality of the state
+than in the legal enforcement of individual moral ideals. The greed
+and lust for power of national groups is not a unique characteristic
+of the modern world; but our own era takes the moral autonomy of
+the nation for granted more generally than did the Middle Ages. The
+Protestant church did not create Machiavellian politics but it was more
+impotent before unscrupulous nationalism than any other institution of
+the religious ideal, and its impotence was partly due to its lack of
+interest in social problems.
+
+The emancipation of economic relations from all ethical restraint
+was more or less concomitant with the Reformation movements, but it
+is a question how much it was causally and how much coincidentally
+related. Tawney[7] thinks that the growing complexity of commercial
+transactions invalidated the old canonical laws designed to enforce
+ethical standards in business, and thus made the secularization of
+economics inevitable even before the Reformation. Luther and Calvin
+were as anxious as the fathers of the medieval church to preserve moral
+standards in business. But they were no more ingenious than these in
+devising new and more flexible methods of control when the prohibition
+of usury and the fixation of a just price were swept away by a growing
+commerce which made money-lending an incident of commercial enterprise
+rather than a philanthropic device, and which engulfed the standards by
+which a just price was determined in a sea of economic relativities.
+Luther was completely baffled by the intricacies of the new world and
+could do little more than try vehemently but futilely to maintain the
+old prohibition against usury and insinuate meanwhile that the recently
+developed system of international banking was in some mysterious way
+related to the evil conspiracies of the papacy. Calvinism, true to its
+genius, was more ambitious in dealing with the problems of commerce; so
+much so in fact that Beza’s thunderous denunciations of covetousness
+prompted the Geneva Council to declare that he stirred up class hatred
+against the wealthy. Yet it was Calvin who finally destroyed the last
+vestige of medievalism in economics by justifying interest. Though his
+action prompted the charge that “usury was the brat of heresy,” he
+probably did no more than to recognize the logic inherent in the facts
+of a new economic development. There was no more conscious desire to
+emancipate commercial life from the sanctions of morality and religion
+in Protestantism than in the ancient church; but the preoccupation of
+the leaders of the Reformation with the problem of the inner life and
+the general temper of individualism which characterized the Protestant
+churches undeniably accelerated the processes of secularization. In
+time Adam Smith rather than Thomas Aquinas became the moral authority
+of the commercial world, and, whatever may have been the futile fury of
+the early reformers, Protestantism did finally accept the economics of
+laissez faire and habituated itself to a world in which vast areas or
+life were withdrawn not only from the influence of religiously inspired
+ethical ideals, but from every ethical sanction whatsoever. Thus was
+the present world created in which “business is business” and “politics
+is politics,” i.e., in which the non-moral character of two of the most
+important social relationships of mankind is taken for granted.
+
+If Protestantism made its easy capitulation before the larger social
+groups of mankind and its premature peace with them, it developed
+its most stubborn resistance to the natural appetites of men in
+its influence upon the individual life. It was precisely in that
+area of life in which the medieval church was least effective that
+Protestantism displayed its highest ambition. At this point it becomes
+impossible to speak in general terms of Protestantism, for the
+strategies of Calvinism and Lutheranism in dealing with the problems
+of the inner life differ widely, even more widely than their social
+policies. The unique characteristics of either are frequently the
+common characteristics of Protestantism when viewed from some external
+perspective; but an intimate view may reveal them in the light of very
+different religions. Calvinism is religion’s most energetic effort to
+master the ethical life of the individual. In some of its historic
+forms, in Geneva and Scotland and the American colonies for instance,
+its social policy was ambitious enough to compare with that of Pope
+Gregory, but its chief interest was not in the social institution as
+such. It merely used the political power to reinforce an uncompromising
+ethical rigor in the life of the individual. In Calvinism the religion
+of the modern world makes its boldest bid for the ethical mastery of
+life. Calvinism believed that life could be dominated by the spiritual
+and ethical ideal if the individual could be persuaded to control
+his appetites and to overcome his natural indolence. A temperate,
+industrious, thrifty and honest individual was, in its esteem, the
+perfect exemplar of the religious ideal and the stuff out of which a
+new society could be built. It never faced the problem of the conflict
+between the ideal in the soul of the individual and the intractable
+forces in human society because its moral ideals were socially and
+economically very useful and it could therefore indulge the illusion
+that economic success, social well-being and obvious happiness are
+the natural and inevitable fruits of the religious life. Hence it was
+a religion admirably suited for the middle classes who rose to power
+in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth century, for it endowed
+them with virtues which would insure their success and it doubled their
+zeal by giving religious sanction to their secular enterprises. The
+ancient and medieval world had given moral precedence to a life of
+leisure and meditation, whether of aristocrat or philosopher, of monk
+or priest. Calvinism was as contemptuous of luxury and leisure as of
+the arts and amenities which flourished in them. Its sanctification
+of the common task, of manual toil and of commercial enterprise was
+in itself a valuable contribution to social progress. It was in a way
+the spiritual foundation upon which the whole structure of modern
+civilization has been built. It developed a high type of honesty
+without which the intricate credit relationships of modern commerce
+would have been impossible. It encouraged a diligence which was the
+driving force in establishing the commercial classes in power over a
+moribund aristocracy. Its religiously inspired habits of continence
+and temperance gave the lower classes a sense of moral dignity and a
+natural self-respect which they needed in challenging the pride and
+complacency of the aristocratic world. These puritan virtues have
+moreover given the whole north European world and America (which is
+more puritan than any nation, because here the puritan life flourished
+on virgin soil and remained unqualified by the vestiges of medievalism
+which remain firmly imbedded in the culture of even the most modern
+European nations) a robust vitality and moral urge which have had no
+small part in developing their political hegemony in the modern world.
+
+The conflict of puritan religion with the world has however resulted in
+the inevitable compromise between the religious ideal and the world’s
+primitive urges and desires. Its moral weakness lies in its naïve
+confidence of victory over the world and its inability to discover
+the relativities and qualifications which history has wrought upon
+its absolute. If the spiritual idealism of Jesus is the norm for
+Christians, the Calvinists and puritans diverged from it more seriously
+than they knew in the very conception of their ideal. The love and
+reverence for personality which is the basis of the ethics of Jesus
+is totally lacking in Calvinism. It knows how to create self-respect
+but lacks the imagination to inculcate a religious respect for others,
+except possibly for the respectable. Its confidence in the obvious
+rewards of virtue tempted it to abhor poverty and hold the poor
+in contempt, though they might become the helpful occasion for the
+exercise of that philanthropy without which the idea of Christian
+stewardship could not be realized. While early Calvinism had an heroic
+mood which would have scorned to make a concession to the selfishness
+of man through the sanctification of prudential ethics, its ethical
+theories did nevertheless lend themselves to easy appropriation by
+moralists who were intent upon identifying the social good with a
+decent selfishness. The uncompromising spirituality of the ethics of
+Jesus is totally lacking in Calvinism. Its moral theories were in
+fact derived from the Old rather than the New Testament; and there
+is hardly a scintilla of evidence in Calvinistic thought that the
+Sermon on the Mount is recorded in the scripture which it accepted as
+revealed finality. Its very bibliolatry was partly responsible for its
+non-Christian type of ethics, for through it the casual moral theories
+of the early Hebrews achieved the dignity of absolute truth. Lack
+of historical perspective in the use of the Old Testament further
+aggravated this error, for the real worth of the prophets was never
+appreciated and their high type of moral idealism could not serve
+to qualify the less heroic morality of the law and the superficial
+moralizing of the Wisdom literature. Incidentally it may be observed
+that bibliolatry is one of the handicaps to moral progress in almost
+all religions. Through it primitive cultures and moral customs which
+happen to be enshrined in the canon become absolutely authoritative,
+and the weight of their influence is set against new ventures in moral
+life.
+
+If Calvinistic and puritan idealism departed from its assumed norm in
+its very conception, the moral realities which issued from it bore even
+less resemblance to the absolute idealism of the ethics of Jesus. Its
+unqualified confidence in the power of individual virtue to overcome
+the world and change society contributed to the relaxation of moral
+restraints upon social institutions and the secularization of society
+to which reference has been made. Its sanctification of secular tasks
+led inevitably to a sanctification of secular motives which it did not
+desire but could not prevent. Men were to serve God by diligence in
+their daily toil. But what was the end of industry which endowed it
+with virtue? The puritan answer was to regard work as an end in itself,
+an emphasis which it learned to make in its reaction to monastic
+and aristocratic idleness. But that answer alone could not suffice.
+Inevitably the material gains which were the rewards of industry were
+given a special religious sanction. “If God show you a way in which
+you may lawfully get more than in another way, without wrong to your
+soul or to any other, if you refuse this and choose the less gainful,
+you cross one of the ends of your Calling and refuse to be God’s
+steward,” said Governor Bradford.[8] The ancient and medieval world
+had been more or less scornful of the pursuit of wealth and abounded
+in characters among both the nobility and the peasantry who thought
+it beneath their dignity to increase their patrimony. The religious
+sanction of material gain was a new thing in history and undoubtedly
+helped to fashion the moral temper of modern society in which diligence
+is the great virtue and greed the besetting vice.[9] It is the puritan
+heritage of America which gives a clew to the paradox of our national
+life. It explains how we can be at the same time the most religious and
+the most materialistic of all modern nations.
+
+If puritanism failed to see how easily the virtue of thrift might
+be transmuted into the vice of avarice, it was even less careful to
+guard the righteous soul against the perils to virtue which inhere
+in the power which wealth supplies. There are few men who can wield
+extraordinary power without making it the tool of their own desires
+and without magnifying their limitations which might pass unnoticed
+in less puissant individuals. Puritanism did indeed have a doctrine
+of stewardship, but it was applied to the privilege which flowed from
+economic power and not to the possession of power itself. There was
+never enough imagination in puritanic religion to detect how nature
+in the soul of man, frustrated by a discipline of the senses, comes
+into its own through the sins of the mind. It knew how to redeem
+human life from its vagrant passions, but it did not know how to
+deal with those dominant desires, the lust for power and the greed
+for gain, which express themselves more frequently in a disciplined
+personality than in a chaotic one and which may be more detrimental
+to the welfare of others than the consequences of undisciplined and
+momentary passions. It was a spiritual discipline admirably suited to
+lift the middle classes to a dominant position in society but hardly
+designed to guide them in the use of the power once they had achieved
+it. Even its abhorrence of luxury and prohibition of extravagance is
+finally softened in a civilization which has profited all too well by
+its virtues and is tempted to destroy them by the very advantages which
+the virtues supplied. John Wesley, who revived puritan morality after
+it had declined in its original form, saw this problem more clearly
+than his predecessors, but he had no answer for it except to advocate
+philanthropic generosity. He writes in his _Journal_: “Religion must
+necessarily produce both industry and frugality, and these cannot
+but produce riches. But as riches increase so will pride, anger and
+love of the world in all its branches.... So although the form of
+religion remains, the spirit is swiftly vanishing away. Is there no
+way to prevent this—this continual decay of pure religion? We ought
+not prevent people from being diligent and frugal; we must exhort all
+Christians to gain all they can and save all they can; that is, in
+effect, to grow rich. What way then can we take that our money may not
+sink us in the nethermost hell? There is one way and there is no other
+under heaven. If those who gain all they can and save all they can
+will likewise give all they can, then the more they give the more will
+they grow in grace and the more treasure will they lay in heaven.”[10]
+Wesley, of course, could hardly be expected to appreciate that money
+represents power even more than privilege in modern society, and that
+philanthropy may become a method of satisfying the ego and displaying
+power.
+
+Many of the moral and religious limitations of modern civilization
+may be attributed first to the partial victory and then to the
+self-destruction of puritan religion in modern civilization. In
+puritanism religion made one of its boldest advances upon the world;
+and so confident was it of victory that it prepared no one for the
+moral relativities which were the inevitable issue of its enterprise.
+In dealing with the stubborn resistance of the material world it is
+better to expect victory than to assume defeat before the battle is
+begun. Yet an undue confidence may be as dangerous to the enterprise
+as a timorous spirit. The medieval ascetics who regarded all human
+relationships with a critical spirit, and rather expected the old
+Adam to assert himself in seemingly the most innocent human concerns,
+possessed spiritual insights which were totally lacking in the typical
+puritan. He expected to build a society in which the scripture was
+“really and materially to be fulfilled.”
+
+It will have been noted that Calvinism and puritanism have been used
+in this discussion as interchangeable terms. The fact is that, while
+the two terms are not synonymous theologically, the moral temper of
+Calvinism was so potent in the whole non-Lutheran Protestant world that
+all of the various denominations were indoctrinated with its puritan
+spirit. The various sects had their own theological peculiarities, but
+in their puritan spirit they were essentially one. Only the Quakers
+departed from it; for George Fox had discovered the ethics of Jesus,
+and the religion of the Friends was ever after to express itself in
+terms relevant to the spirit of the Sermon on the Mount. Denominations
+such as the Baptists and Methodists who evangelized Western America
+gave a rebirth to the puritan spirit when it suffered decay in its more
+native haunts. Their history is additional evidence for the thesis
+that puritanism is a religious sublimation of the life of the middle
+classes. For when the heroic spirit of puritanism declined in those
+classes which it had lifted to power, it was reborn in the lower middle
+classes of England and the Western pioneers of America. Methodism
+is theologically as unrelated to Calvinism as can be imagined. Its
+theological presuppositions are really more congenial to a dynamic
+puritanism than those of Calvinism; for the moral vigor of Calvinism
+was logically incompatible with its deterministic faith. Denominations
+such as the Baptists and Methodists with their strong emphasis on
+regeneration as the basis of church membership aggravated one weakness
+of Protestantism, for all of their spiritual vigor. Their tests of what
+constituted regeneration were drawn from religious experience rather
+than from its moral fruits; yet they were bound to assume that a marked
+moral contrast existed between the saved and the unsaved. Thus they
+accentuated what Professor A. Whitehead has defined as the Protestant
+oversimplification of ethics, i.e., a tendency to judge men, in spite
+of the intricacy of their inner life and the complexity of their
+social relations, as being either good or bad. This is simply another
+aspect of Protestant individualism, but it is an aspect which emerges
+more clearly in the free churches which have renounced all ambition
+to have a membership coextensive with the citizenship of the state
+than in those churches in which some vestige of the state-church idea
+still remains. The superior spiritual vigor of churches which make
+a religious experience the prerequisite of fellowship in the church
+may well be conceded; but that does not change the fact that ethical
+values in a complex civilization are frequently imperiled by the
+oversimplification of moral issues, which is the inevitable by-product
+of simple religious tests. Men are neither totally good nor totally bad
+when they live in a society which may corrupt the virtuous intention of
+the most robust idealist, or when their own inner life is so complex
+that moral purpose may express itself in one of its areas and be
+betrayed in another. There is a moral simplicity in Protestantism which
+is closely related to its individualism and which is particularly
+unfortunate, since it is the characteristic of a religion which orients
+the ethical life of peoples who have tremendous responsibilities in the
+complex life of Western civilization.
+
+Calvinism has frequently been referred to as Protestant asceticism.[11]
+Its robust moral energies are indeed commensurate with the strict
+ethical discipline of medieval monasticism, but with this difference:
+that one is developed within the world and the other outside of the
+world of ordinary human relations. But it is precisely this difference
+which makes Lutheranism more closely related to asceticism than
+Calvinism; for Lutheranism is the Protestant way of despairing of
+the world and of claiming victory for the religious ideal without
+engaging the world in combat. Both are founded upon an ethical
+dualism. The medieval ascetic flees from the world into the monastery
+and there attempts realization of his religious ideal; the Lutheran
+quietist flees from the world into the asylum of his inner life
+where he comes into the emotional possession of the ideal without
+risking its refinements in the world of cruel realities. The one has
+a dualism which divides the monastic from ordinary men; the other
+draws the line within the soul of each individual and expects him to
+realize in his religious experience what he cannot reveal in ordinary
+human relations. If Calvinism is _Weltfreundlich_, Lutheranism like
+asceticism is _Weltfeindlich_. It has little hope that a kingdom of God
+will be established upon earth, except perhaps through supernatural
+intervention. It places all its emphasis upon the sentiment of Jesus:
+“The kingdom of God is within you.” It must be admitted that Jesus’
+conception of the kingdom of God is probably as much related to
+quietistic religion as to puritan morality, though ascetic religion
+seems closer to him than either. The modern church has dismissed the
+eschatological element in Jesus’ teachings as the Semitic shell in
+which Jesus developed his conception of the kingdom of God as a social
+ideal; but it was more probably his way of expressing doubt that his
+ideal could ever be realized in history except by a miracle of God.
+Yet the apocalyptic element in the gospel was qualified by the idea
+of the kingdom to be realized by evolutionary process. The kingdom
+of God was also “like unto a mustard seed.” Jesus in short was both
+pessimistic and optimistic in regard to the spiritual potentialities of
+human society, and in his paradoxical rather than consistent position
+he was able to maintain the tension between religion and life in a way
+which has escaped both parties in the churches of the Reformation. Of
+this more will be said later. The attitude of Lutheran piety toward the
+world has the merit and the limitation characteristic of all pessimism.
+It sharpens the ideal but despairs of its realization. Lutheran
+doctrine was fashioned out of the religious experiences of a tumultuous
+soul seeking peace and failing to find it in any of the institutions
+which were meant to incarnate the religious ideal or in any of the
+observance which were intended to express it. The institution shocked
+him by their imperfections, and the observances and rituals had
+undergone the inevitable process which reduces a necessary symbolism
+to a kind of magic in which the symbol achieves potencies originally
+ascribed only to the ineffable truth or reality for which it stands.
+From all historic relativities of the institutions and superficialities
+of religious rites Luther reacted and discovered his absolute in the
+religious experience in which the soul appropriates the grace of God.
+In that mystic communion all natural imperfections of the human spirit
+are transcended and the soul is lifted out of the relativities of time
+and circumstance. It is easy to see how inevitable is this emphasis in
+the history of religion but also how perilous it may become to moral
+values. It is inevitable because every sensitive conscience suffers at
+times from a realization that “our reach is beyond our grasp,” that
+moral capacities are not equal to the goals set by imagination and
+hope. The apostle Paul, whose religious experience closely paralleled
+those of Luther and whose theology therefore became authoritative for
+him, complained: “... the good that I would, I do not; but the evil
+which I would not, that I do.... For I delight in the law of God after
+the inward man. But I see another law in my members, warring against
+the law in my mind and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin
+that is in my members. O wretched man that I am. Who shall deliver
+me from the body of this death? I thank God through Jesus Christ our
+Lord.”[12] That is a classic statement of the dualism in life which
+every religion is tempted to overcome by transcending it. Lutheranism
+was in fact but a revival of Pauline Christianity and it was Pauline
+Christianity which had built the Christian church. In it the tension
+between religion and life which is maintained in the religious idealism
+of Jesus is relaxed and the sensitive soul is given the assurance that
+a merciful God will know how to complete what is so incomplete and
+how to perfect our manifest imperfections. Thus the same Jesus who in
+the gospels is a bold adventurer of the spirit who challenges his
+disciples to be perfect as their Father in heaven is perfect becomes in
+the epistles the symbol of the divine grace which knows how to accept
+our intentions for our achievements. It may be unfair to speak of a
+conflict between the religion of Jesus and the religion of Paul; for it
+was a heavenly Father and not a jealous judge who was central in the
+thought of Jesus, and his emphasis upon forgiveness shocked the strict
+moralists of his day. But if there is no conflict at this point, there
+is a marked change in emphasis. In the one the appropriation of divine
+grace is a necessary part of the moral adventure; in the other it is
+separated from the moral enterprise and easily becomes a substitute
+for it. Paul had indeed disavowed all antinomian tendencies in his
+doctrine of grace. “What shall we then say? Shall we continue to sin
+that grace may abound? God forbid. How shall we that are dead to sin,
+live any longer therein?” Obviously the mystical experience in both
+the Pauline and the Lutheran religion was not unrelated to the life of
+moral purpose and was not consciously used to obviate the necessity
+for moral enterprise. But what is to prevent men from making a
+premature appropriation of the peace it guarantees, before and without
+deserving it? In that lies a peril to morality in almost all religion
+which Pauline and Lutheran theology did not create but which it may
+accentuate. It is well to remember that some of the greatest perils to
+morality in the life of religion arise out of its most cherished and
+necessary characteristics. Religion is at once the necessary partner
+and the potential foe of moral life.
+
+The quietistic tendencies of religion, particularly as elaborated by
+Pauline and Lutheran theology, are less dangerous in a simple society
+than in a complex one. Ethical attitudes in simple social relations
+flow almost automatically out of a religious experience, even though
+the conscious interpretation of the experience is scornful of the
+“righteousness of works.” But in the secondary and more complex
+social relationships the moral urge which issues out of the religious
+experience is easily frustrated by the intricacies and relativities
+of historic realities and institutions. How shall the soul preserve
+the sense of the absolute which it has gained in the religious
+experience from contamination by the sins which are covert in all
+social relations? It is in the varying answers of quietistic religion
+to that question that its ethical limitations are vividly revealed.
+One answer is to avoid conflict with political and social institutions
+on the score that they are divinely ordained. “Let every soul be
+subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God; the
+powers that be are ordained of God,” said the apostle Paul. When it is
+remembered that the reference is to the government of the Roman empire,
+the social conservatism implicit in this logic is obvious. It was this
+attitude of Paul which made it easy for Luther to bring his church
+into such intimate union with the various governments of Germany and
+to maintain an attitude bordering on subservience toward the German
+princes. The political conservatism of Lutheranism has since been its
+unvarying characteristic and has had its marked effects upon history,
+in no period more so than in that of the World War. State churches of
+any kind easily become the tools of the secular state, but Lutheran
+state churches have usually been more compliant tools than the Anglican
+church, for instance, which has never quite renounced the old Catholic
+ambitions of partnership with the state.
+
+Another method of which quietistic religion avails itself in dealing
+with the world is to assume that its ideal will somehow achieve
+automatic realization in the intricacies of economic and social life.
+This method is hardly consistent with its pessimism, but it satisfies
+the desire for practical results which is bound to assert itself in
+even the most supra-moral religion. Thus Luther declares:[13] “There
+can be no better instructions in ... all transactions in temporal
+goods than that every man who is to deal with his neighbor present to
+himself these commandments: ‘What you would that others should do
+unto you, do ye also to them,’ and ‘Love thy neighbor as thyself.’ If
+these were followed out, then everything would arrange and instruct
+itself; all things would quietly and simply be set to rights, for
+everyone’s heart and conscience would guide him.” It is a conceit of
+religious people, by no means confined to Lutherans, that a vigorous
+statement of the ideal ought to result in its realization. No one can
+estimate how often the pulpit has insisted in these latter days that
+war could be abolished if only the nations “would live according to
+the law of Christ.” This characteristic frequently gives the church’s
+pronouncements a curious air of futility; for ideals are neither
+challenged nor applied if they are not finally embodied in concrete
+proposals for specific situations. It is in such situations that the
+ideal meets its real test and runs the peril of corruption. Frequently
+the tendency of religion to be content with the statement of abstract
+principles is due to a want of intellectual vigor which results easily
+from religion’s mistrust of reason.
+
+A method of dealing with the world which is more consistent with the
+essential dualism of quietistic religion is its effort to give some
+realization to the ideal by means of subjective religious emotion which
+transcends the imperfections of society without attempting to change
+them. Thus the ideal of brotherhood is to be realized by a religious
+appreciation of all men as brothers, however much economic and social
+facts may give the lie to the ideal. This was the apostle Paul’s
+method of dealing with slavery and Luther emulated it in his attitude
+toward the peasant’s revolt. Nothing gives a more illuminating clue
+to the conservative implications of this type of religion than this
+incident in the Reformation. The peasants, suffering in a state of
+semi-slavery, saw in Luther’s statement of the gospel principles of
+freedom, and in the religious ideal of the equal worth of all souls,
+implicit in Christian teaching, a justification for their revolt
+against the intolerable conditions of serfdom. They declared: “It has
+been custom hitherto for men to hold us as their own property, which
+is pitiable enough considering that Christ has delivered and redeemed
+us all, the lowly as well as the great, by the shedding of his precious
+blood. Accordingly it is consistent with scripture that we should be
+free and should wish to be so. We therefore take it for granted that
+you will release us from serfdom as true Christians, unless it should
+be shown from the gospels that we are serfs.”[14] Luther violently
+disavowed this practical application of his gospel. “This article
+would make all men equal and so change the spiritual kingdom of Christ
+into an external worldly one. Impossible. An earthly kingdom cannot
+exist without inequality of persons. Some must be free, others serfs,
+some rulers, others subjects. As St. Paul says, ‘In Christ there is
+neither bond nor free.’” The violence of Luther’s reaction in this
+instance was partly due to considerations of expediency; for he feared
+to lose caste with the princes by having the Reformation identified
+with radical political movements; yet it is fairly faithful to his
+general conceptions of the nature and function of religion. Obviously
+the dualism of Protestantism which separates the religious experience
+of the individual from the social realities in which alone personality
+can achieve significance has defects which are more perilous to social
+values than the ethical dualism of medieval monasticism. If the ideal
+is to be withdrawn from life to save it from corruption, it is better
+that it be realized in some social medium, however artificial, than
+that it be suspended in the thin air of religious sentiment and be
+realized only in subjective experience.
+
+An analysis of the various strategies of religion in establishing
+contact with the historic situations and social realities in which it
+must function reveals, in short, that it can pursue no course which
+is altogether free of peril to its moral values. Capitulation without
+conflict reduces religion to magic and secularizes life. A stubborn
+conflict with the intractable forces of nature and history results in
+some kind of compromise. Neither papal internationalism nor puritan
+plutocracy are what the idealists who were responsible for them really
+desired. And what they really desired fell short of their pretended
+goals. Withdrawal from the world is equally dangerous. For it may
+lead either to the morbid artificialities of asceticism or to the
+sentimental subjectivism of quietistic religion. There are values in
+each of the various strategies as well as perils. Perhaps those who
+are too critical of their limitations can never create their values.
+Religion must create its values in naïve faith and subject their
+limitations to a critical intelligence. Of the various strategies
+asceticism is probably nearest to the real genius of religion and most
+adequate for the moral needs of our day. If a world is completely
+astray the higher perspective from which it may be convicted of sin and
+the greater dynamic which may function redemptively in its life both
+depend upon some kind of detachment of religion from life.
+
+
+
+
+                               CHAPTER VI
+
+                SOCIAL COMPLEXITY AND ETHICAL IMPOTENCE
+
+
+While there is good reason to regret the individualism of Protestantism
+in a civilization which has increased the intimacy of all human
+relations and made social and economic interdependence a basic fact,
+yet it alone cannot be held responsible for the unethical nature
+of modern society. This is attributable as much to the greater
+difficulties which the human conscience faces in modern life as to any
+weakness in the moral and religious idealism by which it is informed. A
+much more adequate type of religious idealism might have been unequal
+to the task of preserving ethical values in modern life.
+
+The gradual secularization of economics through the growing complexity
+of commercial relations has been a previous interest of our study. When
+it became inconvenient and difficult to make simple moral standards,
+expressed in prohibitions of usury and maintenance of a “just price,”
+fit the new intricacies of international commerce and industrial
+production, we have seen how men turned naturally and inevitably to the
+consoling reflection that “in the providence of God life is so arranged
+that each man seeking his own shall serve the common weal.” The
+doctrine of laissez faire was in other words as much an admission of
+defeat on the part of the moral forces of society as it was a conscious
+effort toward secularization. Other factors beside a growing complexity
+of social life helped however to secularize modern society. Modern
+commerce and industry tend to increase the extent of coöperative effort
+while they diminish personal contacts. World commerce and large-scale
+production make human beings interdependent without offering them
+the opportunity of entering upon personal associations. There is a
+natural sympathy in the soul which saves men from actions which are
+very obviously detrimental to their fellows. But if they are unable to
+survey the consequences of their actions or to gauge the reactions to
+their attitudes in the lives of others, their temptation to unethical
+conduct is materially increased. The master of a manufacturing unit
+in the old handcraft period of industry thus found it much easier to
+maintain moral relations to his workers than a modern, frequently
+absentee, owner of a large factory. If in addition ownership becomes
+collective, with the resulting division of responsibility, while the
+number of workers increases until individuals lose their significance
+in the mass, the problem of making industrial relations ethical is
+further complicated. Ethical conduct is, in its last analysis, based
+upon reverence for personality; and personality fails to make its
+appeal to the conscience when considered in the mass and when regarded
+at too long range. In such circumstances a degree of intelligence and
+imagination, which mankind has not yet achieved, is required to gauge
+the effect of industrial and commercial policy upon the individuals who
+are involved in it. The unethical nature of modern civilization with
+its destruction of confidence in the moral integrity of human nature
+and with its deterministic obsessions is largely due to its mechanical
+perfections which have increased the extent of social coöperation while
+they have decreased personal contacts.
+
+The same means of commerce and communication which have increased
+the size of industrial groups and extended the range of commercial
+transactions have also enlarged the political units and increased
+interdependence between them. We are living in a world in which a
+financial depression in America results in a panic upon the silk
+exchange of Tokio; in which a boycott upon cotton goods initiated by
+a Gandhi in India throws thousands of cotton spinners in Manchester
+into unemployment; and in which Western industrialism may exploit
+Chinese labor in the seaports of China without one beneficiary of this
+industrialism out of a million being able to make a mental picture
+of the social consequences of the commercial policies from which he
+benefits. The difficulty of these long-range relationships is further
+complicated by the fact that the participants are separated not only
+by great distances but by the barriers of race and nationality. All
+social decencies in the past have developed within the bounds of the
+group, and men have not yet learned to treat individuals in other
+groups with confidence, respect and honesty. Attitudes of tenderness,
+sympathy and affection have been confined very largely to the family
+group. From this intimate group they were finally sluiced out to
+effect social relations in larger groups, but they have not changed
+inter-group relations. Civilization has increased the size of groups in
+which human relations have an ethical basis, but it has not moralized
+the action of the group nor taught individuals in one social group
+to treat individuals in other groups with the respect and confidence
+which a wholesome social life requires. The connotation of contempt
+which the Jews placed in the word “gentile” and the Greeks in the word
+“barbarian” may be matched in the terminology of practically every
+people. When groups are geographically separated, as in the case of
+political states, fear and misunderstanding are multiplied by the
+ignorance which results from a lack of contacts. But contacts alone
+do not remove them; for the relations of political, social and racial
+groups within the boundaries of the same state are only slightly
+more ethical, as for instance the relation between white and colored
+people in the United States or of the Scotch and Irish in Ulster.
+Human imagination and intelligence have not been equal to the task of
+extending ethical attitudes beyond the boundaries of the group.
+
+The ethical problem of group relations is made still more difficult
+by the expansive desires and unethical attitudes which develop
+naturally within the group as a corporate entity. That is, groups as
+such find it even more difficult to maintain moral attitudes toward
+other groups than do the individuals within it toward individuals in
+other racial or political unities. All human groups tend to be more
+predatory than the individuals which compose them. The most tender
+emotions may characterize the relations of members of a family to
+each other; but the family as such is easily tempted to gain its
+advantages at the expense of other families. The tendency of family
+loyalty to accentuate covetousness has been frequently noted by social
+observers who have seen the family instinct as the very basis of the
+sanctity which civilization has given private property. Religious
+organizations are not free of the imperial ambitions which come
+naturally to social groups of every kind. One fruitful cause of the
+dilution of religious idealism is the desire of religious groups to
+gain power and prestige among larger numbers. They therefore soften
+the rigor of their ideal that it may captivate the morally mediocre
+majority. Both employers and employees frequently find agreement in
+specific cases of conflict difficult because the policies of both are
+determined by considerations of loyalty to their respective groups.
+Of all human groups the political state is probably most inclined to
+unethical conduct. It was a dictum of George Washington’s that a nation
+was not to be trusted beyond its interests, and history supports the
+justice of his observation. After shrewdly observing the statesmen of
+England equivocate on the attitude of their nation toward the southern
+rebellion until they could determine their policy by considerations
+of expediency, Henry Adams came to the melancholy conclusion that
+masses of men were always moved by interest and never by conscience
+and that morality is a private and a costly luxury.[15] One reason
+why the relations of nations to each other are still characterized
+by primitive fears and excessive caution is because their actions
+have not, as a matter of fact, been morally dependable. The problem
+of making nations and other groups conform to ethical standards of
+any kind is particularly difficult because the ethical attitude of
+the individual toward his group easily obscures the unethical nature
+of the group’s desires. The patriot identifies his tender emotions
+toward his nation with the attitude of the nation itself until he
+becomes incapable of a critical appraisal of its policy; or he frankly
+condones the selfishness of the nation because he recognizes no ethical
+values beyond those implicit in group loyalty. The father of a family
+may feel moral pride in essentially selfish pursuits because he means
+to secure advantages by them not for himself but for his family.
+Loyalty to “the firm” may give the business man a consciousness of
+virtue even though it forces him to connive in predatory practices
+of his concern. The class-conscious worker may be willing to disrupt
+society in the interest of his class because all his moral needs are
+satisfied by his devotion to what he regards as the most significant
+social group. While this ethical paradox of patriotism is obviously
+not confined to political groups, the nation is most seriously tempted
+to unethical conduct because it is not a voluntary association, its
+group is conveniently isolated from others and loyalty to it is least
+qualified by other conflicting loyalties. It may be set down as a truth
+of almost axiomatic finality, that groups tend to be unethical in
+proportion to the degree of unqualified loyalty which they are able
+to claim or exact of their members. In this connection it may be noted
+that democracy has increased rather than diminished the imperialism
+of nations, for it has given patriotism a higher moral sanction and
+thus reduced the moral scruples which might qualify the loyalty of
+their citizens. The arrogance of nations and their insistence on moral
+autonomy has developed simultaneously with the extension of democracy.
+It is this ethical paradox of patriotism which invalidates the
+contention that the root of all imperialism is the imperialism of the
+individual. It is true of course that group loyalty may become a device
+for delegating our vices to the group and imagining ourselves virtuous.
+Some types of political arrogance and race prejudice are obviously
+methods of compensating individuals for their lack of opportunity
+to bully their immediate neighbors. Yet on the whole the unethical
+character of group action is determined as much by the partial virtues
+as by the vices of individuals.
+
+The problem of bringing groups under some kind of ethical control is
+not new in history. It has become unusually difficult in the modern
+world not only because of the consolidation of the authority of the
+state but also because rapid means of communication have increased the
+size of social, political and economic units and made relations between
+them more intricate. The larger the unit the more unqualified seems
+to be the moral sanction which loyalty to it may claim. To an average
+citizen, immersed in his parochial interests, the nation appears in the
+light of a universal community in contrast to the smaller and voluntary
+communities within the nation. Yet this same nation is one of many
+human groups, most of which betray imperial desires reminiscent of Rome
+but which aspire in vain after the universal dominion which gave Roman
+imperialism a measure of moral worth. Treitschke, whose philosophy of
+history was the object of so much opprobrium during the World War that
+its faithfulness to the general prejudices of Western life would hardly
+be surmised, presented the nation as the ultimate community because
+all smaller societies are too petty to deserve and all larger ones too
+vague and abstract to claim the unqualified allegiance of men.
+
+The intricacies and propinquities of an industrial civilization tend at
+some points to increase the imperial desires of nations and at others
+to make their ordinary lusts more deadly. The feud between Germany
+and France is a very ancient one, but the need of French industry
+for German coal and of German industry for French iron explains some
+aspects of their present difficulties which are not derived from
+ancient animosities. Modern industry needs a unified world and, lacking
+it, each nation is inclined to seek the completion of its industrial
+establishment by the forcible appropriation of territory, rich in
+needed resources. The economic imperialism of industrially advanced
+nations is a product of the high productivity of modern industry which
+produces more than one national unit can consume and which needs
+more raw materials than the same nation can produce. Covetous eyes
+are consequently turned upon undeveloped portions of the globe, rich
+in raw materials and hungry for the products of modern industry. In
+one sense the European war was incubated in Africa. Rapid means of
+communication also extend the reach of the grasping nations. China is
+attempting to throw off the shackles of a Western imperialism which
+could never have gained the position it holds on Chinese soil but for
+the new contiguity which has destroyed the boundaries between East and
+West. Moreover, the intricacies of international commerce and finance
+offer opportunities for a new kind of economic imperialism which hardly
+needs, though it does not always avoid, the use of political force.
+The economic forces of one nation simply penetrate the economic life
+of another and, if there is a great disparity in economic power, the
+weaker nation is brought under the dominion of the stronger without
+the citizens of either being aware of the process by which this has
+been accomplished. This is the type of imperialism which America
+is most fitted and inclined to develop. In South America political
+pressure does accompany economic penetration, but in Europe American
+power increases under a policy of political isolation. The isolationism
+of America, which has become a firmly established foreign policy
+since the war, is prompted partly by the sense of power which America
+feels as the richest nation of the world, and partly by a political
+infantilism which tempts us both to pharisaism and to fear when dealing
+with the supposedly more astute political bargainers of Europe. The
+relation of America to the rest of the world is a perfect example of
+the moral peril in the new intricacies of modern civilization. The
+citizen of the state is as ignorant of the actual character of his
+nation’s relation to other nations as of other peoples’ reactions to
+the real policy of his own government. Probably not one American in a
+thousand is able to comprehend a single reason why Europe should fear
+or hate America and not more than one in a hundred is actually aware
+of the existence of such hatreds and fears. There is therefore an
+unconscious hypocrisy in the moral pretensions of the citizens of every
+nation, a more or less conscious hypocrisy in the attitudes of the
+governments which do not share but yet exploit the political ignorance
+of the people, and an inevitable reaction of cynicism on the part of
+those who know the real facts and suffer from the moral limitations
+of the nation’s policy. Group relations, particularly those which are
+intricate, are thus persistently unethical because part of the modern
+world is too ignorant to make them ethical and the other part is so
+worldly-wise that it has lost confidence in the possibility of ethical
+relations. Frequently hypocrisy and cynicism are united in the same
+person who knows how to discount the moral pretensions of other groups
+but lacks the perspective from which he might arrive at a critical
+evaluation of the real character of his own group. This curious
+combination of insincerity and cynicism is obvious in the relation of
+both economic and national groups, but it is particularly noticeable
+in international difficulties. In the struggle between economic
+groups there is a growing inclination to make no moral pretensions
+on either side. Sometimes the group in power makes them but in that
+case its insincerity is usually conscious rather than ignorant. In
+international affairs the same patriots who ignorantly persecute every
+person who seeks to qualify national loyalty or to make a dispassionate
+appraisal of national policies frequently sink into moral despair and
+disillusionment when history unfolds the inevitable consequences of the
+anarchy of conflicting national lusts.
+
+The task of making complex group relations ethical belongs primarily
+to religion and education because statecraft cannot rise above the
+universal limitations of human imagination and intelligence. A
+robust ethical idealism, an extraordinary spiritual insight and a
+high degree of intelligence are equally necessary for such a social
+task. The difficulties of the problem are enhanced by the fact that
+the religious imagination and astute intelligence which are equally
+necessary for its solution are incompatible with each other. Religion
+is naturally jealous of any partner in a redemptive enterprise; and
+the same intelligence which is needed to guide moral purpose in a
+complex situation easily lames the moral will and dulls the spiritual
+insight. It is possible that this difficulty may permanently destroy
+every vestige of morality in the group relations of modern society.
+The necessary partnership and the inevitable conflict between the
+religio-moral and the rational forces is obvious in both the political
+and the economic problems of the present age.
+
+The unqualified authority and the boundless lusts of a modern state
+need first of all to be brought under the scrutiny of clear minds who
+understand the implications and can gauge the consequences of its
+pretensions. Patriotism is a form of altruism and as such represents
+the victory of ultra-rational sanctions over the selfish inclinations
+of individuals which seem quite reasonable to the average man. The
+emotional attitude and ethical achievement in patriotism endows the
+patriot with a kind of madness and pride which make him as scornful
+of more rational types of altruism as of the prudent and cautious
+selfishness with which he has his primary conflict. It is because
+patriotism represents a victory of an ethical ideal that religion
+so easily becomes its uncritical partner. When many hearts are cold
+anything that warms them will seem religious to the undiscriminating
+champion of religious values. The defects of patriotic altruism are
+thus left to the correction of rationalistic idealists who know how
+to discover the absurdities into which an uncritical devotion to
+partial values may issue and how to envisage the larger community
+of mankind of which the nation is a part. During the last war moral
+idealists of rationalistic persuasion, such as Bertrand Russell, Romain
+Rolland, Henri Barbusse and Bernard Shaw, were more detached in their
+perspective and freer of war hysterias than any religious leaders of
+equal standing. To envisage the larger community of mankind which
+lacks the physical symbols of the state and to dispel the parochial
+prejudices which are harbored in mediocre minds and which make hatred
+of others the inevitable commitant of love for one’s own is clearly a
+task to which a discriminating intelligence must contribute.
+
+However the problem of group relations, as has been previously noted,
+is created not only by the parochialism of individuals but by the lust
+and greed of the group itself. The task of persuading the group to
+sacrifice some of its advantages for the sake of the whole of human
+society is so difficult that it almost leads to despair. If it will
+ever be accomplished religio-moral forces, whatever their present
+impotence, must come to the aid of reason. Prudence alone may prompt
+nations to a measure of self-sacrificing action, since unqualified
+self-assertion must lead to mutual destruction. But prudential morality
+reveals the same defects in inter-group relations which we have noted
+in simpler social problems. Its ends are always too immediate and its
+perspective is too narrow. Moral action which lacks some reference to
+an absolute standard and some ultra-rational dynamic inevitably falls
+short even of satisfying the social necessities. The prudence of
+nations in the present state of international relations tends to prompt
+a few, usually neighboring nations, to compose their differences, but
+for the sake and at the price of sharpening the conflict with some
+other alliance of states. The net result of such an enterprise is
+simply to enlarge the unit of conflict once more without abolishing
+warfare. The manner in which the triple entente and the triple
+alliance, both formed with high moral pretensions, helped to make the
+World War inevitable is a matter of history. More recently there are
+indications that France and Germany will compose their differences “for
+the sake of Europe.” Such a reconciliation will hasten the unification
+of Europe but will also help to raise the specter of intercontinental
+wars with continental units of conflict. The unification of Asia
+upon a basis of common resentment against Western imperialism is an
+almost unavoidable development in international affairs. All these
+continental alliances are logical enough from any immediate perspective
+but dangerous from the perspective of the welfare of the whole race.
+There is no indication that prudential statecraft has the resources
+to prevent America from inciting the whole of Europe against our
+economic overlordship of that continent. The increasing feeling aroused
+by the problem of debt liquidations is symptomatic of the natural
+resentment which must inevitably issue out of a relation of economic
+interdependence between a very wealthy and a poor continent. For the
+settlement of this issue no policy will be wise except one which will
+appear very foolish to the wise statesmen. A prudent statecraft has
+made the anxiety of a wealthy creditor the dominant note in American
+international policy, and envy and fear the chief characteristics in
+the attitudes of the peoples who must deal with us.
+
+Social intelligence does of course produce a finer fruit than the type
+of prudence which characterizes the international policy of modern
+states. There is a whole class of social idealists who understand the
+economic basis of most international difficulties and who would bring
+peace to the warring classes and nations by an economic reorganization
+of modern society. Since modern industrialism and capitalism have
+materially complicated the ancient feuds between races and classes, it
+is evident that no amount of moral and spiritual goodwill can produce
+an ordered and stable international society if the economic roots of
+war are not clearly discerned and finally eliminated. However the
+same intelligence which is capable of such discernment easily drifts
+into a cynicism which discounts all moral and personal factors in
+social reconstruction and places its hope entirely in a new social
+strategy. Loyalty to the class is substituted for loyalty to the
+state, and class conflict is expected to issue in a lasting peace
+for both classes and nations. Economic determinists show a superior
+discernment in recognizing that in a civilization which is forced to
+organize its economic life across national boundaries the conflict of
+interest between classes does become more significant than the conflict
+between states, particularly since the latter conflict is due either to
+economic or to fantastic and imaginary causes. But their very realism
+betrays them into a cynicism which finally issues in the most romantic
+and unrealistic dreams. They imagine that social peace will result
+from the victory of one class over all other classes. They have not
+taken into account that modern capitalism produces a formidable middle
+class the interests of which are not identical with the proletarians.
+Moral and spiritual considerations may conceivably prompt this class
+to make common cause with the workers in the attainment of ethical
+social ends, but it will never be annihilated even by the most ruthless
+class conflict nor will it be persuaded by the logic of economic facts
+that its interests are altogether identical with those of the workers.
+Even if one class were able to eliminate all other classes, which is
+hardly probable, it would require some social grace and moral dynamic
+to preserve harmony between the various national groups by which this
+vast mass would be organized and into which it would disintegrate. Even
+within one national unit any economic class will dissolve into various
+groups, according to varying and sometimes conflicting interests, as
+soon as its foes are eliminated. The Russian communists were not long
+able to preserve their absolute solidarity after their revolution was
+firmly established. The dominant group soon learned that no amount of
+ruthlessness was able to prevent the gradual formation of a minority
+group under Trotzky and Zinoviev. Significantly, the conflict of
+interest between peasants and industrial workers is the real basis of
+this schism within communist ranks.
+
+In Europe the qualification of patriotism by class loyalties has in
+some instances led to a mitigation of national animosities, but it has
+not destroyed them. On the contrary it has added new hatreds to the
+old and created a society which is divided not only by vertical but
+also by horizontal divisions. The Marxian idea of the unification of
+the world upon the basis of the common interests of the proletarian
+class must be relegated to the category of millennial dreams. It is
+based upon an illusion little better than that of nationalism. The
+nationalists seek to escape the moral problem by delegating the vices
+of the individual to the group and the Marxians fantastically endow
+the group with virtues which it does not possess. Religious and moral
+idealism, preaching goodwill and peace without taking the brutal
+realities of the modern economic conflict into consideration, is little
+better, and probably less serviceable than a cynical realism which is
+blind to everything but the secular facts revealed in modern economic
+life. The moral futility of such idealism is one of the very roots of
+such a cynicism. Yet, finally, the problem of social reconstruction
+cannot be solved without the resources of religious insight and moral
+goodwill. The economic reorganization of society will not be effected
+without conflict between those who possess the privileges and those who
+suffer from the inequalities of modern industrialism. Neither can it be
+effected without the mutual sacrifice of rights, the mutual forgiveness
+of sins and a mutual trust going beyond the deserts of any party to
+the controversy. In England, where economic theory and practice has
+never been as completely divorced from religious idealism as on the
+Continent, a gradual transfer political power and social privilege to
+the ranks of the workers is being made with much less peril of a social
+convulsion than in any nation of the Continent. Both the possessors of
+privilege and those who challenge the possession are stubborn in the
+defense of their advantages and in the championship of their rights;
+but at least a measure of influence upon the struggle is exercised by
+spiritual and moral considerations which Continental critics of England
+identify with the British capacity for compromise but which probably
+has deeper and more spiritual roots. Meanwhile religious idealism in
+America is almost completely corrupted by sentimentality and betrayed
+into social futility because the momentary unification of American
+society upon the basis of the interests of the middle classes absolves
+the religious conscience from facing the moral challenge in the social
+and economic facts of modern society.
+
+Economic determinists are not alone in sharing with an ordinary
+prudential statecraft in the effort to organize the life of groups
+by means of the resources of intelligence. The hopes of the more
+conventional yet socially intelligent people for a new world are
+involved in the idea of a society or league of nations. Since an
+inchoate international society created by the new intimacy in which
+nations live exists in spite of international anarchy, it is reasonable
+to attempt the creation of more adequate forms and machinery for the
+crystallization and expression of its collective will, the conciliation
+of disputes among its members and the closer integration of its life.
+Moral and spiritual forces are sometimes frustrated merely by the
+lack of adequate machinery for the application of generally accepted
+principles to specific situations. There is therefore great need for an
+intelligent statesmanship which will give the soul of an international
+society a body, and incarnate its aspirations in the instruments of
+political order.
+
+From another point of view, however, international society does not yet
+exist and needs to be created; and the means for its creation are not
+laws but attitudes, not organization but a type of life. Politically
+minded people easily suffer from the illusion that laws create
+morality, that organization creates society. Societies are not created
+by political mechanism but by attitudes of mutual respect and trust.
+Where these exist social relations are established and traditions
+formed. These in turn are gradually codified and given definition and
+precision by legal enactments. No one now takes the theory seriously
+that human society was created by a conscious mutual contract between
+individuals who suddenly realized that they could save themselves in
+no other way from mutual self-destruction. Society is older than human
+history and exists wherever individuals establish relations of mutual
+reverence and trust. The family is usually the beginning of society
+because here nature aids the imagination and consanguinity creates an
+atmosphere of mutual trust. The family is enlarged by the fortunes
+and the needs of war, the resulting clans may amalgamate into larger
+units through intermarriage of leaders or through other exigencies,
+and the emerging national or racial group is formed by similar forces.
+The love and trust which unite a society are no more rational than the
+hatred and mistrust which divide one society from another. People do
+not regard each other as morally dependable because reason persuades or
+experience prompts them to such an attitude. The attitude is determined
+by natural and instinctive or by ideal and religious forces and, once
+it is assumed, is inevitably verified; for in an atmosphere of mutual
+trust human action finally becomes trustworthy and morally dependable.
+In so far as national and racial groups live in a state of mutual fear
+and hold life outside of the group in contempt rather than in reverence
+there is no international society nor can political machinery create
+it. Only in rare instances are new social traditions created by legal
+enactments. Political forms and legal measures are usually belated
+recognitions of previously established social facts and necessities.
+The problem of group relations in modern society is as difficult as it
+is because natural causes have operated to make the social units larger
+and larger while no ideal forces have been strong enough to prompt the
+group to enter into ethical relations with other groups. If a higher
+degree of imagination than now seems probable does not inform the life
+of modern nations only, one further step is possible—the consolidation
+of continents. In such an eventuality the present League of Nations
+could easily become the instrument of pan-Europeanism in conflict with
+other Continents. A society of nations is impossible, in short, without
+those ultra-rational attitudes which either instinct or religion must
+create and which in the case of this final venture is beyond the
+resources of natural instincts—except in the event of a threat from
+some other planetary community.
+
+If the creation of an international society is a task to which
+moral and spiritual resources must contribute, its maintenance and
+development are no less dependent upon the coöperation of spiritual
+insight with political prudence. Even at best human nature is so
+imperfect and relations between groups as well as individuals so
+fruitful in misunderstandings that it is impossible to maintain the
+mutual trust and confidence which are the basis of society without
+the spiritual achievement of mutual repentance and forgiveness. In
+the relation between groups the ability to detect flaws in one’s own
+and extenuating circumstances in the actions and attitudes of others
+is at once more necessary and more difficult than in intra-group
+relations. It is more difficult because the intricacy and long range
+of the relations, and the inevitable hypocrisy in the pretensions of
+governments, easily obscure the limitations of one and the virtues
+and good intentions of the other party of the relationship. It is
+more necessary because the frictions which fret the relations of
+national and other groups are much more generally due to mutual guilt
+than those of individual relations. They develop in a narrow world
+and in a society of but few members in which a suspected peril may
+lead to a gesture of defense, the defensive measure be regarded as
+offensive and in turn prompt an actual attack which will be justified
+in turn as a defensive measure. Thus fears produce hatreds, hatreds
+express themselves in ugly grimaces and someone finally strikes the
+first blow. The World War resulted from a spontaneous combustion of
+fears and hatreds, and the partial mobilizations, full mobilizations
+and final declarations of war are so intimately related to each
+other that impartial historians find it increasingly difficult and
+irrelevant to decide who was responsible for the actual hostilities.
+The obvious fact is that every generation of every European state for
+several centuries had gathered fuel for flames of war. Yet each group
+declared its absolute innocence and heaped abuse upon the foe. Years
+after the conflict only a small minority in each of the participating
+nations has had the imagination to see or the grace to confess the
+share of its nation in the mutual guilt. Meanwhile ancient feuds are
+perpetuated because the hypocrisy of the victors is written into
+solemn treaties and produces a resentment among the vanquished which
+makes them incapable of any higher sincerity. Issues between nations
+are so involved that only expert knowledge is able to ascertain the
+real facts, but the very intricacies of the problems involved make
+it possible to use the facts for the validation of almost any thesis
+which national pride may dictate. The real task of persuading groups
+to encourage forgiveness by repentance and repentance by forgiveness,
+and thus to overcome rather than perpetuate evil, is a spiritual
+and a moral one and cannot be accomplished in a completely secular
+atmosphere. There is little evidence to justify the hope that spiritual
+and moral forces, as they are now oriented, are prepared to aid in such
+a task. But their responsibility is obvious; social intelligence may
+be a partner in the process of conciliation but intelligence cannot
+bear the burden alone when a disposition to humility and a capacity for
+mercy is lacking.
+
+Urging the necessity of religious attitudes between social and
+political groups may seem to be a counsel of perfection when it is
+remembered that intra-group relations, except in the circle of the
+family and in small religious fellowships, have never been able to
+profit by their aid. Society in general has usually contented itself
+with the expedient of composing social friction and arbitrating dispute
+by apportioning the relative guilt and innocence of the disputants
+through a presumably impartial judicatory which enforces its decisions
+upon the belligerents, however irreconcilable or obstreperous they
+may be. But the fact is that such a method is both easier and more
+effective in a society composed of individuals than in a society
+of groups. In an ordinary national society the impartiality of the
+court is guaranteed by a society of thousands and even millions of
+individuals who are supposed not to be biased in favor of one or the
+other litigants; and the parties to a controversy are therefore more
+inclined to accept the verdict of a court. Furthermore the society
+which supports the judicial tribunal is so powerful compared to
+whatever political or physical strength the litigants possess that
+it is able to enforce the awards of the latter however recalcitrant
+the disputants may be. But the society of nations is too small,
+judged by the number of its member nations, to function with absolute
+impartiality in any major dispute. Judicial action is therefore
+immediately less effective. It is to be noted that courts are less
+serviceable instruments of social conciliation even within nations
+when they deal with large economic and social groups such as unions
+and trusts or when the issue involves basic economic problems; and the
+reason for this is that the parties to a litigation represent so large
+a part of the total community that the unbiased character of the court
+is not as readily assumed and ought not be taken for granted. Tradition
+and social custom usually bias the court in favor of one or the other
+litigants, generally the one most firmly established in the traditional
+organization of the society. In the case of nations it is obvious that
+for some time to come an international court must confine itself mainly
+to petty disputes among powerful nations and to the real disputes
+of the petty nations, from whose perspective the large nations may
+represent an impartial international society.[16] Even at best no
+formal conciliation can heal wounds such as were made by the World War
+if nations cannot develop the capacity for repentance and mercy and
+learn how to restrain both the proud and the vindictive passions which
+are the natural products of unreflective social life.
+
+Though morally dependable action develops most readily in an atmosphere
+of mutual trust, it is not to be assumed that either nations or
+individuals always justify trust by trustworthy action. Faith does not
+produce conscience automatically. Much of the pacifism now cultivated
+by socially effective religious forces has the defect that it fails
+to gauge the stubborn resistance to ideal forces in the predatory
+nature of national groups. It is difficult to develop moral attitudes
+sufficiently honest not only to give the bearer of trust the prestige
+of sincerity but to make the object of trust worthy of its faith. Trust
+united with selfishness results in moral futility; and when it is
+based upon illusion and fails to take account of the imperfect social
+attitudes which it must overcome, it issues in mere sentimentality. It
+is significant that the idea of the outlawry of war should be espoused
+particularly in America and find little favor in other nations; for
+here extraordinary power is united with remarkable political naïvete,
+so that American idealists find it difficult to appreciate the
+unsatisfied hungers of other nations or their resentful reaction to our
+own satiety. If nations cannot be moved to make some sacrifices for
+the sake of the ideal and to qualify their expansive desires by moral
+purpose, all efforts to create an international society must finally
+prove vain. It may be that the secular ambitions of nations are so
+firmly established in social custom and their unethical attitudes so
+generally sanctioned by the popular mind that nothing will avail to
+give their actions even a touch of ethical character. It is difficult
+enough to subdue and discipline the immediate and anarchic desires
+which struggle for expression in the soul of the individual; but when
+they express themselves in the life of groups and are veiled in seeming
+sanctities even while they achieve new and more diabolical forms they
+can be subdued only by the most astute intelligence united with a high
+moral passion. Modern civilization lacks both this intelligence and
+this moral passion and is in the peril of losing what it has of the
+latter as it develops the former. Moral idealism which fails to gauge
+the measure of resistance which its ideals must meet in the confused
+realities of life or to fashion adequate weapons for its conflict
+degenerates into mere sentimentality. But a social intelligence which
+is overwhelmed by the discouraging realities and despairs of the
+attainment of any ideal sinks into a morally enervating cynicism. Moral
+leadership in Western society is divided to-day between sentimentalists
+and cynics who combine to render the prospect of an ethical
+regeneration of modern life well-nigh hopeless. If men are really to be
+redeemed from the sins of greed and mutual fears and hatreds by which
+they make their common life intolerable they need a faith which is not
+held too cheaply but which is held nevertheless in defiance of every
+discouragement. The same intelligence which the complexities of modern
+life demand and create easily prompts not only to the cynicism which
+declares that “all men are liars” but to a moral ennui which cries,
+“Vanity, vanity, all is vanity.”
+
+Benjamin Kidd who understood the need for ultra-rational sanctions in
+social life better than most sociologists put the problem of modern
+society in these words: “The great problem with which every progressive
+society stands confronted is: How to retain the highest operative
+ultra-rational sanctions for those onerous conditions of life which are
+essential to its life, and at one and the same time to allow freest
+play to those intellectual forces which, while tending to come into
+conflict with such sanctions, contribute nevertheless to raise to the
+highest degree of social efficiency the whole of its members.”[17]
+
+To develop the wisdom of serpents while they retain the guilelessness
+of doves is the task which faces the religio-moral forces if they
+would aid in the moral regeneration of society. It may be that such
+a task is too difficult for the resources of this or any generation
+of the immediate future and that painful experience must first prove
+other strategies inadequate. Meanwhile even the possibility of
+future usefulness of religion demands the largest possible measure
+of immediate detachment from the unethical characteristics of modern
+society. If religion cannot transform society, it must find its social
+function in criticizing present realities from some ideal perspective
+and in presenting the ideal without corruption, so that it may sharpen
+the conscience and strengthen the faith of each generation.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER VII
+
+                TRANSCENDING AND TRANSFORMING THE WORLD
+
+
+The tendency of modern religion to make itself at home in the world and
+to enter into intimate relations with civilization is not due solely to
+the puritan confidence of victory over life. It is partly due to the
+influences of a sentimental and optimistic evaluation of human nature
+which came to the modern church through Rousseau and romanticism. It
+is also a product of the evolutionary optimism which has characterized
+religious thought since ethicists and religionists have learnt to
+overcome the melancholy conclusions implicit in the Darwinian theory
+and to see the bright side of evolution. Traditional religion is
+other-worldly. The modern church prides itself on its bright and happy
+worldliness. It is more interested in transforming the natural and
+social environment of personality than in persuading the soul to
+transcend all circumstances and find its happiness in inner peace. The
+modern church regards this mundane interest as its social passion.
+But it is also the mark of its slavery to society. Whenever religion
+feels completely at home in the world, it is the salt which has lost
+its savor. If it sacrifices the strategy of renouncing the world, it
+has no strategy by which it may convict the world of sin. A movement
+which detaches religion from life to give it perspective and power over
+life must on the other hand run the risk of centering the interests
+of men on other than social problems. Religion thus faces a dilemma
+which is not easily solved. A religion of social amelioration easily
+becomes a beautiful romance which obscures the unlovely realities of
+life. A religion of detachment from the world may persuade the soul
+to find both happiness and virtue in defiance of physical and social
+circumstances and thus to regard all social problems as irrelevant to
+its main purpose. This dilemma is not due to any specific or historic
+weaknesses in types of religion but arises out of the nature and
+constitution of religion as such.
+
+Religion in its unspoiled form is always other-worldly and
+disenchanted. Puritanism, romanticism and evolutionary optimism are
+really but reflections and refractions of the general temper of Western
+life, which has slowly gained the ascendancy over the religious
+spirit. It is a temper of friendliness to, or at least fearlessness
+before the world. In puritanism the tension between religion and life
+is maintained, but the soul is persuaded that it can bring the whole
+of life under the dominion of conscience. In romanticism there is a
+frank identification of human virtue with a sentimentally idealized
+natural world. Religious and ethical thought which has come under the
+influence of evolutionary optimism maintains a sense of tension between
+the soul and the natural world in rare instances; more frequently it
+regards human history as but the last chapter in the beautiful story
+of progress which all life has unfolded and which time and patience
+will inevitably bring to a happy issue. The foundation for the Western
+strategy of life was laid by the Greeks who, overcoming the awe and
+reverence with which the Oriental brooded over nature’s mysteries,
+thrust impious hands into her secrets and made shrewd guesses about
+her varied phenomena. The Greeks learned to make only slight practical
+application of their knowledge, and the rise of Christianity eclipsed
+their scientific temper. It came into its own again at the close of the
+Middle Ages and at the dawn of the modern era. The fact that science
+developed in the West rather than the East is due to this attitude
+toward the natural world. The Orient is not less curious than the
+Occident, but it directs its mind to other problems. While it cradles
+philosophies and religions the West gives birth to science.
+
+Since the dawn of the industrial era scientific knowledge is used
+increasingly for the purpose of transforming the natural circumstance
+of human life. Nature is not transcended but transformed in the
+interest of human happiness. Comforts are multiplied; power is
+increased; time and distance are destroyed; hours of toil are reduced;
+natural environment is changed; disease is eliminated and death
+postponed; the hostilities of nature are overcome and her benevolence
+multiplied for the sake of human welfare. Our birth may be “but a
+sleep and a forgetting” but our life is undeniably lived in natural
+conditions which profoundly affect not only physical well-being but
+cultural and spiritual character. It is evident therefore that there
+is profound wisdom in the scientific strategy which transforms the
+natural world in the interest of the human spirit. Not only is the
+Western world firmly committed to it, but there are indications that
+the Orient will adopt it in spite of the opposition of religious
+leaders such as Gandhi. Whatever perils to the spiritual life may lurk
+in the preoccupation of the soul with its physical circumstances, it
+is clear that human personality may be served by improving the natural
+environment which conditions it. Wealth may lead to sensual excess but
+it is also the basis of culture. Leisure may be secured by reducing
+physical wants to a minimum, but there are cultural advantages in a
+leisure which does not preclude the satisfaction of all reasonable
+desires. Comforts may lead men to become obsessed with their external
+circumstances, but they also reduce irrelevant distractions to life’s
+main purpose. Physical health is not a necessary but a convenient
+condition for moral and spiritual enterprise.
+
+In spite of these advantages religion, except in a few contemporary
+forms, has always been either hostile or indifferent to the business
+of transforming nature in the interest of personal values. It has
+counseled the soul to seek its happiness not in changing but in
+becoming independent of circumstances. In Buddhism the highest
+happiness is sought by throttling all desires. Jesus was more careful
+to distinguish between the will to live and its physical expressions.
+But he was critical of all physical desires and satisfactions. He had
+the Orient’s profound indifference to the “business of earth.” If
+our ears were not so habituated to his words that they fail to catch
+their real significance, a modern congregation would be shocked by
+the admonition: “Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat or
+what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on. Is
+not life more than meat and the body more than raiment?” “Lay not up
+for yourselves treasures upon earth where moth and rust doth corrupt
+and where thieves break through and steal, for where your treasure
+is, there will your heart be also.” “Fear not them which kill the
+body but are not able to kill the soul; but rather fear him which is
+able to destroy both soul and body in hell.” The modern Christian is
+inclined to destroy the force of the profound other-worldliness of such
+sentiments by reflecting that they represent an Oriental cast which is
+incidental and not essential to the gospel of Jesus. They are Oriental
+no doubt, but precisely because they are religious; and to regard them
+as incidental is to miss the whole meaning of the gospel. Though the
+West is unable to accept them, it pays an unconscious tribute to the
+truth involved in them. For the absolute moral values incarnated in the
+personality of Jesus, which the West still reveres, are organically
+related to this other-worldliness.
+
+Whatever the limitations of this emphasis, it is evident that religion
+cannot escape it. Concerned with the soul’s inner peace and perfect
+virtue it is forced to lift it above the corruptions and irrelevancies
+of temporal conditions. The whole course of modern history is ample
+justification for Jesus’ warning: Where your treasure is, there will
+your heart be also. The instruments of personality’s victory over
+nature have become the chains for a new kind of thraldom. Western
+civilization is enslaved to its machines and the things which the
+machines produce. Spiritual forces are emancipated from the forces of
+nature only to become the victims of a mechanized civilization. It is
+a Pyrrhic victory. America, which has developed the Western strategy
+with greater consistency than any other nation, is at once the envy and
+the scorn of the world. The scorn may be a device for hiding the envy,
+but there is moral justification for reproach. What the world regards
+as our vulgarity is more than the awkwardness of youth; it is an undue
+preoccupation with life’s instrumentality and an obsession of the soul
+with the concrete world.
+
+The Orient may be more cruel than the West, but our superior tenderness
+is matched by our more expansive avarice. Having determined that
+life consists in things a man possesses, the West sacrifices both
+inner peace and social harmony in the mad scramble for the power and
+privilege which the conquests of nature has supplied. Neither the
+imperialism of nations nor the monstrous avarice of economic groups
+is confined to Western life, but covetousness and greed have been
+manifestly increased by the temper and strategy of the Occident. The
+Biblical analysis which discovers covetousness as the root of conflict
+is applicable to our own day: “Ye lust and have not; ye kill and
+desire to have, and cannot obtain; ye fight and war, yet ye have not
+because ye ask amiss.... Know ye not that the friendship of this world
+is enmity with God?”[18] However necessary it may be to make a more
+equitable distribution of the physical blessings of life, religion’s
+true function is to develop an attitude of indifference toward the
+very goods for the possession of which men contend so frantically.
+When Jesus rebuked the young man who desired his aid in correcting the
+inequitable division of an inheritance, his unwillingness to assume
+a judicial function was manifestly dictated by the thought that the
+whole inheritance ought to have been a matter of indifference to the
+young man. It is easy to see that such an attitude may lend itself to
+abuse and be used to perpetuate inequalities. If advocated by religious
+groups which have profited by economic inequalities, it becomes the
+tool of hypocrisy. Yet it is an emphasis which religion cannot disavow.
+It is basic to its whole world view.
+
+The peril to happiness as well as to virtue in reliance upon the
+external fortunes of life justifies the counsel of religion that
+happiness must be founded on internal rather than external resources.
+The conquest of nature is really but a relative victory of personality
+over circumstance. Though the caprice of nature’s forces has been
+checked, fortune remains fickle. If men cannot learn “how to be
+abased and how to abound,” there is no guarantee of happiness for
+them. Poverty may be a curse, but voluntarily chosen or consented to
+without sullenness it may become the way of the soul’s emancipation.
+The elimination of disease is a boon to mankind, but there is little
+likelihood that science will be able to overcome all ills to which the
+human flesh is heir. No scientific advance will obviate the necessity
+for the discovery of faith that “God’s strength is made perfect in
+weakness,” that the infirmities of the flesh may become the occasion
+for the cultivation of spiritual graces. Even at best science cannot
+destroy nature’s final irrelevancy—death. There can therefore be
+no real victory over nature except by the strategy of transcending
+her fortunes. The more hostages taken from her the greater will be
+the disappointment in the hour of her final victory. It is man’s
+sublime and tragic fate that he must find happiness in the search for
+infinitude amidst the flux of time and he can therefore never accept
+the portion of mortality for himself with equanimity. Hence his final
+comfort must come from the counsel of religion which teaches him how he
+may identify himself with the eternal values of his devotion, so that
+“though the outward man perish yet the inward man is renewed day by
+day.”[19]
+
+The temper of Western civilization has made the modern church quite
+ashamed of the other-worldly character of traditional religion, and
+intent upon discarding it as much as possible. Everything is done
+to impress the generation with the mundane interests of religious
+idealism and to secularize religion itself so that it may survive
+in a secular age as a kind of harmless adornment of the moral life.
+Yet its service to both human happiness and virtue are involved in
+its other-worldliness. It is through that element that it gains the
+power to raise morality above the utilitarian plane and to give human
+happiness a firmer foundation than fickle fortune. If men can find no
+basis for happiness except in their adjustment to external realities,
+they will not suffer pain to realize a kingdom of righteousness. If
+they are taught to identify physical well-being with their cherished
+peace, they will not venture farther than such actions as a cool
+prudence prompts. The cross was inspired by devotion to a “kingdom
+which is not of this world”; but the cross was also the method by which
+that kingdom was changed from an ethereal to a concrete reality. It
+is the absolute ideal which has no basis in concrete reality which
+moves men to defy the limitations of the concrete and overcome them. A
+religion which is perfectly at home in the world has no counsel for it
+which the world could not gain by an easier method.
+
+Yet the reaction of modern religion to traditional other-worldliness is
+natural enough and, in a way, necessary. While religion cannot afford
+to discard its other-worldliness, the moral and social limitations
+which issue from it are obvious enough. We have previously observed
+the tendency of types of religion to withdraw the ideal from life
+and to imagine that it has magic potencies over life’s realities,
+or that subjective devotion to it may absolve them of the duty of
+realizing it in history. All these defects are due to vagaries
+which are not inevitable characteristics of religious life. But
+the social limitations which result from the religious strategy of
+transcending the fortunes of life are constitutional and central. They
+therefore offer a very serious problem. If the soul is lifted above
+circumstances, it easily loses interest in changing them to better
+advantage. If its happiness is made independent of fortune, there
+is less purpose in making fortune secure. If personality discovers
+its highest satisfactions in defying environmental factors, it may
+become indifferent to the necessary projects of creating a more
+favorable environment for personal values. Human personality is an
+historic product, determined by specific forces of natural and social
+environment, and though it may attain its highest glory by transcending
+all circumstances, it will fall short if it adopts that strategy at
+the beginning and not at the end of its efforts. The Orient, which
+produces more saints than the Occident, pays for them by the abject
+misery of its multitudes. Its highest moral achievements are really
+determined by a cruel law of survival. Only personalities of great
+spiritual resource can overcome the general physical conditions of its
+life which submerge the mass in hopeless poverty.
+
+Some credit for the advantages of Western life must be given to the
+moral superiority of Christianity over Buddhism, which represents the
+quintessence of the Oriental spirit. Christianity is a life-affirming
+and Buddhism a life-denying faith. The one does not destroy but
+refines the energy of life. The other destroys energy in the process
+of refinement. The Orient is pantheistic; and by deifying all of
+life, offers no avenue of escape from its imperfections except by
+annihilation of life itself. There is a difference between fleeing to
+God from life’s unbearable realities and identifying these with the
+divine will. At its worst the strategy of the Orient is a fatalistic
+acceptance of life’s circumstances; at its best it is a stifling of
+all desires so that the soul may be free of the world. Yet there is
+a social peril even in the more wholesome strategy of Christianity
+which affirms life but divorces it from its physical necessities. This
+limitation is felt particularly when the conditions which invite change
+are social rather than natural. Nature is inexorable and it is well to
+learn that only they are able to escape her furies who also know how
+to renounce her delights. But the world which man has created retains
+its cruelties only by the sufferance of man. Anything which will
+incline men to assume an attitude of indifference toward projects of
+social reform and amelioration is therefore a potential peril to social
+progress. When Jesus rebuked the young man for his anxiety about an
+equitable division of his inheritance, he took a high spiritual ground
+which easily lends itself to abuse in the disillusioning realities
+of economic and social life. What if a sublime renunciation does not
+soften the hearts of those who hold more than their just share of the
+inheritance? And what if the welfare of others besides that of the
+moral idealist is involved in the renunciation? Shall the Biblical
+injunction to servants that they be obedient to their masters “not only
+to the good and gentle but also to the froward” apply to political
+tyrannies? Obviously an attitude which represents a high spiritual
+achievement in the individual instance has its limitations when raised
+to a general social policy. Social radicals who have been confronted
+with the conservatism of religion have parodied the other-worldly
+temper at the heart of this characteristic in the words: “Bye and
+bye, there’ll be pie in the sky.” The sneer in this parody hardly
+does justice to religious other-worldliness. The emphasis is not so
+much upon a future life as distinguished from the present existence
+as upon a type of life which can afford to regard “pie” with disdain
+whether in this or any other world. Nevertheless, even the highest type
+of other-worldliness may become the cause of indifference to social
+conditions. The very sensitiveness of religion which persuades it to
+regard human society in the same category with the world of nature as
+“the world” may result in the completer secularization of society and
+its abandonment to the unchecked forces of nature.
+
+There is no easy formula for avoiding this social peril in the strategy
+of religion. The elimination of pantheism is a material aid in its
+solution. The superior energy of the West may be due to a tentative
+dualism in its religion which has been qualified from time to time
+by pantheistic and monistic thought but never completely destroyed.
+Yet even the dualism of Christianity does not save it altogether
+from positions which offer peril to social and moral values. Even an
+observer who is entirely sympathetic to religion must come to the
+conclusion that the West owes many of its advantages to the fact that
+religion has had no easy time in Western life, and that in the past
+centuries not only scientific thought but scientific life-strategy has
+challenged religion at every turn. Some of the excellencies of Western
+life are clearly the fruits of our science rather than our religion.
+Of course, these advantages have been bought at a price. The empirical
+instincts of science drive it to deny the continuities in reality and
+to see everything only in its momentary and immediate situation. The
+modern behavioristic destruction of the concept of personality is
+therefore one of the natural results of scientific thought betrayed
+into absurdity by its own consistency. But a consistent religion is
+generally equally absurd. Regarding all reality, and personality
+in particular, _sub specie æternitatis_, it fails to see how truly
+personality is the product of specific social and natural forces and
+neglects to change the material environment in the interest of human
+welfare. Human personality can be understood neither in terms of its
+environment alone nor in absolute terms which leave the material world
+in which it develops out of account. The final victory of personality
+must be gained by transcending concrete situations and material
+circumstances; but it is a hollow victory if circumstances are not
+previously used and amended to improve personal values. The soul is
+at once the victim and the master of the material world. It gains
+its highest triumph by renouncing the world, but the renunciation is
+premature if a futile and yet not futile effort is not made to make the
+natural world conform to the needs of human character.
+
+While the Western world has much to learn from the East in its strategy
+of life, there is no gain in substituting one strategy for the other;
+for they are both defective. The plight of the West is due to the
+complete bankruptcy of religious forces and the unchallenged dominion
+of science; just as the plight of the East is due to the unchallenged
+sway of religion. Applied science has created a civilization which may
+be as destructive of personality for the meagerly endowed multitudes
+as the natural poverty of Asia. But Western civilization may at least
+boast of developing a middle class which enjoys physical and spiritual
+advantages which no considerable class of the Orient possesses. Neither
+the West nor the East has arrived at a perfect basis for happiness. The
+Oriental soul is like a bird, freed of its cage, but with no wings to
+fly. The Occidental soul has wings but is so fascinated by its gilded
+cage that it does not care to fly.
+
+The conclusion which emerges from such reflections will shock orthodox
+religionists. It is that the values of religion are conditioned and not
+absolute and that they attain their highest usefulness not when they
+subdue all other values but when they are in perpetual conflict with
+them, or it may be truer to say when they are coördinated with them.
+Western life gained an advantage over the East by centuries of conflict
+between the religious and scientific strategy of life. It is losing the
+advantage by an excessive devotion to concrete interests and by the
+capitulation of religion. The supreme tragedy of history would be the
+not improbable armed conflict between West and East, with the Orient
+in a frenzy of resentment against the greed of the Occident and the
+Occident in a natural fear of the low living standards of Asia. Part of
+the truth would be on either side and the conflict could result only
+in exaggerating the limitations of the partial truth which each side
+holds.
+
+Meanwhile there is the possibility of coördinating the values of East
+and West, of science and religion. Let the East learn to live in
+time and the West to view its temporalities with indifference. The
+coördination is not easy because men are not inclined to be at once
+critical and appreciative of the values with which they must deal.
+They always tend to increase the limitations of certain values by an
+uncritical devotion, or to destroy the values in mad resentment against
+their limitations. Since man is a citizen of two worlds, he cannot
+afford to renounce his citizenship in either. He must work out his
+destiny both as a child of nature and as a servant of the absolute.
+
+The prospects for an exchange of values between the East and the West
+are not particularly bright. The Orient is indeed being “Americanized,”
+but partly through the policy of Western imperialism exploiting the
+low living standards of Asia to the advantage of Western industry.
+There is no powerful movement in the West to dissuade it from its
+complete trust in physical power as the method of self-realization, and
+in physical comfort as the way to happiness. Modern religion has not
+been totally ineffective in qualifying racial arrogance and parochial
+prejudices. But it has had practically no effect upon the instincts of
+avarice which dominate Western life. The religious groups which are
+still ambitious to defy civilization in the name of their faith have
+a theology which cannot gain the respect of the thoughtful leaders of
+modern life; and the sins of which they convict modern society are not
+its real sins. The intellectually emancipated religious groups are too
+thoroughly acclimatized to the atmosphere of Western life to have any
+sensitiveness for its imperfections.
+
+The greatest hope lies in the missionary enterprise, which through its
+very effort toward the universalization of the Christian faith has
+a tendency to strip it of its Occidental accretions, so that it may
+become intrinsically worthy of its world expansion. The missionary
+enterprise may thereby contribute as much toward the spiritualization
+of Western life as toward the regeneration of the East. Its very
+contact with the East gives it a perspective on the limitations of
+Western life which churches at home do not possess. There is, of
+course, the possibility that Western imperialism will so thoroughly
+discredit the missionary enterprise before it can function in this
+way that it will lose its whole prestige in the Eastern world. In
+that case Japan will probably continue to unify and occidentalize
+Asia in the hope of fighting fire with fire. A small minority of
+thoughtful missionaries are making a desperate effort to disassociate
+the missionary enterprise from the politics of Western imperialism in
+the Orient. Considering the difficulty of their task, they have made
+commendable progress. Yet if Christianity at home does not become
+disassociated from and does not qualify the greed of which the Oriental
+politics of Western nations is but one expression, the heroic efforts
+of the missionaries may be vain. Men of prudence in the Orient may be
+willing to concede that ideals have validity even if they are outraged
+by those who ostensibly accept them. But the final test of ideals must
+include their ability to qualify human action. If Christian idealism
+is to be a force which will help to create a unified world culture,
+capable of destroying the moral limitations of both the Oriental and
+the Occidental strategy of life, it must detach itself more completely
+from the temper of Western life even while it seeks to influence the
+thought of the East.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER VIII
+
+             A PHILOSOPHICAL BASIS FOR AN ETHICAL RELIGION
+
+
+The ethical problem of religion may be more important than the
+metaphysical one, as previously observed, but it cannot be solved
+without a reorientation of the present philosophical basis of religious
+conviction. The Western world has had a slight advantage over the
+East in the tentative dualism of Christianity, but this advantage
+has been lost by the inevitable drift toward pantheism in Western
+thought. Pantheistic tendencies are potential perils to moral values
+in practically all religions. By identifying God and the natural world
+they either persuade men to resign themselves to the inadequacies of
+nature, under the illusion that divine sanctity has rendered them
+immutable, or they blind the eye to the imperfections of nature and
+thus destroy the moral sensitiveness of religion. The Orient has
+usually derived a morally enervating pessimism from its pantheism,
+while the Occident has chosen the other horn of the monistic dilemma
+and fallen into a sentimental optimism. Both alternatives are as untrue
+to the facts as they are inadequate to men’s moral needs.
+
+In the Western world religious optimism has been gradually destroyed
+by the advance of science which discredited the moral overestimate of
+the cosmic order, implicit as one of two tendencies in pantheism. The
+practical and tragic realities of its international and industrial life
+have added to the disillusionment and made men as sceptical of human as
+of cosmic virtue. Thus the cynicism of disillusioned intelligence is
+added to the despair of an outraged conscience to unite in a pessimism
+which questions both the rationality of the universe and the morality
+of man. The despair of the West is even more devastating to moral
+values than the pessimism of the East, for the Orient is prompted by
+its religion to a serene resignation while the West spends itself in
+blind fury or sensual excess. When all confidence in moral values is
+destroyed, the strong express themselves by asserting their power or
+resenting their seeming impotence, while the weak sink into an easy
+indulgence of natural appetites. The real history of Western society
+is being written by Nietzschian and Marxian cynics who have subdued
+every scruple which might qualify their contest for power. Meanwhile
+their conflict is lazily witnessed by vast hordes whose main purpose
+in life is to gratify their senses and who give their sympathy to one
+or the other side according as it offers least hindrance to their
+enjoyments. In such a situation religion is easily relegated to the
+position of restraining the petty and obscuring the major vices of the
+small minority which still profess it. This is particularly true when
+optimism and sentimentality, such as characterize modern religion,
+make it incapable of a realistic evaluation of the forces which reveal
+themselves in human society.
+
+Albert Schweitzer[20] interprets the whole moral bankruptcy of Western
+civilization as a pessimistic reaction to the extravagant optimism of
+its traditional religions and philosophies. While other factors, such
+as the complexity and the impersonal nature of industrial society,
+have been contributory factors to the disillusionment of the age, it
+is probably true that men are inclined to expect too little of the
+world and of man mostly because too much has been claimed for them and
+extravagant hopes have been disappointed. A regeneration of the ethical
+life of Western society must depend, therefore, upon the revival of a
+religion in which the Scylla of pantheism and the Charybdis of pure
+naturalism are avoided. While the Orient has a serenity which will
+contribute much to the art of living in a unified world civilization,
+there is no health for our sickness in its religious philosophies.
+Its pantheism cannot be maintained in the scientific atmosphere of
+the West, and if it could, as it is in rare instances, it would only
+present us with the impossible choice between the moral ennui of
+pessimism and the sentimentality of an unqualified optimism. The
+youthful exuberance of the Western mind invariably inclines it to
+the least defensible of these two bad alternatives, the optimistic
+one. When the West borrows religion from the East, as for instance
+in theosophy and Christian Science, it is used to support optimistic
+illusions so palpably absurd that they flourish only in those circles
+of society in which life is extremely comfortable and not too
+intelligent.
+
+The only fruitful alternative to a monism and pantheism which
+identifies God and the world, the real and the ideal, is a dualism
+which maintains some kind of distinction between them and does not
+lose one in the other. Dualistic solutions to the riddles of life
+are not new in the history of religious thought. They are in fact as
+numerous as pantheistic ones, but their metaphysical limitations have
+usually outweighed their moral advantages and shortened their life. In
+Zoroastrianism, the noblest of purely Aryan faiths, Ahirman the spirit
+of evil exists independently of Ormuzd the good spirit. The influence
+of this Persian dualism is seen in both Hebrew and Christian thought.
+The satanology of the Old Testament is partly derived from it; and
+Manichæism, through which Augustine passed before he embraced and
+elaborated Catholic orthodoxy, is a compound of Persian and Christian
+religion. Mythology is filled with efforts to do justice to the
+conflicts which the world reveals as obviously as its unities, as for
+instance in the myth of Prometheus and Zeus. Even Plato, from whom most
+Western pantheism has been indirectly derived, held that God’s perfect
+goodness was thwarted by the intractableness of the materials with
+which he worked.
+
+Early Hebrew religion was naïvely dualistic, and that is one reason
+why it has been so potent in the history of religion. God was
+indeed conceived of as omnipotent; that conception was the path
+that led to monotheism. But the idea of omnipotence was elaborated
+dramatically rather than philosophically. The heavens might declare
+his glory and the firmament show his handiwork, but he was revealed
+in national history and (according to the conception of the later
+prophets) in personal experience more than in natural phenomena. Even
+a very early prophet discovered that the still small voice rather
+than the earthquake or the fire was the symbol of his presence.
+The Genesis account of the fall solves the problem of evil upon an
+essentially monistic basis by making human sin responsible for even
+the inadequacies of nature and attributing everything from weeds to
+mortality to the luckless error of the first man. Neither the goodness
+nor the omnipotence of God is abridged in this naïve but sublime
+conception in which the human conscience assumes responsibility for
+more than its share of human ills in order to save the reputation of
+divine virtue. The monism of this account is, however, qualified by the
+injection of the tempting serpent, an element which is precursory of
+the belief in the devil, which the Jews inherited from Babylonia and
+Persia and which has fortunately qualified all monistic tendencies in
+Jewish and Christian orthodoxy until this day. A profounder instinct
+than reveals itself to the casual observer persuades fundamentalism
+to defend the reality of the devil with such vehemence. It may be
+metaphysically inconsistent to have two absolutes, one good and one
+evil, but the conception provides at least for a dramatic portrayal of
+the conflict which disturbs the harmonies and unities of the universe,
+and therefore, it has a practical and ethical value. The idea of
+attributing personality to evil may be scientifically absurd but it
+rests upon a natural error. When the blind and impersonal forces of
+nature come to life in man they are given the semblance of personality.
+
+Professor Albert Schweitzer[21] ascribes the moral superiority of
+prophetic Judaism and Christianity over other world religions to the
+naïve dualism of the prophets and Jesus, who emphasized the moral
+rather than the metaphysical attributes of God in such a way as to
+develop a practical and morally potent distinction between God and the
+universe, between the ideal of religious devotion and the disappointing
+realities of life. The distinction between Oriental monism and the
+practical dualism of Christianity in its unspoiled form is succinctly
+stated by Professor Alfred Whitehead: “Christianity has always been
+a religion seeking a metaphysics in contrast to Buddhism which is a
+metaphysics generating a religion.... The defect of a metaphysical
+system is the very fact that it is a neat little system which thereby
+oversimplifies its expression of the world.... In respect to its
+treatment of evil, Christianity is therefore less clear in its
+metaphysical idea but more inclusive of the facts.”[22]
+
+In the early Christian church the naïve dualism of Jesus was given
+dramatic and dynamic force through his deification, so that he became,
+in a sense, the God of the ideal, the symbol of the redemptive force
+in life which is in conflict with evil. Since no clear distinction
+was made between the spirit of the living Christ and the indwelling
+Holy Ghost, the doctrine of the trinity was, in effect, a symbol of
+an essential dualism. Orthodox Christianity did indeed renounce the
+gnostic heresy which tried to give this implicit dualism explicit
+character by its distinction between the God who was revealed in Jesus
+and the God of creation. And history has justified the wisdom of its
+course. The scientific precision necessary to save such theology
+from essential polytheism was lacking and Christianity was intent
+upon guarding its monotheism. Yet it preserved enough metaphysical
+inconsistency to retain dualistic tendencies in its monistic orthodoxy.
+Its symbols lacked philosophical precision but they did give vivid
+and dramatic force to the idea of a conflict between evil and the
+redemptive and creative force in life. Thus it could fulfill the two
+great functions of religion in prompting men to repent of their sins,
+and in encouraging them to hope for redemption from them. No mechanical
+or magical explanations of the significance of the crucifixion have
+ever permanently obscured the helpful spiritual symbolism of the
+cross in which the conflict between good and evil is portrayed and
+the possibility as well as the difficulty of the triumph of the good
+over evil is dramatized. An absolute dualism either between God and
+the universe or between man and nature, or spirit and matter, or good
+and evil, is neither possible nor necessary. What is important is that
+justice be done to the fact that creative purpose meets resistance in
+the world and that the ideal which is implicit in every reality is also
+in conflict with it. The reason why naïve religions are “more inclusive
+of the facts” in portraying this struggle than highly elaborated
+theologies is that the latter are always prompted by the rational need
+of consistency to obscure some facts for the sake of developing an
+intellectual plausible unity. Religions grow out of real experience in
+which tragedy mingles with beauty and man learns that the moral values
+which dignify his life are embattled in his own soul and imperiled
+in the world. He is inclined neither to obscure the reality of the
+struggle nor to sacrifice the hope of victory until too much reflection
+persuades him to believe either that all partial evil is universal good
+or that destiny makes his struggle futile and his defeat inevitable.
+That is how morality dies with religion when an age has become too
+sophisticated.
+
+Naïve Christianity was unable to maintain itself in the Græco-Roman
+world without making concessions to its intellectual scruples and
+paying for its conquests by incorporating Hellenic philosophies in its
+theology. The gospel was diluted with neo-Platonism to make it more
+palatable for a cultured world. The naïvely and dramatically conceived
+omnipotence of God was metaphysically elaborated and inevitably
+betrayed the church into an essential pantheism, which “turns the
+natural world, man’s stamping-ground and system of opportunities,
+into a self-justifying and sacred life, endows the blameless giant
+with an inhuman soul and worships the monstrous divinity it has
+fabricated.”[23] The process of compounding the simplicities of the
+gospel with the dialectic achievements of Greek philosophy culminated
+in St. Augustine who laid the foundation for Christian orthodoxy and
+made the simple Christian epic the basis of an elaborate theological
+structure in which God becomes at the same time the guarantee of the
+reality of the ideal and the actual cause of every concrete reality.
+Christianity has always anathematized pantheism officially, but
+probably—as Professor Santayana suggests—because it suspected that
+it was a suppressed but not entirely quiescent half of its dogma.
+Vital religion has a way of expressing itself outside the limits of
+its rationally fixed concepts and the essential pantheism of orthodox
+Christianity therefore did not destroy the moral vigor of even such
+resolute determinists as Augustine or John Calvin. Yet in the end the
+logic of a system of ideas becomes the pattern of human action. A
+rigorous determinism as well as an unqualified pantheism destroys moral
+vigor because it either makes the attainment of the ideal too certain
+or idealizes the real beyond all evidence. If reality only thinly
+veils the ideal implicit in it, or if the implicit ideal is certain to
+become real in history, there is no occasion for moral adventure and
+no reason for moral enthusiasm. In a sense pantheism is naturalism
+with an unnatural light upon it. That is why the determinism implied in
+pantheism may lead so easily to a reaction of naturalistic determinism.
+Thus Karl Marx appropriated Hegel’s determinism and put it to his own
+use. When the whole wealth of Hegel’s dialectical skill served no
+better purpose than to deify the Prussian military state, as a kind
+of ultimate revelation of the counsels of God, it was easy enough to
+discredit its optimistic illusions without destroying its determinism.
+The residual determinism became the basis of a new philosophy of
+history in which natural instinct and economic necessity took the
+place of divine will as man’s inexorable fate. The reaction from Hegel
+to Marx is a perfect symbol of the whole course of Western thought
+in the last hundred years with its change from a supernatural to a
+naturalistic determinism.
+
+Religion left to itself, even when it elaborates theologies, tries
+to do some justice to the reality of moral conflict even though it
+may confuse the issue by a faulty definition of divine omnipotence.
+But its necessary coöperation with metaphysics drives it inevitably
+into more and more consistent monisms in which moral enthusiasms are
+destroyed. The monistic and pantheistic element in Western religion
+was greatly increased by its intimate collaboration with philosophies
+which dealt chiefly with the problem of knowledge. For the solution
+of the epistemological problem the philosophical idealists thought it
+necessary to posit an all-knowing intelligence. It was this all-knowing
+absolute which became the support of religion’s faith in God against
+the attacks of realists and empiricists, though there was little enough
+affinity between the God of any healthy religious theism and the
+impersonal absolute of monistic philosophers.
+
+When religious apologists found it necessary to readjust the age-old
+affirmations of faith to the evolutionary facts revealed by science
+they usually sank even more deeply into the morass of pantheistic and
+monistic philosophy. The old and naïve conceptions of a capricious
+omnipotence working its will upon natural phenomena became manifestly
+untenable and a way had to be found to relate divine purpose to and
+discover the area of creativity in the natural and cosmic processes. It
+was practically inevitable that such a task would be accomplished only
+by an overemphasis on divine immanence and a consequent betrayal of
+religion into a sentimental optimism. When defenders of religious faith
+were borrowing from the quiver of their opponents they would have done
+well to consult Thomas Huxley more and Herbert Spencer less; for Huxley
+was morally much more realistic than Spencer. Spencerian doctrines lent
+themselves more easily to the strategy of linking religious theism
+with the faith of science in the dependability of the universe; but
+there was something lacking in Spencerian optimism which is very vital
+to religion, a sense of the tragic in life and an awareness of the
+frustration which moral purpose and creative will must meet in nature
+and in man. The sentimentality of modern religion is of course older
+than the optimism which it derived from Spencer. Part of it is derived
+from Rousseau and the romanticism of the eighteenth century. Here again
+religion suffered the fate of snatching error while it was borrowing
+truth from its opponents. Renouncing the idea of total depravity which
+was central in medieval religion, and in orthodox Protestantism for
+that matter, it evolved a sentimental overestimate of human virtue
+which is no nearer the truth than the medieval conceptions of original
+sin. It is a strange irony in history that to-day irreligion, in
+the form of deterministic psychology, should elaborate doctrines
+strangely akin to the derogatory estimates of human resources made by
+medieval theologians. So modern churches are involved in an optimistic
+overestimate of the virtue of both man and nature at the very time
+when science tempts men to despair of discovering moral integrity in
+the one and moral meaning in the other. Modern religion is, in short,
+not sufficiently modern. In it eighteenth-century sentimentality and
+nineteenth-century individualism are still claiming victory over the
+ethical and religious prejudices of the Middle Ages. Meanwhile life
+has moved on and the practical needs of modern society demand an ethic
+which is not individualistic and a religion which is not unqualifiedly
+optimistic.
+
+The practical effects of this lack of contact of modern religion
+with the real temper of modern life may be gauged by comparing the
+observations of any average denominational journal of religion upon the
+events of contemporary history with the realistic analyses of secular
+journals. The brutalities of the economic conflict, the disillusioning
+realities of international relations, the monstrous avarice of nations
+and the arrogance of races, all these sins with which the life of
+modern society is cursed are treated with an easy complacency by
+religious observers which contrasts strangely with the frantic anxiety
+of secular idealists. In a recent world conference of the churches
+at Stockholm members of the German delegation objected to what they
+regarded as an identification of the Kingdom of God with the League of
+Nations made by a good bishop in the opening sermon. National prejudice
+may have prompted this criticism but the superior perspective lent by
+bitter experience gave it a measure of justification, and it would be
+applicable to other sermonic interpretations of current history besides
+those of the bishop.
+
+The war itself was a disheartening revelation of the moral obfuscation
+of modern religion when dealing with the tragedies of history. The
+easy partnership of religious sentiment with patriotic fervor has been
+previously ascribed to the natural relation between religion and any
+devotion to an ethical ideal, however imperfect. There is, however,
+yet another reason for the blindness of religious idealists to the
+horrors of war. The monistic orientation of modern religion made it
+necessary for the church to save religious faith by discovering the
+saving virtues in the great evil. It was therefore unable to view the
+realities in proper proportion. For a realistic interpretation of the
+great tragedy modern society had to depend upon secular idealists who
+did not feel called upon to save either God’s or man’s reputation.
+
+Sentimentality is a poor weapon against cynicism, and idealistic
+determinism has no way of defeating determinism of the naturalistic
+type. Since both the latter represent reactions to the former, they
+can be overcome only by bringing these into closer conformity with the
+facts. The freedom and moral integrity of man is not an illusion but
+it is a fact very seriously circumscribed. Transcendent purpose and
+creative will in the universe may be scientifically validated but do
+not thereby become the effective cause of every natural phenomenon.
+What is needed is a philosophy and a religion which will do justice
+both to the purpose and to the frustration which purpose meets in the
+inertia of the concrete world, both to the ideal which fashions the
+real and to the real which defeats the ideal, both to the essential
+harmony and to the inevitable conflict in the cosmos and in the soul.
+In a sense there is not a single dualism in life; rather there are
+many of them. In his own life man may experience a conflict between
+his moral will and the anarchic desires with which nature has endowed
+him; or he may experience a conflict between his cherished values and
+the caprices of nature which know nothing of the economy of values in
+human life. In the cosmic order the conflict is between creativity and
+the resistance which frustrates creative purpose. Whether the dualism
+is defined as one of mind and matter, or thought and extension, or
+force and inertia, or God and the devil, it approximates the real facts
+of life. It may be impossible to do full justice to the two types of
+facts by any set of symbols or definitions; but life gives the lie to
+any attempt by which one is explained completely in terms of the other.
+There is no more reason to-day to deny the reality of God than to
+explain every casual phenomenon in terms of his omnipotent will.
+
+Our interest is in the moral fruits of religious and philosophical
+ideas rather than in their perfect consistency, but it may be noted in
+passing that philosophically competent scientists and scientifically
+competent philosophers arrive at conclusions to-day which are in
+closer accord with a naïve theism than with the monism of absolute
+idealism. They do not of course picture a God who is outside of the
+world and at work upon it as a potter upon his clay; but they do
+justice to both the purpose and the limitation of purpose in the
+creative process. Professor Hobhouse writes: “The evolutionary process
+can best be understood as the effect of a purpose slowly working
+itself out under limiting conditions which it brings successively
+under control.... This would mean not that reality is spiritual or the
+creation of an unconditioned mind ... but that there is a spiritual
+element integral to the structure and movement of reality and that
+evolution is the process by which this principle makes itself master
+of the residual conditions which at first dominate its life and thwart
+its efforts.”[24] It may be a natural overbelief and an inevitable
+anthropomorphism if religion attributes all the characteristics of
+personality to the purpose, “the spiritual element integral to the
+structure and movement of reality.” But if a place for freedom and
+purpose in the cosmic order, however conditioned, is discovered the
+essential affirmation of religious faith is metaphysically verified.
+The values of personality are related to cosmic facts. Professor Alfred
+Whitehead defines God as that in reality which is not concrete but the
+principle of every concrete actuality. He makes the telling observation
+that while a dynamic view of reality may dispense with God as the prime
+mover it must substitute for Aristotle’s prime mover a principle of
+limitation and concretion, since the dynamic nature of reality does
+not account for the various forms in which it is made concrete.[25]
+In other words the faith of religion in both the transcendence
+and immanence of God is given a new metaphysical validation. His
+unchangeableness is “his self-consistency in relation to all change”;
+but this does not justify the deterministic conclusion of a “complete
+self-consistency of the temporal world.” The reality of God and the
+reality of evil as a positive force are thus both accepted.
+
+There is, in short, no reason why religion should not hold to its
+faith in God without either identifying him with or losing him in the
+concrete world. The moral and spiritual values in which religion is
+interested have a basis in concrete actuality. They are on the one hand
+not a mere effervescence on the surface of the concrete, and on the
+other hand they are not the only basis of historical realities. The
+pluralism of William James, which has been criticized as scientifically
+inaccurate and metaphysically inconsistent, seems to have both
+scientific and metaphysical virtues. There is good reason to accept at
+least a qualified dualism not only because it is morally more potent
+than traditional monisms, but because it is metaphysically acceptable.
+It is not to be expected that science will ever invest the concept
+of God with the attributes which religious devotion assigns to it.
+But there is no reason why religious and moral experience should not
+build further upon the foundation laid by science. It is manifestly
+necessary to have some metaphysical basis for religious conviction, for
+there is no spiritual vigor in the conscious self-deception of purely
+subjective religions. But it is not necessary to limit religion to
+the bare concepts which science establishes. It is in fact better for
+religion to forego perfect metaphysical consistency for the sake of
+moral potency. In a sense religion is always forced to choose between
+an adequate metaphysics and an adequate ethics. That is not to say that
+the two interests are incompatible but that they are not identical.
+When there is a conflict between them it is better to leave the
+metaphysical problem with some loose ends than to develop a religion
+which is inimical to moral values. The reason why naïve religions have
+frequently been morally more potent than highly rationalized ones is
+not because the faith which gave them moral fervor was necessarily
+inconsistent with the facts, but because they based their affirmations
+upon facts and experiences which were inconsistent with each other
+or seemed to be but were equally true and equally necessary for the
+maintenance of moral and spiritual energy.
+
+The objection to religious dualism comes not only from those who
+subordinate all advantages to that of rational consistency but also
+from those who believe that it imperils purely religious values. It
+robs God of omnipotence (so the argument runs) and the universe of
+dependability. It gives no certain guarantee of the triumph of personal
+and spiritual values. It may put a note of challenge in religion,
+but it also destroys its comforting assurances. The answer to such
+a criticism is that the moral virtues of dualism are derived from
+precisely that characteristic. It is not easy to challenge to conflict
+and to guarantee victory at one and the same time. By dignifying
+personality religion runs the peril of obscuring the defects of human
+nature; if it makes the triumph of righteousness certain, it may
+incline men to take “moral holidays.” Too much emphasis upon the
+harmonies of the universe may make evil seem unreal. If men are given
+the opportunity, they will extract comfort from religion and forget the
+challenge implied in its faith; which simply means that they will use
+religion to sublimate rather than to qualify their will to live. They
+will accept the assurance of faith that the frustrations of the natural
+world are not permanent, but they will not accept the challenge of
+faith to overcome the corruptions of nature in their own souls.
+
+The perennial conflict between priest and prophet is given in the
+double function of religion. The priest dispenses comfort and the
+prophet makes the challenge of religion potent. The priest is more
+numerous than the prophet because human selfishness is as determining
+in religion as in other fields. Though the priest always defeats
+the prophet in the end, the prophet is avenged because his original
+experience is the reality which makes the priest’s assurance plausible.
+There is no way of guaranteeing the reality of God if someone does
+not make him real in experience, and there is no way of declaring
+the victory of the ideal if someone does not defeat reality in the
+name of the ideal in history. Religion validates itself in spiritual
+experience and moral triumph. Speculation and deduction contribute to
+religious certainty only after experience has laid the foundation for
+faith. It is not possible to free religion altogether of its priestly
+corruptions. But anything which will make it more difficult to accept
+the comforts of faith without accepting its challenges will increase
+the moral potency of religion and decrease the possibility of its
+corruption by those who want to use it for the purpose of insuring the
+dignity of human life without paying the price of moral effort for the
+boon.
+
+There is no reason why the comforting assurances of religion should be
+sacrificed completely. Science is not inimical to the assumption of
+religion that personal and moral values have a basis in the universe
+itself which insures their permanence and their further refinement.
+Though God works his will against the inertia of the concrete world
+and the waywardness of man, neither science nor history justifies
+the conclusion that his resources are not ultimately equal to the
+creative task. The intractableness of the world makes the creative
+and redemptive struggle real but not hopeless. Religion has as much
+right to preach hope as it has to preach repentance. It fails in its
+task if it does not save men from despair as well as from undue pride
+and complacency. There is nothing in either science or history which
+invalidates either function of religion. But science unites with
+moral experience in insisting on the reality and the painfulness of
+the creative process in man and in nature. If the resistance to moral
+purpose in cosmic history is underestimated, it merely serves to
+increase that resistance in the life of man by justifying his moral
+inertia. The needs of a dynamic religion are consistent with scientific
+fact, though not always compatible with a completely consistent
+metaphysics. Science may well combine with religion in persuading man
+that “if hopes are dupes, fear may be liars,” and that he must “work
+out his salvation with fear and trembling.”
+
+
+
+
+                               CHAPTER IX
+
+                               CONCLUSION
+
+
+At the risk of unnecessary repetition it may be well to capitulate the
+most important conclusions which emerge from our study of religion in
+contemporary civilization. Religion is dying in modern civilization not
+only because it has not yet been able to restate its affirmations so
+that they will be consistent with scientific fact, but also because it
+has not been able to make its ethical and social resources available
+for the solution of the moral problems of modern civilization. Its
+rejuvenation therefore waits upon a reorientation of its ethical
+traditions as well as of its theological conceptions. It is under the
+necessity of finding some metaphysical basis for its personalization of
+the universe, but its scientific and philosophical respectability will
+be of no avail if the moral fruits which issue from its affirmations
+and experiences do not actually qualify the brute struggle of life, so
+largely determined by natural forces.
+
+Religion is scientifically verified if freedom and purpose are found to
+have a place in the cosmic processes, and it is ethically justified if
+it helps to create and maintain creative freedom and moral purpose in
+human life. The present moral impotence of Protestant Christianity is
+partially derived from the inadequacy of some of its traditions which
+it inherited out of periods of history which had different moral needs
+than our own day. Its individualism rendered a universal service at the
+dawn of the modern era but survives to-day chiefly as a sanctification
+of the peculiar interests and prejudices of one particular class in
+Western society. The limitations of its ethical traditions are easily
+obscured not only because all religion easily gives the semblance
+of finality to the relativities of history, but because a religion
+which imagines itself devoted to the spirit of Jesus is under the
+temptation of exploiting the prestige of his absolute ethics without
+approximating his ethical position.
+
+The moral effectiveness of religion depends upon its ability to detach
+itself from the historical relativities with which its ideals are
+inevitably compounded in the course of history. The avowed loyalty
+of the Christian church to the spirit of Christ may become the basis
+of such a detachment, since there is little in the gospel of Jesus
+which conforms to the dominant interests of modern life. But the very
+reverence in which Jesus is held may operate to obscure the essential
+genius of his life. Religion is therefore under the necessity of
+developing the critical faculty even while it maintains its naïvete
+and reverence. The necessity of coöperation between the naturally
+incompatible factors of reason and imagination, of intelligence
+and moral dynamic, is really the crux of the religious and moral
+problem in modern civilization. The complexity of modern life demands
+that moral purpose be astutely guided; but moral purpose itself is
+rooted in ultra-rational sanctions and may be destroyed by the same
+intelligence which is needed to direct it. Both humility and love,
+the highest religious virtues, are ultra-rational; yet they cannot
+be achieved in an intricate social life without a discriminating
+intelligence which knows how to uncover covert sins and to discover
+potential virtues. The incidental limitations which every historic type
+of religion reveals can be dealt with only if the religious devotee
+can be persuaded to regard the values of his religion critically;
+yet the cultivation of such a critical spirit may easily lead to the
+enervation of the religious spirit itself. If the highest values of
+religion are themselves conditioned rather than absolute, it must be
+possible to assign them a place in the hierarchy of values, without
+encouraging a complete loss of confidence in them. Such a task is
+difficult but not impossible. A robust moral idealism will help
+to create a spiritual fervor which will not be easily defeated by
+any superficial intellectualism. If institutions of religion gave
+preference to the ethical rather than the intellectual problem of
+religious faith, it might be possible to create a religious spirit
+sufficiently vigorous to permit the free play of the critical faculties
+without a loss of moral or spiritual dynamic. Obviously civilization
+cannot afford to dispense with either the irrational moral will or
+the critical intelligence by which it is made effective in complex
+situations. Men need to subject all partial moral achievements to
+comparison with the absolute standards of truth, beauty and goodness of
+their religious faith, and yet be able to see and willing to concede
+the relativities in the absolute values of their devotion. They can
+be saved from a morality of mere utilitarianism only by the religious
+quest for an absolute moral standard; yet they need to be discerning
+enough to see that every ethical achievement, even when inspired by
+religious motives, is tinged with prudential self-interest. They must
+continue to strive after freedom and yet realize that human life and
+character is largely determined by environment. If they seek happiness,
+divorced from fortune, they nevertheless cannot escape the duty of
+making the material world serve human welfare. Their ability to
+discover the transcendent values in human personality has value only
+if they maintain faith in human nature after they have discovered its
+imperfections. They must search after the perfect goodness in God and
+yet be prepared to face the cruelties of life without either denying
+their reality or being driven to despair by them.
+
+If it is true that moral sincerity is even more necessary to a vital
+religion in modern life than intellectual modernity, a strategy must
+be developed to sever religious idealism from the unethical tendencies
+in modern civilization. Any strategy which will succeed in such an
+enterprise will savor of asceticism. The limitations of historic
+asceticism may teach the present how to avoid inevitable pitfalls
+in the task of detaching religious idealism from the corruptions of
+society. An asceticism which flees the world and develops its saints at
+the price of abandoning industrial civilization even more completely to
+the natural and anarchic forces which operate in its life, is obviously
+of no use to modern civilization. Yet a type of asceticism is needed,
+if for no other reason, because greed is the dominant motive of Western
+civilization and nothing less than an ascetic discipline will free
+religious idealism from its entanglement with the covetousness of
+modern life. Since Western life is intent upon material advantages,
+no religious idealism can maintain any degree of purity if it does
+not enter into a conscious conflict with the civilization in which it
+functions and succeed in setting some bounds to the expansive desires
+of men and of nations.
+
+The church as such has sufficient spiritual resources to become the
+recruiting ground for such a movement of detachment, but it is too
+much to hope that it will take the leadership in it. It is too deeply
+enmeshed with the interests and prejudices of contemporary civilization
+to possess the insight and courage which the enterprise requires. Such
+a movement of detachment must be, as it has always been, a minority
+movement. But the minority ought not detach itself from the majority
+so completely that it will sacrifice the possibility of acting as
+a leaven in it. There is no force or strategy which can prevent the
+great majority from using religion to give human personality dignity
+and self-respect without a serious effort to approximate a moral
+ideal which would justify religion’s estimate of human worth. Some
+types of religion will continue to obscure the defects in nature and
+human nature. They will reassure the perplexed soul by recounting the
+victories of the past without seeking new triumphs. They will build
+systems of faith upon past experiences without any effort to validate
+or amend them in fresh experience. Thus rejuvenation and progress must
+come from the few who understand the fuller implications of the faith
+which they share with the multitudes whose eyes are holden and who lack
+the courage to follow even such visions as may come to them.
+
+A highly spiritual religion cannot be an esoteric possession to which
+the multitudes may never aspire. It cannot afford to lose confidence
+in the multitudes; yet it must resist the gravitation toward moral
+mediocrity among them. It certainly must avoid the cultivation of
+a priestly cult into which the layman cannot be initiated. If the
+modern movement of detachment is to be effective it must in fact be
+a layman’s movement; for it must express itself in rebuilding the
+social order rather than in building new religious institutions. Its
+most effective ministers will be laymen who will lack neither the
+technical skill nor the spiritual resource to deal with the practical
+problems of industry and politics. Religious teachers may help to
+inspire such a movement, but its efficacy will depend upon those who
+are engaged in the world’s work. If the greed of Western civilization
+is to be qualified by religious idealism, it will be accomplished by
+men who use and direct the machines of modern industry without making
+mechanical efficiency an end in itself and without succumbing to the
+lure of the material rewards which come so easily to those who are
+proficient in the industrial enterprise. A revival of either puritan
+or monastic asceticism will be unequal to the task which faces modern
+religion. Puritanism sanctified economic power, and monasticism fled
+its responsibilities. The new asceticism must produce spiritualized
+technicians who will continue to conquer and exploit nature in the
+interest of human welfare, but who will regard their task as a social
+service and scorn to take a larger share of the returns of industry
+than is justified by reasonable and carefully scrutinized needs. The
+new asceticism must, in short, be in the world and yet not of the
+world. It must be truly scientific in gauging the advantage to human
+personality in the conquest of nature and truly religious in finding
+a basis for human happiness beyond the material rewards which this
+conquest returns.
+
+If Christian idealists are to make religion socially effective they
+will be forced to detach themselves from the dominant secular desires
+of the nations as well as from the greed of economic groups. The
+socially minded portion of the church has in fact made some progress in
+this direction. The lessons of the World War have not been altogether
+futile, and there is a wholesome mood of repentance in the church
+for its easy connivance with an unethical nationalism in the past
+centuries. The church has not yet had an opportunity to prove the
+sincerity of its contrition in this matter, for the moment of crisis
+has not yet come. In that moment, which will come inevitably, many
+religiously inspired peace idealists will no doubt bow their knees to
+Baal; but there is real reason to hope that there is a new conscience
+in the church which will resist the claims of an unethical nationalism
+to the utmost. Perhaps the greatest weakness of the religious idealists
+who have become critical of an unethical nationalism is that they are
+not sufficiently aware of the intimate and organic relation between
+the imperialism of nations and the whole tendency of avarice which
+characterizes Western life. Too few realize that it is not possible
+to detach oneself from an unethical nationalism if one continues to
+enjoy the material advantages which flow from the nation’s unqualified
+insistence upon the right to hold its advantages against the world.
+It may be impossible to arrive at a complete equalization of living
+standards among all individuals who desire to achieve and express the
+ideal of the brotherhood of man. But a religious idealism which does
+not move in that direction will be convicted of insincerity and moral
+confusion. Unrepentant political realists may well pour contempt upon
+it and justly accuse those who profess it of profiting from policies
+which they ostensibly condemn. Religious idealism is in desperate need
+of a strategy which will express its detachment from the dominant
+desires and impulses of modern civilization by something more than
+desultory and usually qualified criticism of unethical political ideals
+and industrial policies.
+
+The old challenge “be ye not conformed to this world” must be accepted
+anew in a more heroic fashion than is customary in enlightened
+religious circles. The policy of building a Kingdom of God by
+regenerating individual lives has become discredited, not because
+moral character is dispensable to a wholesome social life, but
+because the criteria of moral character have been too individualistic
+to serve the needs of modern society. It is important enough that
+men gain some control over their immediate desires and discipline
+their momentary passions. Society is always in need of integrated
+personalities. But the validity of the religious ideal must finally
+be judged by its capacity to create not only unified personalities
+but personalities which know how to restrain their expansive desires
+for the sake of social peace. Religion intensifies selfishness
+when it adds sanctity to a respectable selfish life and creates a
+self-respect which is impervious to emotions of contrition. If the
+religious ideal is to gain any potency in modern life it must be able
+to convict men of sin and inspire them to a conversion. But the sins
+of which they need most to be convicted are those which are covert
+in the social and economic relations which custom has hallowed;
+and the conversion of life which is most needed is that which will
+express itself in terms of the economic and political relationships
+in which men live. Not to be conformed to this world, if it is to
+have any real meaning in modern life, will mean that the religiously
+inspired soul knows how to defeat the avarice and to overcome the
+indifference to the worth of human personality which inheres in the
+whole economic and industrial structure of modern society. Practically
+and individually such a detachment from the world will express itself
+in the sacrifice of material advantages for the sake of realizing a
+more intimate fellowship with the underprivileged, in the careful
+analysis of industrial policies from the standpoint of their effect
+upon personality, in an unwillingness to profit by social and economic
+practices and policies which are fundamentally unethical and in a
+willingness to bear some pain for the sake of expressing loyalty to the
+community of mankind as against all lesser and conflicting loyalties.
+
+The hope of persuading any large number of religious people to
+express their spiritual convictions in any such socially tangible
+and revolutionary terms is made rather desperate by the fact that
+the modern church seems no more inclined to undertake the task of
+spiritual regeneration than the orthodox church. The orthodox church
+still possesses some of the religious fervor which is required to
+defy the world, but it is too anti-rational in its theology to gain
+the respect of the intelligent classes and too individualistic in its
+ethics to express religious idealism in socially helpful terms. The
+modern churches are not acutely conscious of any serious defects in
+contemporary civilization. If they do recognize limitations in the
+social order, they give themselves to the pleasant hope that time
+and natural progress will bring inevitable triumph to every virtuous
+enterprise. They have relegated the eschatological note of the gospel,
+by which Jesus expressed his sense of the tragic, to the limbo of
+theological antiquities. The possibility of a catastrophe seems never
+to arouse their fears or to give energy to their ambitions. Life,
+according to their gospel, goes automatically from grace to grace and
+from strength to strength.
+
+Though neither the orthodox nor the modern wing of the Christian
+church seems capable of initiating a genuine religious revival which
+will evolve a morality capable of challenging and maintaining itself
+against the dominant desires of modern civilization and yet expressing
+itself in terms relevant to civilization’s needs, there are resources
+in the Christian religion which make it the inevitable basis of any
+spiritual regeneration of Western civilization. Christianity, as Dr.
+Ernst Troeltsch has observed, is the fate of Western society. Spiritual
+idealisms of other cultures and societies may aid it in reclaiming its
+own highest resources; and any universal religion capable of inspiring
+an ultimately unified world culture may borrow from other religions.
+But the task of redeeming Western society rests in a peculiar sense
+upon Christianity. It is congenial to the energy and activism of
+Western peoples and is yet capable of setting bounds to their expansive
+desires. It has reduced the eternal conflict between self-assertion and
+self-denial to the paradox of self-assertion through self-denial and
+made the cross the symbol of life’s highest achievement. Its optimism
+is rooted in pessimism and it is therefore able to preach both
+repentance and hope. It is able to condemn the world without enervating
+life and to create faith without breeding illusions. Its adoration
+of Jesus sometimes obscures the real genius of his life but cannot
+permanently destroy the fruitfulness of his inspiration. If there is
+any lack of identity between the Jesus of history and the Christ of
+religious experience, the Jesus of history is nevertheless more capable
+of giving historical reality to the necessary Christ idea than any
+character of history. Intelligence will gradually soften prejudices and
+allay the conflict between Christianity and the Judaism out of which it
+emerged and with which it is organically related so that the religions
+of the prophetic ideal may make common cause. Such a coöperation will
+probably never lead to complete fusion because Christianity cannot
+afford to sacrifice the Christ idea and the Jews will continue to
+regard this as a Hellenistic and unacceptable element in the Christian
+religion. Christianity will not disavow it, for it gives dramatic
+force and historical concretion to its theism and dualism. The God
+of our devotion is veritably revealed most adequately in the most
+perfect personality we know, as he is potentially revealed in all
+personal values; and his conflict with the inertia of the concrete and
+historical world is expressed most vividly in the cross of Christ.
+When dealing with life’s ultimates, symbolism is indispensable, and a
+symbolism which has a basis in historic incident is most effective. The
+idea of a potent but yet suffering divine ideal which is defeated by
+the world but gains its victory in the defeat must remain basic in any
+morally creative world view.
+
+It is possible of course that the resources of the Christian religion
+will not be made available in time to save Western civilization from
+moral bankruptcy. It is possible that life will continue to run its
+course of conflict between the unrestrained ambitions and desires of
+individuals and groups until unqualified self-assertiveness will issue
+in mutual destruction. It is possible that cynicism will continue
+to discount the moral potentialities of human nature while science
+continues to give plausibility to a depreciation of the moral factors
+in life by arming the brute in man and making his vices more deadly.
+Civilization may be beyond moral redemption; but if it is to be
+redeemed a religiously inspired moral idealism must aid in the task.
+A purely naturalistic ethics will not only be overcome by a sense
+of frustration and sink into despair, but it will lack the force to
+restrain the self-will and self-interest of men and of nations. If life
+cannot be centered in something beyond nature, it will not be possible
+to lift men above the brute struggle for survival. Intelligence may
+mitigate its cruelties and prudence may prompt men to eliminate its
+worst inhumanities; but the increased power which the conquest of
+nature supplies merely substitutes unintended cruelties for those which
+have been consciously abolished. Living on the naturalistic level men
+are bound to contend for life’s physical prizes and to use physical
+force in the contest with more and more deadly effect.
+
+It is the virtue of a vital religious idealism that it lifts life
+above the level of nature and makes the development of an ethical
+personality the ultimate goal of human existence. Without the vivid
+and realistic other-worldly hopes and fears with which the medieval
+church disciplined life and which the modern church cannot restore,
+it may seem that religion possesses no force which could counteract
+the primitive impulses which move men and nations. But these hopes
+and fears were merely crude ways of expressing the idea that life
+is fundamentally moral and that its destiny transcends the animal
+conflict. Life will continue to develop in the direction of the ideal
+implicit in it and every organism is impelled to move toward the
+goal of its own completeness. The ideal implicit in human character
+is that of ethical freedom; and awakened personalities will seek to
+realize that ideal. They will seek to realize it even at the expense
+of physical sacrifices and pain. They will learn how to find life by
+losing it. It is the quest for what is not real but is always becoming
+real, for what is not true but is always becoming true, that makes man
+incurably religious. Modern religion is therefore not without resource
+in contending against the forces of nature. The great difficulty is
+that the struggle for ethical integrity is so painful that most men are
+tempted to seek some short-cut to it; and organized religion generally
+expresses the hopes and desires of this easygoing multitude. In the
+medieval church magic provided the short-cut. In the modern church
+it is provided by a sanctified prudence which teaches men how to be
+unselfish and selfish at the same time, how to gain moral self-respect
+without sacrificing too many temporal advantages. The hope of a revival
+of ethical religion and of an ethical reconstruction of society
+therefore depends, as it did in the past, upon a renunciation of the
+religious short-cuts which lead to hypocrisy.
+
+If religious aspiration can be united with perfect moral sincerity a
+fruitful partnership may again be established between religion and
+morality. The moral struggle will give meaning to the affirmations
+of religion and the religious experience will strengthen the
+moral purpose. While religion does not issue automatically in
+moral action and the moral enterprise does not inevitably create
+religious experience and hope, there is nevertheless a relation of
+interdependence between religious aspiration and moral endeavor. This
+relationship is due to the fact that a perfect ethical freedom is
+possible only if personality is withdrawn from or lifted above the
+immediate necessities of the physical life. The other-worldly hopes and
+the mystical experience of religion by which the strategy of withdrawal
+and transcendence has been effected is momentarily discredited because
+it has resulted too frequently in absolving the soul of its moral
+responsibilities in the specific problems of society. But the fact that
+religious hopes and religious experiences may help people to escape the
+onerous duties of the moral enterprise cannot permanently obscure the
+need of religious experience and religious hope for the development of
+an ethical life. If men are to center their life in moral purpose they
+must reassure themselves periodically on the moral purpose in life
+itself. That is mysticism and prayer. If they are to develop a perfect
+ethical freedom which makes no compromises with life’s immediate
+necessities, they must find a content and a meaning in life beyond its
+present conflict of interests and desires. That is other-worldliness.
+If the quest for ethical freedom and integrity does not lead to
+religious experience and religious hope, it will issue in despair.
+If the assurances of religious hope and the certainties of religious
+experience are not accompanied by sincere moral effort, they result in
+hypocrisy. The hope of an ethical society is therefore bound up in the
+possibility of restoring ethical integrity to religion and religious
+dynamic to the moral effect.
+
+
+                              [Footnotes]
+
+[1] Professor Alfred Whitehead, in his _Science and the Modern World_
+and _Religion in the Making_, indicates the inevitable anti-mechanistic
+trend of philosophical thought as it achieves mastery of the varied
+fields of modern science.
+
+[2] _Prospects of Industrial Civilization_, page 218.
+
+[3] Matthew v. 43–48.
+
+[4] _The Decline of the West._
+
+[5] Stuart Mill’s refutation of LePlay’s thesis that the salvation of
+the working classes can come only through the benevolence of their
+superiors is worth quoting in this connection: “No times can be pointed
+out in which the higher classes of this or any other country performed
+a part even distantly resembling the one assigned to them in this
+theory. All privileged and powerful classes have used their power in
+the interest of their own selfishness. I do not affirm that what has
+always been must always be. This at least seems to be undeniable, that
+long before superior classes could be sufficiently inspired to govern
+in the tutelary manner supposed, the inferior classes would be too much
+improved to be governed.”
+
+[6] _Gesammelte Aufsaetze zur Religions-Sociologie._
+
+[7] _Religion and the Rise of Capitalism._
+
+[8] Quoted by Tawney, _op. cit._
+
+[9] The relation of puritanism to modern capitalism has been most
+exhaustively treated by Max Weber in his essay on “Die Protestantische
+Ethic und der Geist des Kapitalismus.”
+
+[10] Quoted in Southey’s _Life of Wesley_, Chapter xxix.
+
+[11] Both Max Weber and E. Troeltsch make much of the relation of
+Calvinism to medieval asceticism. See Max Weber, _op. cit._, and E.
+Troeltsch, _Sociallehren der Christlichen Kirche_.
+
+[12] Romans vii. 19–25.
+
+[13] _Grosser Sermon vom Wucher_ (_Werke_, Vol. IV, page 49).
+
+[14] Article 3 in Twelve Articles, quoted by J. S. Shapiro in _Social
+Reform and the Reformation_.
+
+[15] In his _Education of Henry Adams_, Chapter x.
+
+[16] Commenting on the first Hague conference Count Holstein of the
+German foreign office made some realistic observations which may not
+have justified his obstructive conclusions but which are nevertheless
+pertinent. He wrote: “Subjects of international law are states and not
+individuals. It will therefore be formally difficult and practically
+impossible to isolate the individual judge from the passions and
+interests of the whole in a way that happens or is supposed to happen
+in private law. Of all conceivable judges Great Powers are least
+disinterested, for in every conceivable question of any importance that
+may come up all Great Powers are interested _à un degre quelconque_. An
+impartial decision is therefore excluded by the nature of things....
+Small disinterested states as subjects, small questions as objects of
+arbitral decision are conceivable; great states and great questions are
+not.” (Quoted by Dickinson in _International Anarchy_, p. 351.)
+
+[17] _Social Evolution_, page 140.
+
+[18] James iv. 2–4.
+
+[19] II Corinthians iv. 16.
+
+[20] In _Civilization and Ethics_ and _The Decay and Restoration of
+Civilization_.
+
+[21] _Christianity and Other World Religions._
+
+[22] _Religion in the Making_, page 50.
+
+[23] George Santayana in _Religion and Reason_, page 176.
+
+[24] In _Development and Purpose_, page 360.
+
+[25] In _Religion in the Making_.
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 77050 ***
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+    <title>
+      Does civilization need religion? | Project Gutenberg
+    </title>
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+<body>
+<div style='text-align:center'>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 77050 ***</div>
+
+
+<h1>
+DOES CIVILIZATION<br>
+NEED RELIGION?
+</h1>
+
+<p class="center">
+<i>A Study in the Social Resources</i><br>
+<i>and Limitations of Religion</i><br>
+<i>in Modern Life</i><br>
+<br>
+<br>
+BY<br>
+<span style="font-size:x-large">REINHOLD NIEBUHR</span><br>
+<br>
+<br>
+NEW YORK<br>
+THE MACMILLAN COMPANY<br>
+1927<br>
+<i>All rights reserved</i>
+</p>
+
+<hr>
+<p class="center">
+<span class="smcap">Copyright</span>, 1927,<br>
+<span class="smcap">By</span> THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.<br>
+<br>
+Set up and electrotyped.<br>
+Published December, 1927.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+SET UP BY BROWN BROTHERS, LINOTYPERS<br>
+<i>Printed in the United States of America by</i><br>
+THE FERRIS PRINTING COMPANY, NEW YORK
+</p>
+
+<hr>
+<div class="center">
+TO THE MEMORY OF MY FATHER<br>
+<br>
+<span class="smaller">WHO TAUGHT ME THAT THE CRITICAL<br>
+FACULTY CAN BE UNITED WITH A<br>
+REVERENT SPIRIT</span><br>
+<br>
+<i>and</i><br>
+<br>
+TO MY MOTHER<br>
+<br>
+<span class="smaller">WHO FOR TWELVE YEARS HAS SHARED<br>
+WITH ME THE WORK OF A<br>
+CHRISTIAN PASTORATE</span>
+</div>
+
+<hr>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+<div class="chapter">
+  <h2 class="nobreak" id="CONTENTS">
+    CONTENTS
+  </h2>
+</div>
+
+<table>
+  <tr>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdl smaller">CHAPTER</td>
+    <td class="tdr smaller">PAGE</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">I.</td>
+    <td class="tdl">The State of Religion in Modern Society</td>
+    <td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_1">1</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">II.</td>
+    <td class="tdl">Nature and Civilization as Foes of Personality</td>
+    <td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_19">19</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">III.</td>
+    <td class="tdl">The Social Resources of Religion</td>
+    <td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_35">35</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">IV.</td>
+    <td class="tdl">The Social Conservatism of Modern Religion</td>
+    <td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_63">63</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">V.</td>
+    <td class="tdl">Religion and Life: Conflict and Compromise</td>
+    <td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_79">79</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">VI.</td>
+    <td class="tdl">Social Complexity and Ethical Impotence</td>
+    <td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_124">124</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">VII.</td>
+    <td class="tdl">Transcending and Transforming the World</td>
+    <td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_165">165</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">VIII.</td>
+    <td class="tdl">A Philosophical Basis for an Ethical Religion</td>
+    <td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_190">190</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">IX.</td>
+    <td class="tdl">Conclusion</td>
+    <td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_220">220</a></td>
+  </tr>
+</table>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_1">[1]</span></p>
+  <div class="center fake-h1">
+    DOES CIVILIZATION NEED
+    RELIGION?
+  </div>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+<div class="chapter">
+  <h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_I">
+    CHAPTER I
+    <br>
+    THE STATE OF RELIGION IN MODERN SOCIETY
+  </h2>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>Religion is not in a robust state of health
+in modern civilization. Vast multitudes, particularly
+in industrial and urban centers, live
+without seeking its sanctions for their actions
+and die without claiming its comforts in their
+extremities. While its influence is still considerable
+among agrarians and the middle
+classes of the city, an ever-increasing number
+of the privileged classes are indifferent to its
+values. Spiritual and moral forces have always
+been in a perennial state of decay in those
+circles of society in which physical ease and
+cultural advantages combine to make intellectual
+scruples more pressing than moral
+ones. But modern scientific education has
+greatly multiplied the intellectual difficulties
+of religion and the increasing opulence of
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_2">[2]</span>
+Western life has rendered its moral problems
+more perplexing. Industrial workers, in as
+far as they are socially self-conscious, are
+almost universally inimical to religion, and
+their opposition represents a type of anti-religious
+sentiment which is entirely new in
+history.</p>
+
+<p>Since the dawn of the modern era the tides
+of faith have ebbed and flowed so that it is not
+easy to chart their general course; but it is
+difficult to escape the conclusion that each new
+tide has barely exceeded the mark left by a
+previous ebb. The stream of religious life has
+been deepened at times, as in the Protestant
+Reformation, but the impartial observer will
+note that it has been narrowed as well. A
+psychology of defeat, of which both fundamentalism
+and modernism are symptoms, has
+gripped the forces of religion. Extreme
+orthodoxy betrays by its very frenzy that the
+poison of scepticism has entered the soul of the
+church; for men insist most vehemently upon
+their certainties when their hold upon them has
+been shaken. Frantic orthodoxy is a method
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_3">[3]</span>
+for obscuring doubt. Liberalism tries vainly
+to give each new strategic retreat the semblance
+of a victorious engagement. To retreat from
+untenable positions is no doubt a necessary
+step in preparation for new advances; but this
+necessary strategy has not been accompanied
+by the kind of spiritual vigor which would
+promise ultimate victory. The general tendencies
+toward the secularization of life have
+been consistent enough to prompt its foes to
+predict religion’s ultimate extinction as a
+major interest of mankind and to tempt even
+friendly observers to regard its future with
+grave apprehension. There are indeed many
+forms of religion which are clearly vestigial
+remnants of another day with other interests.
+They have no vital influence upon the life of
+modern man, and their continued existence
+only proves that history, like nature, is slow to
+destroy what it has found useless, and even
+slower to inter what it has destroyed. Scattered
+among the living forms of each civilization are
+the whitened bones of what was once flesh and
+blood.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_4">[4]</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>The sickness of faith in our day may be the
+senility which precedes death; on the other
+hand, it may be a specific malady which time
+and thought can cure. If history is slow to
+destroy what has become useless, it may be as
+patient and persistent in reviving what is useful
+but seems dead. Five hundred years are
+but a short span in history, and a constant tendency
+over such a period may lead to premature
+conclusions. If religion contains indispensable
+resources for the life of man, its
+revival waits only upon the elimination of
+those maladjustments which have hindered it
+from making its resources available for the
+citizen of the modern era. Whatever may be
+said of specific religions and religious forms, it
+is difficult to imagine man without religion;
+for religion is the champion of personality in a
+seemingly impersonal world. It prompts man
+to organize his various impulses, inherited and
+acquired, into a moral unity; it persuades him,
+when its vitality is unimpaired, to regard his
+fellows with an appreciation commensurate
+with his own self-respect; and it finally discovers
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_5">[5]</span>
+and creates a universe in which the
+human spirit is guaranteed security against the
+forces of nature which always seem to reduce
+it to a mere effervescence unable to outlast the
+collocation of forces which produced it. The
+plight of religion in our own day is due to the
+fact that it has been more than ordinarily
+pressed by foes on the two lines on which it
+defends the dignity and value of personality.
+The sciences have greatly complicated the
+problem of maintaining the plausibility of
+the personalization of the universe by which
+religion guarantees the worth of human personality;
+and science applied to the world’s
+work has created a type of society in which
+human personality is easily debased. The pure
+sciences have revealed a world of nature much
+more impersonal and, seemingly, much less
+amenable to a divine will and to human needs
+than had been traditionally assumed; and the
+applied sciences have created an impersonal
+civilization in which human relations are so
+complex, its groups and units so large, its
+processes so impersonal, the production of
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_6">[6]</span>
+things so important, and ethical action so difficult,
+that personality is both dwarfed and outraged
+in it.</p>
+
+<p>Personality is that type of reality which is
+self-conscious and self-determining. The concept
+of personality is valid only in a universe
+in which creative freedom is developed and
+maintained in individual life as well as in the
+universe. Religion therefore needs the support
+of both metaphysics and ethics. It tries to
+prompt man to ethical action by the sublime
+assumption that the universe is itself ethical
+in its ultimate nature whatever data to the
+contrary the immediate and obvious scene may
+reveal; and through the cultivation of the
+ethical life in man it seeks to make such a
+personalization of the universe both necessary
+and plausible. It teaches men to find God by
+loving their brothers, and to love their brothers
+because they have found God. It inspires a
+mystical reverence for human personality,
+prompted by the discovery and creation of a
+universe in which personality is the supreme
+power and value; and it persuades men to
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_7">[7]</span>
+discover personal values in the universe because
+they have first come upon clues to the transcendent
+value of personality in the lives of their
+fellows. Its ethics is dependent upon its metaphysics
+and its metaphysics is rooted in its
+ethics. Religion is thus obviously placed in a
+desperate plight when its metaphysics and its
+ethics are imperiled at the same time. It must
+face and do battle with two hosts of enemies,
+those who do not believe in men because they
+do not believe in God, and those who do not
+believe in God because modern civilization has
+robbed them of their faith in the moral
+integrity of men.</p>
+
+<p>Since it is difficult to fight on two fronts at
+the same time, the forces of religion have been
+forced to choose one of the two fronts for
+their major defensive effort. Perhaps it was
+inevitable that they should choose the easier
+task. It is easier to challenge the idea of an
+impersonal universe than to change the fact
+of an impersonal civilization. That is what the
+modern church has done and is doing. It is
+spending all its energy in discounting the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_8">[8]</span>
+excessive claims of a deterministic science. It
+has exhausted its ingenuity in retreating from
+the untenable positions of an orthodoxy which
+overstated the freedom and the virtue in the
+physical universe and therefore aggravated the
+very determinism by which it was defeated.
+Outraged truth has a way of avenging itself.
+The idea of a capricious God working his will
+in the universe without the restraint of law or
+the hindrance of any circumstance helped to
+create the concept of a mechanistic world in
+which all freedom is an illusion and therefore
+all morality a sham. Thus the strategic
+retreats of religion in the field of metaphysics
+have been the necessary prelude to any new
+religious advance. Religion may in fact be
+forced to make some concessions which even
+modern liberalism seems still unwilling to
+make. Modern religionists, particularly popular
+apologists are inclined to add the word
+creative to the word evolution, and assume that
+their problem is solved. The modern church
+has very generally borrowed its apologetic
+strategy from John Fiske and Henry Drummond,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_9">[9]</span>
+and has tried to visualize a God who
+differed from older conception only in this—that
+he took more time to gain his ends than
+had once been assumed. The important fact
+which has escaped many modern defenders of
+the faith is that the patience of the creative
+will is a necessary characteristic rather than
+a self-imposed restraint. There is a stubborn
+inertia in every type of reality which offers
+resistance to each new step in creation, so that
+an emerging type of reality is always in some
+sense a compromise between the creative will
+and the established facts of the concrete world.
+Whether we view the inorganic world, organic
+life or the world of personal and moral values,
+each new type of reality represents in some
+sense a defeat of God as well as a revelation
+of him. Religious apologetics will probably
+be forced to concede this fact more generously
+than has been its wont before it can bring
+religious affirmations into harmony with
+scientific facts. Modern liberalism is steeped
+in a religious optimism which is true to the
+facts of neither the world of nature nor the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_10">[10]</span>
+world of history. The ultimate worth of
+human personality in the universe may not be
+guaranteed as immediately nor as obviously as
+liberal religion seems inclined to assume.
+Liberal religion may be forced to discard its
+metaphysical and theological monisms, which
+have been its support even more than orthodoxy’s,
+and concede that freedom and
+creativity in both man and the cosmic order
+are more seriously circumscribed than religion
+had assumed. But after that concession is
+made it is not likely that the idea of freedom,
+and the dignity of personality which is associated
+with it, will ever be completely discredited,
+whatever may be the deterministic
+obsessions of modern science. The various
+sciences can momentarily afford to indulge in
+their various determinisms because the prestige
+of metaphysics as a coördinator of the sciences
+has been destroyed for the time being. Each
+science is therefore able to disavow the authority
+of metaphysics and work upon the basis
+of its own metaphysical assumptions, which
+are usually unreflective and generally deterministic.
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_11">[11]</span>
+But the bulk of new knowledge
+which has momentarily destroyed the authority
+of any unifying perspective must in time be
+mastered by philosophical thought; and absolute
+determinism is bound to be discredited in
+such a development.&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_1_1" href="#Footnote_1_1" class="fnanchor">[1]</a></p>
+
+<p>There can be no question but that the
+development of the physical sciences has permanently
+increased the difficulty of justifying
+the personalization of the universe upon which
+all religious affirmations are based. Every
+new form of reality is so closely linked to every
+preceding form out of which it emerges that
+it is not easy to discern the place where free
+creativity functions. Yet no total view of
+reality can ever be permanently mechanistic,
+for new types of reality do emerge and science
+is able to explain only the process and not the
+cause of their emergence.</p>
+
+<p>Important, then, as the metaphysical problem
+of religion is, it is not the only problem
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_12">[12]</span>
+which it faces. Though it is a real task to
+reinterpret religious truth in the light of
+modern science, it is by no means a hopeless
+one; and though it is necessary, it is not the
+only necessary task. In the light of modern
+philosophical inquiries it is justifiable to
+assume that the most needed hypotheses of
+religion are metaphysically defensible. In the
+present situation of religion in civilization, it
+is more necessary to inquire if and how the
+peculiar attitudes and the unique life which
+proceeds from a religious interpretation of the
+universe may be made to serve the needs of
+men in modern civilization. The fact is that
+more men in our modern era are irreligious
+because religion has failed to make civilization
+ethical than because it has failed to maintain
+its intellectual respectability. For every person
+who disavows religion because some ancient
+and unrevised dogma outrages his intelligence,
+several become irreligious because the social
+impotence of religion outrages their conscience.
+Religion never lacks moral fruits so long as it
+has any vitality. It has been placed in such a
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_13">[13]</span>
+sorry plight in fulfilling its ethical task in
+modern civilization because the mechanization
+of society has made an ethical life for the
+individual at once more necessary and
+more difficult, and failure more obvious,
+than in any previous civilization. If we
+are not less ethical than our fathers, our
+happiness is certainly more dependent than
+that of our fathers upon the ethical character
+of our society. Rapid means of commerce and
+communication have brought us into terms of
+intimacy with all the world without increasing
+the spiritual dynamic and ethical intelligence
+which makes such close contact sufferable. We
+have multiplied the tools of destruction which
+a confused conscience may wield and have thus
+armed the world of nature which lives in the
+soul of man by the same science by which we
+imagined ourselves to have conquered nature.
+We have developed so complex a society that
+it cannot be made ethical by moral goodwill
+alone, if moral purpose is not astutely guided.
+Lacking social intelligence, modern civilization
+has thus robbed man of confidence in his own
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_14">[14]</span>
+and his neighbor’s moral integrity even when
+ethical motives were not totally lacking.
+Civilization with its impersonal and mechanized
+relationships tends on the one hand to make
+society less ethical, and on the other to reveal
+its immoralities more vividly than in any previous
+age. Religion has a relation to both
+cause and effect to the moral life. Both its
+friends and its foes are inclined to judge it by
+its moral fruits, regarding it as primarily the
+root, fancied or real, of morality. Yet morality
+is as much the root as the fruit of religion;
+for religious sentiment develops out of moral
+experience and religious convictions are the
+logic by which moral life justifies itself. In a
+civilization in which the dominant motives and
+basic relationships are unethical, religion is
+therefore doubly affected. The immoralities
+which bring the reproach of impotence upon it
+are also the reason for the impotence. Thus
+modern civilization creates a temper of scorn
+for a religion which fails to challenge recognized
+social iniquities, and at the same time it
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_15">[15]</span>
+destroys the vitality which religion needs to
+issue such a challenge. The defection of the
+industrial workers from religious life and
+institutions, one of the most significant phenomena
+of our time, has this double significance.
+The industrial worker is indifferent to
+religion, partly because he is enmeshed in
+relations which are so impersonal and fundamentally
+so unethical that his religious sense
+atrophies in him. On the other hand he is
+hostile to religion because he observes the
+ethical impotence of the religion of the privileged
+classes, particularly in its failure to
+effect improvement in economic and social
+attitudes. The industrial worker raises a
+general characteristic of modern urban man to
+a unique degree. His own experiences help him
+to see the moral limitations of modern civilization
+more clearly than do the more privileged
+classes; but what is true of him is generally
+true of all members of a complex society in
+which human relations are impersonal and
+complicated. If religion is senescent in modern
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_16">[16]</span>
+civilization, its social impotence is as
+responsible for its decline as is its metaphysical
+maladjustment.</p>
+
+<p>The restoration of its vitality must wait
+upon the adjustment of its tenets and the
+reorganization of its life to meet the problems
+which both the pure and the applied sciences,
+which both the depersonalization of the universe
+and the depersonalization of civilization,
+have created. The metaphysical problem of
+religion cannot be depreciated. In the long
+run religion must be able to impress the mind
+of modern man with the essential plausibility
+and scientific respectability of its fundamental
+affirmations. But the scientific respectability
+of religious affirmations will not avail if the life
+which issues from them will not help to solve
+man’s urgent social problems. If modern
+churches continue to prefer their intellectual
+to their ethical problems, they will merely
+succeed in maintaining a vestige of religion in
+those classes which are not sensitive enough to
+feel and not unfortunate enough to suffer from
+the moral limitations of modern society. An
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_17">[17]</span>
+unethical civilization will inevitably destroy the
+vitality of the religion of the victims and the
+sincerity and moral prestige of the religion of
+the beneficiaries of its unethical inequalities.</p>
+
+<p>The future of religion and the future of
+civilization are thus hung in the same balance.
+Both as a means to a moral end and as an end
+in itself, for which the moral life is the means,
+the future of religion is involved in the ethical
+reconstruction of modern society. Social and
+economic problems are not the only problems
+which fret the mind and engage the interest of
+modern men. But they are proportionately
+more important in an advanced than in a
+primitive society. Modern men face no problem
+that is greater than that of their aggregate
+existence. How can they live in some kind
+of decent harmony with their fellow men when
+the size and intricacy of their social machinery
+tends continually to aggravate the vices which
+make human life inhuman? How shall they
+gain mastery over the instruments by which
+they have mastered nature so that these will
+not become the means of projecting nature’s
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_18">[18]</span>
+vices into human history? How shall they
+bring the life of great social and political
+groups under the dominion of conscience and
+moral law? These are the problems upon
+which hangs the future of civilization. Such
+social problems are fundamentally ethical and
+the intimate relation between religion and
+morality bring them inevitably into the province
+of religion. Can it help to solve them?
+Will their solution give religious idealism new
+vitality? Is the present social impotence of
+religion due to innate defects? Or is it due to
+specific and historical limitations which the
+years may change at least as quickly as they
+produced them? To such questions we must
+address ourselves.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_19">[19]</span>
+</p>
+
+
+  <h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_II">
+    CHAPTER II
+    <br>
+    NATURE AND CIVILIZATION AS FOES OF
+    PERSONALITY
+  </h2>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>It would be extravagant to claim that the
+possibility of making the resources of religion
+available for the solution of social problems
+of modern civilization is absolutely determining
+for its future. Religion would continue to
+maintain itself in modern society even if it
+produced only the scarcest socio-ethical fruits.
+The problem of living together is not the only
+problem which men face, and civilization is not
+the only foe with which personality contends.
+At least two other fundamental problems
+engage the interest of every normal individual,
+that of developing the multifarious forces of
+his personality into some kind of harmony and
+unity and that of asserting the dignity and
+worth of human personality in defiance of
+nature’s indifference and contempt. If religion
+can render the human spirit a tolerably effective
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_20">[20]</span>
+service in the solution of these two problems,
+its aid will not be scorned though it fail
+him in his social problem. It will not maintain
+itself with equal vitality in all strata of society,
+but it will continue some kind of existence in
+all of them, and a fairly vigorous life in those
+classes in which social problems are least
+urgent.</p>
+
+<p>Psychiatry and the psychological sciences
+are encroaching upon one service to the perplexed
+spirit of man which was once an almost
+exclusive province of religion. They are
+offering him aid in the task of integrating
+the heterogeneous forces, with which ages of
+human and prehuman history have endowed
+him, into the unity of dependable character;
+and there are those who think that this service
+will obviate his need for religion in this field.
+Undoubtedly it will be to the advantage of any
+moral or religious discipline of the individual
+life to avail itself of a more precise knowledge
+of the intricacies of human personality; yet
+only the most mechanistic and naturalistic
+ethical theorist would maintain that the knowledge
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_21">[21]</span>
+of self is the only prerequisite of self-mastery,
+and that the eternal conflict between
+the higher will and the immediate desires, about
+which the religious of every age have testified,
+may be composed by nothing more than a
+better understanding of the devious ways of
+human intelligence and emotion. The psychological
+sciences have undoubtedly saved
+men from some morbid fears and repressions,
+but the most modern school of psychological
+mechanists and determinists seems more
+anxious to destroy restraints which are the
+product of ages of moral experience than to
+correct the defects which reveal themselves
+inevitably on the fringe of every moral discipline.
+The reason mechanistic psychiatry and
+psycho-analysis run easily into a justification
+of license is because they labor under the
+illusion that the higher self (they would scorn
+that term) is able to put all internal forces in
+their proper place, if only it knows their previous
+history and actual direction. Under
+such an illusion the clamant desires of man’s
+physical life are bound to be closer to the center
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_22">[22]</span>
+of character than any moral discipline would
+allow. Modern determinism is too naturalistic
+to see or to be willing to regard human personality
+as the incarnation of moral and
+spiritual values which did not have their origin
+in any immediate necessity and which no
+individual will maintain if his resolution is not
+strengthened by something more than his
+momentary and obvious experience. This is
+not to say that moral discipline in individual
+life can be maintained by religion alone. A
+humanistic ethical idealism, which makes the
+experience of the race the guide and inspiration
+of individual conduct, will not fail to aid
+men toward some higher integration of personality,
+though it will seldom go beyond the
+Greek ideal of a balanced life which knows
+how to escape sublime enthusiasms as well as
+crass excesses. The value of religion in composing
+the conflict with which the inner life of
+man is torn is that it identifies man’s highest
+values, about which he would center his life,
+with realities in the universe itself, and teaches
+him how to bring his momentary impulses
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_23">[23]</span>
+under the dominion of his will by subjecting
+his will to the guidance of an absolute will.
+“Make me a captive, Lord, and then I shall be
+free,” has ever been the prayer of religious
+people. “He who loses his life for my sake
+shall find it,” said Jesus. In such paradoxes
+the truth is revealed that the highest peace
+comes to men where their life is centered not
+in what is best in them but in that beyond them
+which is better than their best.</p>
+
+<p>Obviously this function of religion in the
+life of the individual has its social implications;
+but it is not to be assumed that the integration
+of personality automatically solves man’s social
+problem. That assumption, which religion
+invariably makes, is one of its very defects in
+dealing with the social problem. A unified
+personality may still be anti-social in its
+dominant desires and the very self-respect
+which issues from its higher integration may
+become the screen for its unsocial attitudes.</p>
+
+<p>Just as important as the problem of bringing
+peace to the warring factions within the soul of
+man is the task of giving human personality a
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_24">[24]</span>
+sense of worth in the face of nature’s indifference
+and contempt; and of adjusting man’s
+highest values to nature’s sublimer moods.
+The significance of the religious inclinations of
+country people lies just here. The peasant is
+religious because man’s relation to the natural
+world about him is still the agrarian’s great
+interest. His ethical life is simple and
+develops in those primary or family relationships
+in which problems are comparatively few
+and a disturbance of the religious temper by
+unethical social facts rather infrequent. He is
+close enough to nature to be prompted to awe
+and reverence by her beauties and sublimities,
+to gratitude by her vast and perennial benevolences,
+and to fear by her occasional cruel
+caprices. He expresses his awe in worship,
+his gratitude in the spring and harvest festivals,
+which are traditional in all religions, and
+when her momentary atrocities overtake him
+he appeals from nature’s God to the God who
+is above nature and seeks the intervention of a
+supernatural ally in behalf of human personality.
+In a sense the religion of peasants
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_25">[25]</span>
+remains the constant spring of religious sentiment
+in every class of society, which others
+may corrupt or refine but never quite destroy.
+Urban men suffer from an atrophy of the
+religious sense because they lose, as they are
+divorced from the soil, some of the reverence
+to which a view of the serene majesties of
+nature prompts and some of the fear occasioned
+by her elemental passions. Yet the most
+sophisticated and emancipated city dweller
+cannot finally escape the problem of the relation
+of the human spirit to the natural world
+in which it is at once child and rebel. Even
+the refinements and artificialities of urban life
+will not save man from facing nature’s last and
+most implacable servant—death, nor free him
+of the necessity of making some kind of appeal
+against the obvious victory which nature
+claims at the grave. The fight of personality
+against nature is religion’s first battle, and that
+is one reason why there is always a possibility
+that other struggles will be neglected for it.
+Traditional religion fails in its social tasks
+partly because men have suffered longer from
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_26">[26]</span>
+the sins of nature than from the sins of man;
+and religious forms and traditions are therefore
+better adjusted to offer them comfort for
+these distresses than for any other from which
+they suffer. Religion is not yet fully oriented
+to the new perils to personality which are
+developed in civilization. But it may fail to
+meet these and yet not be totally discredited;
+for the new perils have not supplanted the old
+ones. At its best religion is both a sublimation
+and a qualification of the will to live. Defeated
+by nature the human spirit rises above nature
+through religious faith, discovering and creating
+a universe in which divine personality is
+the supreme power and human personality a
+cherished, protected and deathless reality.
+But this religious sublimation of the will to
+live must be balanced by a qualification of that
+will to live by which men are persuaded to
+sacrifice themselves for each other, that they
+may save themselves from each other and
+realize their highest self. Love is a natural
+fruit of religion but not an inevitable one. A
+high appreciation of personality ought to issue
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_27">[27]</span>
+in a reverence for all personalities and in a
+qualification of the tendency to self-assertion
+for the sake of other personalities. But left
+to itself religion easily becomes a force which
+sublimates but does not qualify man’s desire
+for survival; in which case it may still function
+in simple societies but will be less useful in
+those which are highly complex and in which
+the problem of human relationships has become
+very important.</p>
+
+<p>Next to the faith of agrarian classes the
+greatest stronghold of religion is in the life of
+the middle classes of the city. This phenomenon
+is due to several causes. Ideals of self-mastery
+and personal rectitude are always
+strongest in those classes in which physical
+resources are not so abundant as to tempt to
+sensual excesses and not so scant as to lead to
+an obsession with life’s externalities. For that
+reason the resources of religion for the solution
+of personal moral problems are particularly
+coveted by the middle classes. On the other
+hand the middle classes are also religious
+because they are comparatively unconscious of
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_28">[28]</span>
+their responsibility for society’s sins and comparatively
+untouched by the evil consequences
+of an unethical civilization. They may therefore
+indulge in a religion which creates moral
+respectability, and reinforces self-respect, even
+though it does not force them to share their
+sense of worth with all their fellows. There is
+for this reason an element of hypocrisy in all
+middle-class religion of which it never becomes
+clearly conscious but which helps to create
+the corroding cynicism from which the lower
+classes of modern society suffer.</p>
+
+<p>Since ideals of personal righteousness flourish
+in the genteel poverty of the countryside at
+least as well as in urban middle class conditions,
+the religion of peasants and the city’s
+middle classes have two characteristics in common:
+their preoccupation with problems of the
+individual life and their concern for the adjustment
+of the soul to nature’s realities. But
+while they share these elements the two types
+of religion are by no means identical. The
+simple expedient of claiming divine and supernatural
+intervention in the soul’s specific cases
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_29">[29]</span>
+of distress does not appeal to the sophisticated
+intelligence of city people, particularly since
+higher learning has become so general and
+science has become the burden of this learning.
+They are anxious to correct the intellectual
+inadequacies of traditional religion; and if they
+are conscious of any moral defects in it, they
+have the easy faith that these will be eliminated
+with a proper adjustment of religious
+affirmations to the world of scientific fact.</p>
+
+<p>The conflict between orthodoxy and liberalism,
+between fundamentalism and modernism,
+is essentially a conflict between city and
+countryside. Though the Protestant Reformation
+was used by the rising cities to assert the
+needs of the inner life against a too artificially
+elaborated institutional religion and to express
+an ethic of individualism against the traditional
+loyalties of the peasants rather than to
+make a readjustment of religion to the growing
+demands of intellectual life, the humanistic
+revival which preceded the Reformation was
+clearly determined by this latter interest and it
+contributed to the dissolution of the medieval
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_30">[30]</span>
+religious structure. In the recent theological
+controversies within Protestantism, between
+Conservatism and Liberalism, the religious
+naïvete of the agrarian and the intellectual
+sophistication of the city are more obvious
+influences in the conflict.</p>
+
+<p>The revision of ancient affirmations of faith
+in the light of modern learning was of course
+necessary from the point of view of the general
+needs of the age, and not required merely to
+satisfy the intellectual scruples of a particular
+class in society which has a preponderant influence
+in the Protestant church. It might be
+better to say therefore that the commercial
+middle classes appropriated as much as they
+prompted the revision of Protestant theology
+and religion.</p>
+
+<p>By doing this they have indeed created a
+religion capable of maintaining itself in urban
+civilization, but it develops little power for the
+ethical reconstruction of industrial society.
+The same religionists who pride themselves
+upon the reasonableness of their faith generally
+use their very modern and revised religion to
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_31">[31]</span>
+sanctify a very unmodern and unrevised
+ethical orthodoxy, an individualistic orthodoxy
+which makes much of self-realization and comparatively
+little of the social needs of modern
+life.</p>
+
+<p>The kind of liberal religion which thrives
+among the privileged classes of the city gives
+them some guarantee of the worth of their
+personalities against the threats of a seemingly
+impersonal universe which science has revealed,
+but it does not help to make them aware of
+the perils to personality in society itself. The
+final test of any religion must be its ability to
+prompt ethical action upon the basis of reverence
+for personality. To create a world view
+which justifies a high appreciation of personality
+and fails to develop an ethic which guarantees
+the worth of personality in society, is the
+great hypocrisy. It is the hypocrisy which is
+corrupting almost all modern religion. In a
+sense hypocrisy is the inevitable by-product of
+every religion. Men are never as good as their
+ideals and never as conscious as the impartial
+observer of their divergence from them. Every
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_32">[32]</span>
+religious person commits the error of solipsism
+in some form or other, the sin of claiming for
+himself what he will not grant to his brothers.
+The religion of modern men, particularly of
+the privileged classes, seems to be more than
+ordinarily insincere, partly because the social
+simplicity of another age obscured this
+inevitable hypocrisy and partly because the
+privilege of the religious classes is so great and
+its unethical basis in modern society, particularly
+from the perspective of the lowly, so
+patent and so destructive, that it is no longer
+possible to veil the immoral implications of a
+self-centered religion.</p>
+
+<p>The question which we really face, therefore,
+is whether religion is constitutionally but
+a sublimation of man’s will to live or whether it
+can really qualify the will of the individual and
+restrain his expansive desires for the sake of
+society. If it is only the former, it will continue
+to be the peculiar possession either of
+those who have no urgent social problems or of
+those who are the beneficiaries and not the victims
+of social maladjustments. If religion is
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_33">[33]</span>
+not now functioning in the solution of social
+and ethical problems, its impotence in this field
+may be due to constitutional weaknesses which
+may be corrected, once they are understood, or
+it may be due to certain specific historical
+influences of the past centuries of Western life
+which further experience will change and
+qualify. If religion has resources for the
+solution of social and ethical problems which
+have not been made available for the uses of
+society, it is the duty of modern teachers of
+religion and of all who still have confidence in
+its social efficacy or who benefit by its comforts
+to work for the elimination of its social limitations,
+whether they seem to be incidental and
+casual or basic and constitutional. Even constitutional
+limitations in the social task need
+not discredit religion as a social force; for a
+valuable resource may be closely related to a
+social limitation and a way may be discovered
+to detach the one from the other. Men always
+tend to be either uncritical devotees or merciless
+critics of the various values which emerge
+in human life. This is particularly true in
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_34">[34]</span>
+regard to the values of religion, the limitations
+of which are always aggravated by its unreflective
+champions and made the occasion of
+sweeping abuse by its critics. Religious people
+have assumed too easily that a religious life
+must issue not only in private rectitude but in
+perfect social attitudes. This overestimate of
+its social usefulness easily creates a reaction of
+criticism which denies that there is any useful
+counsel in religion for the problems of society
+or any dynamic necessary for their solution.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_35">[35]</span>
+</p>
+
+
+  <h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_III">
+    CHAPTER III
+    <br>
+    THE SOCIAL RESOURCES OF RELIGION
+  </h2>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>The task of analyzing and isolating the
+ethical limitations and the social deficiencies
+of religion is to no purpose if there is not in
+religion itself, at its best, some resources which
+civilization and society need for the solution
+of their problems. Some critics of religion
+discount it entirely as a social force, or at least
+as a force of social progress. Bertrand Russell’s
+prejudices on this subject are too violent
+to make his testimony against religion particularly
+weighty. Yet he speaks for a large
+number of ethically sensitive individuals who
+share his critical attitude, if not his vehemence,
+when he declares: “Since the thirteenth century
+the church has consistently encouraged men’s
+blood lust and avarice and discouraged every
+approach to human and kindly feeling....
+Emancipation from the churches is still an
+essential condition of improvement, particularly
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_36">[36]</span>
+in America where the churches have more
+influence than in Europe.... Of all requisites
+for the regeneration of society the decay
+of religion seems to me to have the best chance
+of being realized.”&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_2_2" href="#Footnote_2_2" class="fnanchor">[2]</a> The number of people
+among the middle and higher classes who
+would subscribe to such a denunciation of
+organized religion is probably not very large.
+But there are very many who ignore the
+church as a force for social amelioration; and
+in the class of industrial workers a temper
+against the church exceeding even Mr. Russell’s
+violence is very general.</p>
+
+<p>Whatever may be the facts in regard to
+contemporary religion and to other specific
+types of organized religious life, it is relevant
+to ask whether religion as such, freed from its
+specific limitations, contains indispensable
+resources for the ethical reconstruction of
+society.</p>
+
+<p>The first resource which would seem to be of
+social value is the social imagination which
+religion, at its best, develops upon the basis of
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_37">[37]</span>
+its high evaluation of personality. A spiritual
+interpretation of the universe may not issue
+automatically in a high appreciation of human
+personality, but religion is never quite able to
+deny this ethical implication of its faith, and
+in occasional moments of high insight it revels
+in it. It persuades men to regard their fellows
+as their brothers because they are all children
+of God. It insists, in other words, that temporal
+circumstance and obvious differences are
+dwarfed before the spiritual affinities which
+men have through their common relation to a
+divine creator. Thus Jesus could deal sympathetically
+with the harlot of the street, the
+publican at the gate, the Samaritan woman at
+the well and the blinded fanatics and their
+dupes who crucified him. The apostle Paul,
+though he did not always understand the
+genius of his master, was nevertheless able to
+apprehend this central dogma at the heart of
+religion and declare: “In Christ there is
+neither Jew nor Greek, neither bond nor free.”
+Celsus, the critic of the Christian church in the
+first century, derides the church for its failure
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_38">[38]</span>
+to distinguish between outcasts and respectable
+citizens. The fervor and consistency with
+which the church has espoused the ideal of the
+equal worth of all personalities has not always
+equaled that of the early church; many
+compromises with the brute facts of history
+have been made; yet the church has never been
+able to betray this faith altogether. The
+missionary enterprise with all its weaknesses
+is still a revelation of this power in religion.
+Oceans are bridged and varying circumstances
+of race and environment are ignored in order
+that the soul inspired by God may claim kinship
+with other souls of every race and every
+clime.</p>
+
+<p>The physical characteristics and outward
+circumstances in which men differ are sometimes
+not so great as they seem to the superficial
+observer; wherefore education may do as
+much as religion to cultivate and discover those
+profounder unities which made all men
+brothers. There are hatreds which are due
+merely to misunderstanding. They spring
+from the parochialism of the average mind,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_39">[39]</span>
+which knows no better than to regard with contempt
+what differs from the standards and
+values to which it has become habituated.
+Education and culture may emancipate men
+from such hatreds. Other misunderstandings
+which are caused by a superficial analysis of
+men’s action may be dissipated by a profounder
+appreciation of the complex life of every individual
+out of which each action emerges. Yet
+understanding alone does not solve all the
+problems of living together. We do not hate
+only those whom we do not know or understand.
+Sometimes we hate those most whom
+we know best. Love does not flow inevitably
+out of intimacy. Intimacy may merely accentuate
+previous attitudes, whether they be
+benevolent or malevolent. Anthropologists are
+easily obsessed with the inequalities which men
+reveal in their natural state, and the very
+abundance of their knowledge prompts them
+to an ethically enervating determinism when
+they attempt to gauge the potentialities of
+so-called primitive peoples. The modern
+psychologists are more inclined to accept the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_40">[40]</span>
+dogma of the total depravity of man than the
+ancient theologians were, and they prove
+thereby that a profound knowledge of human
+nature need not incline men to regard human
+beings with reverence and affection. Mr.
+H. L. Mencken may not speak for the scientists,
+but he is somewhat typical of the cynicism
+which follows in the wake of intellectualism.
+His estimate of human beings is: “Man is a
+sick fly taking a dizzy ride on a gigantic
+flywheel.... He is lazy, improvident, unclean....
+Life is a combat between jackals and
+jackasses.” Love is always slightly irrational
+and requires an irrational urge for its support.
+It is at least as irrational as hatred and the
+same intelligence which mitigates the one may
+enervate the other. A highly sophisticated
+intelligence is generally unable to survey the
+human scene with any higher attitude than that
+of pity for human beings, and pity is a form
+of contempt under a thin disguise of sympathy.</p>
+
+<p>The facts of human nature are sufficiently
+complex to validate almost any hypothesis
+which may be projected into them. Therefore
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_41">[41]</span>
+the assumptions upon which we essay our social
+contacts are all important. One reason why
+the social sciences can never attain the scientific
+prestige of the physical sciences to which they
+aspire is that the importance of hypotheses
+increases with the complexity and variability
+of the data into which they are projected.
+Every assumption is an hypothesis, and human
+nature is so complex that it justifies almost
+every assumption and prejudice with which
+either a scientific investigation or an ordinary
+human contact is initiated. A vital religion
+not only prompts men to venture the assumption
+that human beings are essentially trustworthy
+and lovable, but it endows them with
+the courage and inclination to maintain their
+hypothesis when immediate facts contradict it
+until fuller facts are brought in to verify it.
+Mere sentiment is easily defeated by life’s disappointing
+realities. Anatole France observed
+that if one started with the supposition that
+men are naturally good and virtuous, one
+inevitably ends by wishing to kill them all.
+Human nature is neither lovable nor trustworthy
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_42">[42]</span>
+in its undisciplined state and a sentimental
+overestimate of its virtue may well
+result in the reaction to which Anatole France
+alludes. Yet its undeveloped resources are
+always greater than either a superficial or critical
+intelligence is able to fathom. There must
+be an element of faith in love if it is to be
+creative. “Love,” said Paul, “believes all
+things”; and it may be added that it saves its
+faith from absurdity by creating some of the
+evidence which justifies its assumptions. It
+“hopes till hope creates from its own wreck the
+thing it contemplates.” Nothing less than
+a religious appreciation of personality, supported
+by a spiritual interpretation of the universe
+itself in terms of moral goodwill, will
+make love robust enough to overcome momentary
+disappointments and gain its final victory.
+The injunction of Jesus to his disciples to forgive
+not seven times, but seventy times seven,
+represents the natural social strategy of a
+robust and vital religious idealism, which subdues
+evil by its unswerving confidence in the
+good.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_43">[43]</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>While it is true that religion does not issue
+automatically in an attitude of reverence and
+goodwill toward all human personalities, it
+nevertheless remains a fact that a religious
+world view does incline men to regard their
+fellow men from a perspective which obscures
+differences and imperfections and reveals affinities
+and potential virtue. Even if intelligence
+became imaginative enough to discover the
+affinities, it could not be courageous enough to
+challenge the evil in men in the name of their
+better selves. The art of forgiveness can be
+learned only in the school of religion. And it
+is an art which men must learn increasingly as
+a complex society makes human associations
+more and more intimate. Whatever improvement
+a growing social science may establish
+in the technique of social intercourse, men will
+never escape the necessity of overcoming the
+evil, which they inflict upon each other, by
+creative patience and courageous trust. A
+higher intelligence may mitigate our fears and
+an exacter justice may restrain the inclination
+to wreak vengeance upon the wrongdoer; but
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_44">[44]</span>
+only the stubborn forces of religion will turn
+fear into trust and hatred into love. Sometimes
+mutual fear and hatred reduce themselves
+to such an absurdity (as in the late
+World War) that even a superficial intelligence
+can recognize it; but their absurdity does
+not become patent until they have issued in
+mutual annihilation. Even then the person
+with an ordinary commonsense view of life can
+do no better than to substitute partial trust for
+fear and partial understanding for hatred. So
+one war breeds the next. All men are potentially
+at once our foes and our friends. An
+unreflective social life assumes that they are
+enemies and helps to make them so. A higher
+social intelligence establishes a nicely balanced
+compromise between trust and mistrust so that
+the one cannot be very creative and the other
+not too destructive. Only the foolishness of
+faith knows how to assume the brotherhood of
+man and to create it by the help of the assumption.
+A religious ideal is always a little absurd
+because it insists on the truth of what ought to
+be true but is only partly true; it is however
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_45">[45]</span>
+the ultimate wisdom, because reality slowly
+approaches the ideals which are implicit in its
+life. A merely realistic analysis of any given
+set of facts is therefore as dangerous as it is
+helpful. The creative and redemptive force is
+a faith which defies the real in the name of the
+ideal, and subdues it.</p>
+
+<p>Love is, in short, a religious attitude. There
+are circumstances in which it may prosper
+without the inspiration of religion. In the
+family relation and in other intimate circles
+proximity and consanguinity may prompt men
+to regard human beings as essentially good,
+and direct experience validate their faith.
+That is why Jesus discounted love in the
+family as a religious achievement. “If ye love
+those who love you, what thanks have ye?” In
+the secondary relations, which are no longer
+secondary in the matter of importance to
+human welfare, the matter is not so simple.
+In these only a sublime assumption will persuade
+men to embark upon the adventure of
+brotherhood, and only a robust and constantly
+replenished faith will inure them against
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_46">[46]</span>
+inevitable disappointments. The religious
+interpretation of the world is essentially an
+insistence that the ideal is real and that the real
+can be understood only in the light of the ideal.
+Since the family relation is the most ethical
+relation men know, religious faith interprets
+all life in terms of that relation. In view of
+many of the facts of history which seem to
+reveal the world of man as but a projection of
+the world of nature in which animal fights with
+animal and herd with herd, this kind of interpretation
+is superficially too absurd to persuade
+a highly sophisticated intelligence. It is
+the truth which is withheld from the wise and
+revealed to babes. Yet it is the truth without
+which men will not be able to build a peaceful
+society. It is the truth which even the physical
+facts of a highly complex civilization, in which
+space and time are being annihilated, are conspiring
+to make true. The races and groups
+of mankind are obviously not living as a
+family; but they ought to. And as the necessity
+becomes more urgent the truth of the ideal
+becomes more real.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_47">[47]</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>It would be foolish to insist that goodwill
+alone will create conscience and that to detect
+the ethical core at the heart of man’s being is
+all that is required to make him ethical. It is
+a task to persuade human beings to trust their
+fellows; but is equally important to prompt
+their fellows to trustworthy action. If human
+nature is left unchallenged and undeveloped,
+it hardly qualifies the brute struggle for survival
+sufficiently to validate any religion or
+ethic of trust. Men’s actions are not as free as
+we have imagined. The social, economic and
+psychological sciences have restricted the concept
+of freedom in the soul of man as the
+physical sciences have restricted it in the universe.
+Man is not only less free than he had
+once imagined, but he is not as free as he once
+was. If science has discredited the idea of
+freedom, civilization has circumscribed the fact.
+It is easier for man to act as an ethical individual
+in a comparatively simple social group,
+such as the family, than in a very large and
+complex social group when even the most
+robust ethical purpose must meet the resistance
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_48">[48]</span>
+and the corruption of the primitive and
+untamed desires of the group. If man is
+capable of sacrificing immediate advantages
+for ultimate ones and his own advantages for
+the sake of society, this capacity is an achievement
+which he gains only after much effort and
+preserves from corruption only at the price of
+eternal vigilance. The first requisite of an
+ethical life in modern civilization is a realization
+of the difficulties which face the human
+conscience in maintaining itself against the
+pressure of immediate desires to which the
+whole emotional life of man is wedded. It is
+not easy to sacrifice meat for beauty, pleasure
+for some seemingly ephemeral value, self-interest
+for the sake of the family, the interest
+of the family for the sake of society, the
+interest of our generation for the society of
+to-morrow. Yet only by such sacrifices can
+man prove the reality and potency of his creative
+will. If such sacrifices are not actually
+made, all so-called morality becomes in fact a
+device for obscuring the bestiality of man
+without overcoming it.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_49">[49]</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>The fact that, in spite of the pressure of the
+struggle for survival, man has created a kingdom
+of values in which truth, beauty and goodness
+have been made real, is proof that he is
+more free and more moral than the modern
+cynic is willing to concede. But his kingdom
+of values is never as uncorrupted as he
+imagines. The task therefore of binding men
+to spiritual values, and of prompting them to
+sacrifice immediate pleasures and physical
+satisfactions for them, is difficult almost to the
+point of desperation. Religion makes its contribution
+to it by giving man the assurance
+that the world of values really has a relevant
+place in the universe and that values are permanent
+and will be conserved. He is challenged
+to sacrifice in a universe in which love
+is a basic law. He is asked to prefer personal
+values to property values in a world in which
+personality is the highest reality. He is
+prompted to exercise his conscience under the
+scrutiny and with the sympathy of a higher
+conscience. Religion in its purest form does
+not guarantee man an immediate reward for
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_50">[50]</span>
+every ethical achievement; indeed it may offer
+him no reward at all except the reward which
+inheres in the act itself. But it does give him
+the final satisfaction of guaranteeing the
+reality of a universe which is not blind to the
+values for which he must pay such a high price,
+and which is not indifferent or hostile to his
+struggle. It asks him to respect human personality
+because the universe itself, in spite of
+some obvious evidence to the contrary, knows
+how to conserve personality; and to create
+values in a world in which values are not an
+effervescence but a reality. Religion is in
+short the courageous logic which makes the
+ethical struggle consistent with world facts.
+In its most vital form religion validates its
+sublime assumptions in immediate experience
+and gives man an unshakable certainty. It
+thus becomes the dynamic of moral action as
+well as the logic which makes the action
+reasonable.</p>
+
+<p>The force of its faith operates not only to
+preserve moral vigor but to sensitize moral
+judgments. The God of religious devotion is
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_51">[51]</span>
+not only revealed in the moral values of the
+universe outside of man, but he is revealed in
+the aspirations of man which are beyond his
+achievements. God insures not only the preservation
+of values but their perfection. All
+moral achievement is qualified by the relativities
+of time and circumstance. The worship of
+a holy God saves the soul from taking premature
+satisfaction in its partial achievement. It
+subjects every moral value to comparison with
+a more perfect moral ideal. Of course the
+absolute perfection of God is itself conditioned
+by the imperfect human insight which conceives
+it. A cruel age may picture God more cruel
+than itself, and to a generation lusting for
+power God may be the supreme tyrant. Thus
+religion may become the sanctification of
+human imperfections. Yet in its highest form
+religion does inculcate a wholesome spirit of
+humility which gives the soul no peace in any
+virtue while higher virtue is attainable.</p>
+
+<p>The force of religion in moral action and
+the necessity of religious assurance for the
+highest type of social life may be gauged by
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_52">[52]</span>
+an analysis of possible alternatives to a social
+life which is oriented by a religious world view.
+There are two real alternatives to such a life.
+The one is based upon an ethical but unreligious
+world view, and the other scorns both
+ethics and religion in its absolute determinism.
+An ethical life which claims no support from
+religion may on occasion develop a very high
+type of social idealism, particularly since it
+escapes the ethical defects of religion even
+while it sacrifices religious resources. Stoicism
+is in many respects superior to pantheistic
+religions; for there are moral advantages in
+underestimating rather than overestimating
+the virtue of the universe. It is better to create
+a sense of tension between the conscience of
+man and a morally indifferent nature than to
+obscure the moral defects of nature by a deification
+of the natural order. But if men disavow
+all faith in a power not their own which
+makes for righteousness, they cannot finally
+save themselves from either arrogance or
+despair. Religion may destroy man’s self-reliance
+by an undue sense of humility, but
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_53">[53]</span>
+even that limitation is no more destructive of
+moral values than a self-reliance which prompts
+the human spirit to strut for a while on this
+narrow world in the consciousness of unique
+virtue before capitulating to a world which is
+too blind to know what it has destroyed.
+Thomas Huxley thought he would as soon
+worship “a wilderness of monkeys” as to give
+himself to the worship of humanity after the
+fashion of Comte. To insist too strenuously
+upon the uniqueness of human life in the cosmic
+order must inevitably issue in the pride which
+such a worship implies. Since the Renaissance
+there has been a marked decay of the spirit of
+humility in Western civilization which is closely
+associated with the secularization of its ethical
+idealism. The difference between the pride of
+secular idealism and the humility implicit in
+genuine religion may be gauged, as Professor
+Irving Babbitt suggests, by comparing Confucius
+with Buddha and Marcus Aurelius
+with Jesus. Pascal thought the stoics were
+guilty of “diabolical pride.” The judgment
+may be too severe, but it must be confessed
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_54">[54]</span>
+that a purely secular idealism has difficulty in
+escaping a morally destructive arrogance from
+which true religion is saved because it subjects
+all values and achievements to measurement,
+with its absolutes as the criteria. “Why callest
+thou me good?” said Jesus: “no one is good
+save God.” In the religion of Jesus the perfection
+of God is consistently defined as an
+absolute love by comparison with which all
+altruistic achievements fall short. “I say unto
+you, love your enemies; bless them that curse
+you; do good to them that despitefully use you
+and persecute you; that ye may be children of
+your Father in heaven; for he maketh his sun
+to rise on the evil and the good and sendeth
+rain upon the just and on the unjust. For if
+ye love them which love you, what reward have
+ye? Do not even the publicans the same?...
+Be ye therefore perfect even as your
+Father in heaven is perfect.”&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_3_3" href="#Footnote_3_3" class="fnanchor">[3]</a> Here the value
+of an absolute standard to save from undue
+pride in partial ethical achievements is particularly
+apparent. Prudential morality can
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_55">[55]</span>
+hardly go beyond the encouragement of altruism
+within the social group, i.e. loving those
+“which love you.” That is precisely what
+Stoicism did. It is just this pride in partial
+achievement which complicates the moral problem
+of modern life; for our ethical difficulties
+are created by the very tendency of reasonable
+ethics to make life within groups moral and
+never to aspire to the moral redemption of
+inter-group relations. Humility is therefore a
+spiritual grace which has value not only for
+its own sake but for its influence upon social
+problems. Traditional religions, which live off
+of original inspirations and experiences without
+recreating them, easily fall into a pride of their
+own, the pride which comes from identifying
+the absolute standards of their inspired source
+with their partial achievements and inevitable
+compromises. But religion in its purest and
+most unspoiled form is always productive of a
+spirit of humility which regards every moral
+achievement as but a vantage point from which
+new ventures of faith and life are to be initiated
+toward the alluring perfection which is in God.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_56">[56]</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>An ethical idealism unsupported by religion
+is almost as certain to issue in final despair as
+in unjustified pride. A few choice spirits are
+sometimes able to imagine themselves in
+rebellion against the universe without finally
+succumbing to a temper of sullenness; but the
+dreadful logic of insisting upon conscience in a
+conscienceless world inevitably leaves its mark
+upon the multitude. Oswald Spengler, in his
+morphology of civilizations,&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_4_4" href="#Footnote_4_4" class="fnanchor">[4]</a> presents “religion
+without God” as the unvarying symptom of a
+dying civilization, too sophisticated to believe
+in the cosmic worth of its moral values but not
+quite ready to abandon them. The enervating
+effect of a moral idealism which has sacrificed
+its hopes with its illusions always becomes
+apparent in the long run, but frequently it
+reveals itself quite immediately in the very lives
+of its most robust champions.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Russell may think that the “firm
+foundation of unyielding despair” is an adequate
+basis for an ethical life, but his own
+growing bitterness betrays how such a
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_57">[57]</span>
+philosophy corrupts moral idealism with a
+sense of frustration. The idealist is put into
+the position of sacrificing everything for values
+which have no guaranteed reality in the cosmic
+order. Even his faith in mankind is finally
+destroyed; for however precious personal
+values may seem in a given moment, his
+philosophy denies him the right to attribute
+any lasting worth to them. True religion
+gives man a sense of both humility and security
+before the holiness which is at once the source
+and the goal of his virtue; and thus it saves
+him at the same time from premature complacency
+and ultimate despair. The choice
+between irreligious and religious idealism is
+the choice between pride which issues in
+despondency and humility which becomes the
+basis of self-respect. There is an irrational
+element in either alternative; but the irreligious
+idealist is in error when he imagines that he
+has chosen the more reasonable alternative;
+his choice is no more reasonable and morally
+much less potent.</p>
+
+<p>The absolute determinists who have as little
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_58">[58]</span>
+confidence in the moral integrity of human
+nature as in any moral meaning in cosmic facts
+are more consistent than the Stoics, but they
+are involved in worse absurdities. Their
+cynicism robs them of both an adequate motive
+and an adequate method for social reconstruction.
+Discounting moral idealism even while
+they exhibit it in their social passion, they
+ostensibly desire social reconstruction only in
+the interest of the class to which they belong.
+But their personal interests are not frequently
+identical with those of the oppressed classes
+and they are moved as much by sympathy for
+the plight of the victims of our present society
+as by any selfish considerations. They profess
+to be prompted by the reflection that individual
+action has become useless in a capitalistic
+age and that it is possible to advance the interests
+of an individual only by making common
+cause with other individuals in a similar predicament.
+Meanwhile there is hardly an economic
+determinist, even among those who are
+actually members of the class of the oppressed,
+who could not gain higher advantages for himself
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_59">[59]</span>
+by disassociating himself from his class
+than by making common cause with it. This
+is certainly true of those who are intelligent
+enough to evolve or elaborate the theory of
+absolute determinism.</p>
+
+<p>Absolute determinism, when developed consistently,
+must disavow all other methods of
+social reconstruction but that of ruthless conflict.
+If nothing qualifies the self-interest of
+men, a conflict of interests becomes inevitable.
+This defect in method is even more important
+than the defect in its motive. A ruthless
+struggle can result in an ordered society only
+if the victors are able to annihilate their foes.
+But even in that event the interests of the
+members of any class engaged in a social or
+political struggle will cease to be identical as
+soon as its foes are eliminated. Thus a new
+and equally ruthless struggle must result
+between the comparatively strong and comparatively
+weak, the comparatively privileged
+and the comparatively underprivileged victors.
+Ultimately men cannot escape the necessity
+of building a stable society by the mutual
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_60">[60]</span>
+compromise and the mutual sacrifice of conflicting
+rights. The determinists have made
+an important contribution to the modern
+social problem by revealing the brutal nature
+of much of man’s social life. Even if the
+human conscience could be sensitized to a much
+greater degree than now seems probable, it
+will not be possible to eliminate conflict
+between various social and economic groups.&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_5_5" href="#Footnote_5_5" class="fnanchor">[5]</a>
+Good men do not easily realize how selfish they
+are if someone does not resist their selfishness;
+and they are not inclined to abridge their
+power if someone does not challenge their right
+to hold it. Religious and moral idealism cannot
+be expected to eliminate, but it can be
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_61">[61]</span>
+expected to mitigate social warfare. The conscience
+of man must finally be the force which
+builds a new society; and a man with a conscience
+must be the end for which such a society
+is built. If there is no virtue in man which lifts
+him above the brute struggle for survival,
+there is no value in him to justify the effort of
+building a new and more perfect society—and
+he is not the stuff out of which such a society
+can be built. It is difficult to escape the conclusion
+that the reverence for personality
+which is implicit in religion is necessary to
+establish an adequate motive and an adequate
+method of social reconstruction. Reverence
+for personality qualifies the individual’s will to
+power so that his life can be integrated with
+other lives with a minimum of conflict; and it
+saves society from sacrificing the individual to
+the needs of the group. In the religion of
+Jesus both a social and an individualistic
+emphasis issues from a spiritual appreciation
+of human personality. The individual is given
+a place and prestige which he never before possessed
+in society. Western civilization owes
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_62">[62]</span>
+much to the high evaluation of the individual
+which Jesus introduced into the thought of the
+world. On the other hand this emphasis is
+saved from mere individualism by an ethic
+which helps the individual to realize his highest
+self by sacrificing personal advantages for
+social values.</p>
+
+<p>The contribution of religion to the task of
+an ethical reconstruction of society is its reverence
+for human personality and its aid in creating
+the type of personality which deserves
+reverence. Men cannot create a society if they
+do not believe in each other. They cannot
+believe in each other if they cannot see the
+potential in the real facts of human nature.
+And they cannot have the faith which discovers
+potentialities if they cannot interpret human
+nature in the light of a universe which is perfecting
+and not destroying personal values.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_63">[63]</span>
+</p>
+
+
+  <h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_IV">
+    CHAPTER IV
+    <br>
+    THE SOCIAL CONSERVATISM OF MODERN RELIGION
+  </h2>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>The charge against religion most frequently
+made by critics who are interested in social
+reconstruction is that it is a conservative force
+which impedes social progress. If it has
+resources which are indispensable for the life
+of society, social idealists will not appreciate
+them if its contemporary forms are invariably
+aligned with the social forces most intent upon
+preserving the status quo. Contemporary liberal
+Christianity refutes the charge of social
+conservatism by appealing to the social
+radicalism of Jesus which it alleges to have
+appropriated. By this appeal liberal Christianity
+exhibits one of the very tendencies of
+religion which subjects it to the criticism of
+social liberals. Religion is easily tempted to
+make devotion to the ideal a substitute for its
+realization and to become oblivious to the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_64">[64]</span>
+inevitable compromise between its ideal and the
+brute facts of life. The absolute nature of the
+ethics of Jesus and the perfect harmony
+between his religion and his ethics may be the
+guarantee of the perennial spiritual and
+ethical renewal of the Christian religion; but
+it is also occasion for the self-deception of many
+professed disciples. Many streams of thought
+have contributed to the current of modern
+liberal Christianity and it contains alluvial
+deposits from all Western civilizations. Yet
+it imagines that it represents a simple return
+to radical and dynamic ethics of the religion of
+Jesus. By this deception it easily becomes the
+façade behind which the brutal facts of modern
+industrial civilization may be obscured rather
+than a force by which they might be eliminated.
+The Protestant Reformation suffered from the
+same deception. It thought of itself as a
+return to the original ideal when it was, as a
+matter of fact, a new type of compromise.</p>
+
+<p>Catholicism was a compound of early Christianity
+and the thought and life of Græco-Roman
+civilization. The medieval church was
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_65">[65]</span>
+a kind of ghostly aftermath of the Roman
+empire and the popes were inspired by the
+genius of Cæsar as much as by the spirit of
+Christ. The north European peoples first
+accepted this latinized Christianity, partly
+because they were attracted by those universal
+elements in it which have made their appeal to
+all peoples, and particularly those of the
+Western world, and partly because it was for
+them the symbol of the ordered civilization of
+Rome which they first envied, then destroyed,
+and finally tried to rebuild. In time they
+reacted against the ecclesiastical, international
+and feudal solidarities of this whole politico-religious
+world, prompted no doubt by the
+untamed spirit of liberty which characterized
+the northern peoples and which resented the
+tyranny by which the middle ages achieved
+their high measure of social cohesion. Thus
+Protestantism became the handmaiden of a
+budding nationalism which was impatient of
+the restraints of an international papacy, as
+it has since been impatient of every other type
+of international control. In time it also came
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_66">[66]</span>
+to be the peculiar spiritual possession of those
+classes among the northern peoples who developed
+modern commerce and industry. The
+affinity between its sanctification of the principle
+of liberty and the necessary individualism
+of classes which were intent upon destroying
+the traditional restraints of the ancient world
+for the sake of giving unhampered play to a
+growing commercial and industrial life, has
+been so perfect that it is hardly possible to
+decide which of the two is cause and which
+effect. Max Weber&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_6_6" href="#Footnote_6_6" class="fnanchor">[6]</a> has made an interesting
+analysis of commercial and industrial superiority
+of Protestant nations. It may be that the
+aptitude for commercial and industrial pursuits
+and an inclination to the Protestant form of
+the Christian faith are concomitant characteristics
+of north European peoples rather
+than casually related phenomena. Yet they
+have become so intimately related in history
+that the most typical commercial classes and
+nations are most generally Protestant, and
+most uniquely Protestant. In England the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_67">[67]</span>
+nonconformist sects are almost identical with
+the commercial middle classes, while the established
+church with its semi-Catholic genius has
+spiritual affinities both with the old Tories and
+the new world of the industrial worker. In
+Germany there is a similar alignment with
+Catholic and agrarian Bavaria on the one hand
+and the highly industrialized and Protestant
+Prussia on the other. The contrast between
+Protestant and industrial Ulster and Catholic
+and agrarian south Ireland is equally significant.
+Everywhere in Western civilization, and
+nowhere more than in America, Protestantism
+with its individualism became a kind of
+spiritual sanctification of the peculiar interests
+and prejudices of the races and classes which
+dominate the industrial and commercial expansion
+of Western civilization.</p>
+
+<p>Since liberal Christianity is the product of
+an adjustment of the main tenets of orthodox
+Protestantism to the sophistication of the cities
+and the growing intelligence of the privileged
+and therefore educated classes, its whole moral
+atmosphere is much more determined by the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_68">[68]</span>
+special interests of these classes than it is willing
+to admit. The authority of Jesus, to which
+it appeals, has indeed been given a new
+emphasis, but this has been done because liberal
+Christianity valued the theological simplicity
+rather than the moral austerity of his gospel.
+In the same way many liberal Jews have
+appealed from the law to the prophets, not
+because they had a great passion for the ethical
+rigors of an Amos or Isaiah but because they
+found obedience to the minute exactions of the
+law too onerous in a sophisticated age. Jesus
+is valuable to the modern Christian because he
+offers an escape from the theological absurdities
+of the ancient creeds; meanwhile his
+ethical and religious idealism will not leave the
+lives of those who profess to follow him unaffected.
+In time it may become the instrument
+of the regeneration of Western society; but
+this will not be possible if the liberal church
+does not overcome its self-deception and realizes
+that its religious and moral life is a composite
+into which have entered the imperialism
+of Rome, the sophistication of the Greeks, the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_69">[69]</span>
+fierce tribalism and individualism of the
+Nordics and the prudential ethics of an
+industrial civilization.</p>
+
+<p>Religion can be healthy and vital only if a
+certain tension is maintained between it and
+the civilization in which it functions. In time
+this tension is inevitably resolved into some
+kind of compromise. The tendency of religion
+to become a conservative social force is partly
+derived from its ambition to defend the
+resultant compromise in the name of its original
+ideal. Thus all partial values, determined
+by geographic, economic, social and political
+forces, are given a pseudo-absolute character
+by the religious elements which entered into the
+compromise; and their defects are sufficiently
+obscured and sanctified to make them comparatively
+impregnable to the attacks of the critics
+of the status quo. The Russian moujik was
+more than ordinarily docile under the tyranny
+of the czars and more than ordinarily patient
+with the imperfections of his society, because
+his obedience was claimed not by Russia but
+by “holy Russia,” the historic incarnation of
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_70">[70]</span>
+his religion. In the same way the medieval
+church became organically involved with feudalism
+and forced the critics of feudal society to
+undermine its influence before they could hope
+to change the feudal social order. Orthodox
+Protestantism is intimately related to this day
+with Nordicism, with the racial arrogance of
+north European peoples. The Ku Klux Klan,
+which thrives in the hinterlands of America,
+maintains its influence over simple minds by
+screening racial prejudice against Slavic,
+Latin and Semitic peoples behind a devotion
+to the spiritual treasures of Protestantism and
+their defense against the fancied peril of
+allegedly inferior religions. In Ireland the
+racial pride of Ulstermen expresses itself in a
+passionate espousal of the Presbyterian
+religion and a contemptuous attitude toward
+the Catholicism of the Irish. In modern prewar
+Germany there was a curious partnership
+between “Thron und Altar,” the interests of
+the nationalist German state, as integrated by
+the Prussian royal house, with the interests of
+Protestantism. To this day the fanatic
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_71">[71]</span>
+monarchists of Germany are also Protestant
+extremists who imagine that the monarchy was
+undermined by religiously motivated conspiracies
+of Jews and Catholics. Incidentally
+the Lutheran type of Protestantism which
+flourishes in Germany has always been less
+intimately aligned with the commercial classes
+than the Calvinistic sects of other Western
+nations. While the German socialists include
+the Lutheran church among the forces of reaction
+with which they must contend, the church’s
+real strength is among the peasants and junkers,
+who are also the strongest support of
+monarchist opinion and who abhor the democratic
+liberalism of commercial and industrial
+Germany as much as they despise socialist
+radicalism; and they imagine both to be
+inspired by Semitic designs upon their national
+integrity. The real inspiration of this liberalism
+with its emphasis on international conciliation
+and coöperation is born out of the
+economic and political necessities of an industrial
+and commercial state which cannot afford
+to indulge in the fanatic nationalism to
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_72">[72]</span>
+which peasants and agrarian aristocrats are
+prone.</p>
+
+<p>Liberal Christianity as it has developed in
+the urban centers of the Western world grew
+out of the intellectual and religious needs of
+the privileged classes and bears the marks of
+its social environment just as much as the other
+types of religion which have preceded it and
+with which it is historically related. It is in the
+same danger of becoming a spiritual sublimation
+of the peculiar interests and prejudices of
+these classes while it imagines itself the bearer
+of an unconditioned message to its day. It has
+preserved the same individualistic ethics which
+has characterized orthodox Protestantism and
+which is so dear to the hearts of the commercial
+classes, and so unequal to the moral problems
+of a complex civilization in which the needs of
+interdependence outweigh the values of personal
+liberty. The supposed devotion of the
+privileged classes to a religion in which the
+sacrifice rather than the stubborn preservation
+of individual rights is enjoined and in which
+the prudential and utilitarian root of morality
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_73">[73]</span>
+is completely plucked out is one of the incongruities
+which frequently occur when a civilization
+harks back to the spiritual visions of its
+childhood in order to obscure the sober and
+disenchanted practicality of its maturity.</p>
+
+<p>If the modern church is really to become an
+instrument of social redemption, it must learn
+how to divorce itself from the moral temper of
+its age even while it tries to accommodate itself
+to the intellectual needs of the generation.
+The religion of Jesus is free of theological
+absurdities. Its very simplicity saves it from
+undue entanglements with discredited cosmologies.
+But those who espouse it chiefly for
+this reason easily miss its real genius. Its
+essential assumptions may not outrage the
+mind, but neither are they readily accepted by
+an age which has sanctified cool and careful,
+moral prudence. Its solemn injunction, “Take
+no thought for your life, what ye shall eat or
+what ye shall drink ... but seek ye first the
+kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all
+these things shall be added unto you,” is
+strangely anachronistic in a day which worships
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_74">[74]</span>
+obvious and tangible success and appreciates
+virtue only as it insures those advantages of
+health and prosperity which are its highest
+desiderata. Prudential morality has its own
+uses. Few men have either the imagination or
+the courage to pursue an ideal if it does not
+justify itself by some fairly immediate advantage.
+Society is not altogether the loser if men
+discover that “Godliness is profitable unto all
+things,” and espouse an ideal because they have
+their eye upon the concrete and obvious advantages
+which flow from it. But a prudential
+morality has its limitations and these will prove
+less detrimental to society if they are not
+sanctified by religion. It is better therefore to
+seek no other basis for utilitarian ethics than
+the social experience from which it is really
+derived. Honesty will prove itself the best
+policy without the authority of religion. The
+function of religion is to nerve men for an
+ethical achievement when it promises no
+immediate returns. From the perspective of
+an impartial observer there is an element of
+hypocrisy in all prudential morality. The cool
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_75">[75]</span>
+intelligence which computes selfish advantage
+which may flow from moral action is not
+imaginative enough to include all persons who
+are affected by an action and not dynamic
+enough to balance the drive of self-interest
+which influences it.</p>
+
+<p>In modern industrial society those who are
+in position of power and privilege are most
+inclined to espouse an ethical ideal because it
+tends to stabilize social life and thus insures
+the perpetuation of privilege. They are also
+most easily tempted to restrict ethical action so
+that it will prompt to no sacrifices which are
+not consistent with a wise self-interest. Since
+they are also the classes which have, for reasons
+previously discussed, maintained their loyalty
+to religion, the church can avoid connivance
+with their prudential morality only by a continual
+regeneration of its religious life. Failing
+to maintain a distinction between utilitarian
+ethics and a religiously inspired moral life, the
+church cannot escape the fate of becoming a
+useful adjunct of the forces of privilege in the
+social and economic conflict in which modern
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_76">[76]</span>
+society is engaged. It may be good business
+to pay high wages, but social good may demand
+an increase in the wages of workers beyond the
+point where economic advantage is derived
+from an enlightened wage policy. It may be
+wise to share some privileges so that all of them
+will not be lost, but sensitive ethical insight will
+detect the selfishness and insincerity in such a
+course. A religion which sanctifies such social
+prudence is ultimately a hindrance to the
+ethical reconstruction of modern society. A
+religion which discovers and amends the limitations
+of prudential morality by the elements
+of its reverence for personality and its quest
+for the absolute is a necessary factor in social
+reconstruction.</p>
+
+<p>The question which faces the modern church
+is whether it will help to hide or to discover the
+limitations in the ethical orientation of modern
+life. Its devotion to the gospel of Jesus may
+serve either purpose. The contempt for ethical
+opportunism implied in the whole idealism of
+Jesus and its scorn for immediate advantages
+are the very ethical values which the generation
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_77">[77]</span>
+needs, but they are also the values which have
+given the Christian religion its great moral
+authority and prestige which the church can
+so easily misuse. If the authority of Jesus
+prompts men to a courage and imagination
+which escapes the defects of contemporary
+morality, its influence will be redemptive; if it
+is used merely to hide the defects, the critics
+of the church will be justified in regarding it
+as detriment to social progress. The religion
+which is socially most useful is one which can
+maintain a stubborn indifference to immediate
+ends and thus give the ethical life of man that
+touch of the absolute without which all
+morality is finally reduced to a decorous but
+essentially unqualified self-assertiveness. The
+paradox of religion is that it serves the world
+best when it maintains its high disdain for the
+world’s values. Its social usefulness is dependent
+upon its ability to maintain devotion to
+absolute moral and spiritual values without
+too much concern for their practical, even for
+their social usefulness. The church is in a very
+favorable position to make a necessary contribution
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_78">[78]</span>
+to social life, for it reveres as Lord
+one whose life incarnates the strategy which
+saves morality from insincerity. But its assets
+easily became moral liabilities when it compounds
+the pure idealism of Jesus with the calculated
+practicalities of the age and attempts
+to give the resultant compromise the prestige
+of absolute authority.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_79">[79]</span>
+</p>
+
+
+  <h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_V">
+    CHAPTER V
+    <br>
+    RELIGION AND LIFE: CONFLICT AND COMPROMISE
+  </h2>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>It is obvious that the ethical potency of
+religion depends largely upon its ability to
+make its ideals effective in the world and yet
+preserve a measure of detachment from those
+natural forces which express themselves in
+human society and offer such stubborn resistance
+to every spiritual and ethical ideal that
+no victory has yet been gained over them in
+which the heel of the victor has not been
+bruised. Ideal religion makes reverence for
+personality the end of human action. Society
+has its various secular ends the attainment of
+which necessitates the debasement of personality.
+Religion seeks to persuade men to
+sacrifice immediate advantages for ultimate
+values; the average man whose influence is
+dominant in all large social groups is not easily
+persuaded to forego immediate and concrete
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_80">[80]</span>
+advantages for values which are too remote and
+too ephemeral to captivate his imagination.
+There must therefore be a tension between the
+spiritual ideal and all historic societies. The
+significance of Jesus for the religious life of
+the Western world is due to his attainment and
+incarnation of a spiritual and moral ideal of
+such absolute and transcendent nature that
+none of his followers have been able to
+compromise it by their practical adjustments
+to the social necessities of their day. There
+is therefore a resource in the avowed loyalty
+of Western civilization to his ideal which may
+yet become the basis of its redemption. It is
+the peculiar characteristic of men and societies,
+and an evidence of both their moral and
+immoral nature, that they reserve their most
+unqualified devotion for those ideals and personalities
+which they find difficult to realize
+or emulate. They pay tribute to the ideal even
+while they are corrupting it and they reward
+those who have accommodated it to their indifferent
+capacities with a more qualified respect.</p>
+
+<p>It was probably inevitable that the church
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_81">[81]</span>
+should adjust the spiritual ideal, which to
+propagate it ostensibly regards as its very
+raison d’être, to the practical needs of the
+various ages and social orders with which it
+came in contact. But it is necessary that it
+should be shrewd enough to see the compromise
+involved in every adjustment and be stubborn
+enough to make a new bid for victory after
+every partial defeat. On the whole the
+Catholic church, which Protestants easily
+assume to have been more amenable to the
+practical demands of an unregenerate society
+than the churches of the Reformation, has
+really been much shrewder than these in
+gauging the hazards to virtue in the most
+natural social relationships. Some of the
+moral weaknesses in the modern church may
+be traced directly to the naïvete of Protestantism
+in dealing with the vagaries of human
+nature, and in failing to estimate the overt and
+covert peril to its values in the ordinary ways
+of men.</p>
+
+<p>Medieval Catholicism had various strategies
+in preserving and relaxing the tension between
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_82">[82]</span>
+the ideal of religion and the practical needs of
+men and society. It made fewest demands upon
+the individual. He was permitted to indulge
+almost all the natural appetites and ambitions
+which characterize the life of the average man.
+For him the religion of the church was a magic
+which guaranteed divine intervention in critical
+moments and which offered a rather easy
+short-cut to the prizes of the spirit which ought
+to be won only by virtuous achievement. Yet
+this same church had an uncompromising attitude
+toward the various social institutions
+which Protestantism has never equaled. It
+insisted on the sacramental nature of the family
+union with such intransigeance that it may
+fairly be accused of failing to make necessary
+accommodations of its spiritual ideal to the
+imperfections of human nature. It dealt with
+economic relations with less severity but
+enforced ethical ideals upon them which must
+seem unusually exacting to an age which has
+become accustomed to the connivance of Protestantism
+with laissez-faire economics. The
+master of the medieval church, Thomas
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_83">[83]</span>
+Aquinas, had elaborated a theory of the just
+price for all commercial transactions, which the
+church made every effort to apply and which
+it enforced through the canonical law. The
+church did not organize the guilds but it
+blessed them; and their efforts to regulate
+wages, fix fair profits, insure high quality of
+merchandise and organize mutual aid among
+their members were prompted by a religiously
+inspired moral idealism. While it dealt less
+successfully with the ethical implications of
+the relations between landowners and peasants,
+it impressed the owners with a sense of their
+obligation toward those who were economically
+dependent upon them which to this day gives
+the landed aristocracy of European nations a
+certain moral superiority over the industrial
+overlords who have been trained in more
+modern schools of thought. The ambition of
+the medieval church to dominate the life of the
+nations is well known but frequently misinterpreted.
+The contest between the papacy and
+the empire was indeed in some of its aspects no
+more than a conflict between two great political
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_84">[84]</span>
+organizations lusting for the power which
+easily becomes the sole end of the life of social
+and political organisms. Yet there was a
+measure of ethical idealism in the political
+aspirations of the popes to which Protestant
+thought has given scant justice. In the two
+greatest exponents of the papacy as an international
+political force, Gregory VII and
+Innocence III, particularly in Gregory, the
+ethical ideal of a unified Christian society
+which knows how to hold the capricious self-will
+of nations in check and how to set bounds
+to their natural lust for power is of no small
+moment in the development of papal policy.
+The very autocracy of the papacy, which the
+modern world finds so little to its liking, was
+elaborated by Gregory in order to save the
+church from international anarchy and make it
+an instrument of international unification.
+Incidentally Gregory was neither the first nor
+the last great statesman who preferred autocracy
+to anarchy, and the preference is supported
+by more than one lesson of history.
+Free coöperation between individuals and
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_85">[85]</span>
+groups is a high and rare political and moral
+achievement, and where men’s capacities are
+unequal to it there are occasions when it may
+be better to sacrifice freedom than to destroy
+social cohesion. At any rate the medieval
+church revealed both political shrewdness and
+spiritual idealism in its attempt to dominate
+the life of nations. Naturally its efforts did
+not result in any ideal society. The ambition
+of the Cæsar haunted the life of the popes
+and in many respects the work of their hands
+approximated the dominion of an Augustus
+more nearly than the kingdom of God of
+Christian dreams. The Christian ideal of an
+ethical international society was thus corrupted
+by imperial ambition in its very inception, and
+the historical realities which sprang from it
+diverged even farther from any conceivable
+ideal. Yet the whole political policy of the
+medieval church is in marked contrast to the
+easy capitulation of historic Protestantism
+before the force of economic and political
+groups. If Catholicism’s treatment of the
+moral problems of the individual represents
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_86">[86]</span>
+the relaxation of the tension between religion
+and life, and its social and political policy represents
+the compromise which follows inevitably
+upon the conflict of the ideal with the
+moral inertia of life, its monasticism represents
+the strategy of religion when it seeks to maintain
+an absolute tension between its ideal and
+historic reality.</p>
+
+<p>The various ascetic movements which prospered
+under the general ægis of the medieval
+church represent so many different types of
+religious idealism that no generalization about
+them will be accurate. Protestantism reacted
+violently from the monastic ideal and therefore
+has been able to see nothing in monasticism
+but a selfish flight from life’s realities.
+Monasticism may be a retreat from life, but
+at its best it was not a selfish retreat. Its
+development of the arts, its emphasis on learning,
+its vast philanthropies and its religious
+zeal for those outside of the monastic walls are
+not selfish characteristics. It did sometimes
+degenerate into a very odious type of spiritual
+selfishness and pride; but if we judge it by its
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_87">[87]</span>
+typical exemplars, we cannot accuse it of a
+lack of social passion. The religious fervor of
+Catholic ascetics has been matched by Protestant
+mystics, but their ethical insights have
+never been excelled. Their superior moral
+shrewdness was revealed in their ability to
+detect the perils to the ethical ideal which are
+covert in the natural and, from any obvious
+perspective, virtuous social relationships. They
+saw that the family, in itself the most virtuous
+of human groups, could easily become the occasion
+for disloyalty to high fealties of the soul.
+“Whoso loveth father or mother more than me
+is not worthy of me,” Jesus had said, and no
+one in the history of the church seems to have
+understood the problem with which he dealt
+in those words as well as Catholic ascetics. It
+must be said that the celibacy of the monasteries
+was not prompted solely by the desire to
+avoid conflicting loyalties; it sprang partly
+from a morbid evaluation of the sexual relation.
+That was probably the weakest and least
+worthy characteristic of medieval asceticism.
+Its understanding of the perils to the spirit in
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_88">[88]</span>
+the possessive instinct was perhaps its finest bit
+of insight. It understood how easily the
+privilege and power which spring from the
+possession of property may corrupt the soul
+with pride and destroy a loving relationship
+between individuals. It therefore insisted
+upon the vow of poverty. In all these problems
+the insight of asceticism was superior to
+its strategy. It saw peril in ordinary human
+relationships where most modern Christians
+are unable to detect them; but it knew of no
+way to overcome the peril except by destroying
+the relationships and building its unique
+fellowship of the spirit upon the basis of celibacy,
+poverty and absolute obedience. In
+asceticism the flowers of the spirit are cut from
+the roots by which they are supported and life
+is destroyed in the process of its purification.
+Asceticism creates a high type of ethical
+spirituality which cannot be universalized without
+completely destroying society; and the
+virtue which it develops can be maintained
+only in its own artificial media and therefore
+lacks redemptive force. The great medieval
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_89">[89]</span>
+ascetics have always claimed Jesus as their
+authority though he was not an ascetic in their
+sense. He disassociated himself from the
+asceticism of John the Baptist, who had come
+“neither eating nor drinking,” and unlike the
+ascetics he had no morbid fears of natural
+enjoyments. Protestantism has therefore
+regarded asceticism as the result of a foolish
+literalism which failed to allow for poetic latitude
+in the words of Jesus. Nevertheless it
+must be admitted that both his words and his
+practice have a closer affinity to medieval
+asceticism at its best than to any modern
+spiritualized worldliness which tries vainly to
+unite the largest number of spiritual graces
+with the greatest possible temporal advantages.
+Francis of Assisi was surely more like
+the real Jesus than Bruce Barton’s modernized
+caricature of the original. The strategy
+of Jesus might be described as a leaning in the
+direction of asceticism, as a hovering upon its
+brink. He is saved from its morbid temper by
+the wholesome common sense which leavens all
+his attitudes. The virtue of asceticism lies in
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_90">[90]</span>
+its ability to detect the perils to a virtuous life
+in the necessary and inevitable social relationships
+in which all individual personality must
+develop; its limitation is its inclination to
+destroy the relationships in order to overcome
+the peril. Religious idealism, nurtured in the
+individualism of Protestantism, fails to appreciate
+the virtue of asceticism, while it condemns
+its limitations because it fails to realize how
+fundamentally all individual ethical achievements
+are qualified by the society in which men
+live. Wherever that fact is fully understood,
+every honest effort to maintain the purity of
+the religious ideal will result in strategies
+which will approximate asceticism at many
+points and which may excel it only in the ability
+to avoid its depreciation, occasionally morbid
+depreciation, of the ordinary functions of life.</p>
+
+<p>Protestantism’s reactions to the problems of
+preserving a sense of tension between religion
+and life have been a little more varied than
+those of the medieval church because of the
+multifarious nature of its historic forms. But
+varied as may be the strategies of the various
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_91">[91]</span>
+churches, they do not finally differ from the
+three which Catholicism employed, i.e., capitulation
+without a struggle, compromise after a
+struggle, and victory gained through the device
+of avoiding some of the issues. The marked
+differences between the medieval and the modern
+church lie in the areas of life where the
+struggle between religion and human inertia
+was attempted, where the compromises were
+made and where the victories were won. If
+Catholicism left the individual to his own
+devices, the churches of the Reformation followed
+a similar course in dealing with the moral
+problems of all human groups. The state was
+completely secularized under Protestant influence.
+The Reformation was in some of its
+aspects simply a simultaneous revolt of the
+various new nations of Europe against the
+restraints of the international papacy. In
+Germany, Scotland and finally in England, the
+nationalistic motive was a decided force in
+destroying the prestige of the old religion.
+Lutheranism capitulated much more easily to
+the secular state than Calvinism, which tried
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_92">[92]</span>
+in fact to maintain the ancient controls upon
+political life. But once the Reformation had
+destroyed the old unity of Western society and
+the prestige of the organization which maintained
+it, secular nationalism became the universal
+characteristic of Western civilization.
+Even Calvinism, which was ambitious to
+dominate the policy of political states, hardly
+had the opportunity of affecting international
+relations. Its influence barely went beyond
+domestic policy, and there it was less interested
+in the morality of the state than in the legal
+enforcement of individual moral ideals. The
+greed and lust for power of national groups is
+not a unique characteristic of the modern
+world; but our own era takes the moral autonomy
+of the nation for granted more generally
+than did the Middle Ages. The Protestant
+church did not create Machiavellian politics
+but it was more impotent before unscrupulous
+nationalism than any other institution of the
+religious ideal, and its impotence was partly
+due to its lack of interest in social problems.</p>
+
+<p>The emancipation of economic relations
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_93">[93]</span>
+from all ethical restraint was more or less concomitant
+with the Reformation movements,
+but it is a question how much it was causally
+and how much coincidentally related. Tawney&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_7_7" href="#Footnote_7_7" class="fnanchor">[7]</a>
+thinks that the growing complexity of
+commercial transactions invalidated the old
+canonical laws designed to enforce ethical
+standards in business, and thus made the
+secularization of economics inevitable even
+before the Reformation. Luther and Calvin
+were as anxious as the fathers of the medieval
+church to preserve moral standards in business.
+But they were no more ingenious than these in
+devising new and more flexible methods of
+control when the prohibition of usury and the
+fixation of a just price were swept away by a
+growing commerce which made money-lending
+an incident of commercial enterprise rather
+than a philanthropic device, and which
+engulfed the standards by which a just price
+was determined in a sea of economic relativities.
+Luther was completely baffled by the
+intricacies of the new world and could do little
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_94">[94]</span>
+more than try vehemently but futilely to
+maintain the old prohibition against usury and
+insinuate meanwhile that the recently developed
+system of international banking was in
+some mysterious way related to the evil conspiracies
+of the papacy. Calvinism, true to its
+genius, was more ambitious in dealing with the
+problems of commerce; so much so in fact that
+Beza’s thunderous denunciations of covetousness
+prompted the Geneva Council to declare
+that he stirred up class hatred against the
+wealthy. Yet it was Calvin who finally
+destroyed the last vestige of medievalism in
+economics by justifying interest. Though his
+action prompted the charge that “usury was
+the brat of heresy,” he probably did no more
+than to recognize the logic inherent in the facts
+of a new economic development. There was
+no more conscious desire to emancipate commercial
+life from the sanctions of morality and
+religion in Protestantism than in the ancient
+church; but the preoccupation of the leaders of
+the Reformation with the problem of the inner
+life and the general temper of individualism
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_95">[95]</span>
+which characterized the Protestant churches
+undeniably accelerated the processes of secularization.
+In time Adam Smith rather than
+Thomas Aquinas became the moral authority
+of the commercial world, and, whatever may
+have been the futile fury of the early reformers,
+Protestantism did finally accept the economics
+of laissez faire and habituated itself to a world
+in which vast areas or life were withdrawn not
+only from the influence of religiously inspired
+ethical ideals, but from every ethical sanction
+whatsoever. Thus was the present world
+created in which “business is business” and
+“politics is politics,” i.e., in which the non-moral
+character of two of the most important
+social relationships of mankind is taken for
+granted.</p>
+
+<p>If Protestantism made its easy capitulation
+before the larger social groups of mankind and
+its premature peace with them, it developed
+its most stubborn resistance to the natural
+appetites of men in its influence upon the
+individual life. It was precisely in that area
+of life in which the medieval church was least
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_96">[96]</span>
+effective that Protestantism displayed its
+highest ambition. At this point it becomes
+impossible to speak in general terms of
+Protestantism, for the strategies of Calvinism
+and Lutheranism in dealing with the problems
+of the inner life differ widely, even more widely
+than their social policies. The unique characteristics
+of either are frequently the common
+characteristics of Protestantism when viewed
+from some external perspective; but an intimate
+view may reveal them in the light of very
+different religions. Calvinism is religion’s
+most energetic effort to master the ethical life
+of the individual. In some of its historic
+forms, in Geneva and Scotland and the
+American colonies for instance, its social policy
+was ambitious enough to compare with that of
+Pope Gregory, but its chief interest was not
+in the social institution as such. It merely used
+the political power to reinforce an uncompromising
+ethical rigor in the life of the individual.
+In Calvinism the religion of the modern
+world makes its boldest bid for the ethical
+mastery of life. Calvinism believed that life
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_97">[97]</span>
+could be dominated by the spiritual and ethical
+ideal if the individual could be persuaded to
+control his appetites and to overcome his natural
+indolence. A temperate, industrious,
+thrifty and honest individual was, in its esteem,
+the perfect exemplar of the religious ideal and
+the stuff out of which a new society could be
+built. It never faced the problem of the conflict
+between the ideal in the soul of the individual
+and the intractable forces in human
+society because its moral ideals were socially
+and economically very useful and it could
+therefore indulge the illusion that economic
+success, social well-being and obvious happiness
+are the natural and inevitable fruits of the
+religious life. Hence it was a religion admirably
+suited for the middle classes who rose to
+power in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth
+century, for it endowed them with virtues
+which would insure their success and it
+doubled their zeal by giving religious sanction
+to their secular enterprises. The ancient and
+medieval world had given moral precedence to
+a life of leisure and meditation, whether of
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_98">[98]</span>
+aristocrat or philosopher, of monk or priest.
+Calvinism was as contemptuous of luxury and
+leisure as of the arts and amenities which
+flourished in them. Its sanctification of the
+common task, of manual toil and of commercial
+enterprise was in itself a valuable contribution
+to social progress. It was in a way the
+spiritual foundation upon which the whole
+structure of modern civilization has been built.
+It developed a high type of honesty without
+which the intricate credit relationships of modern
+commerce would have been impossible. It
+encouraged a diligence which was the driving
+force in establishing the commercial classes in
+power over a moribund aristocracy. Its
+religiously inspired habits of continence and
+temperance gave the lower classes a sense of
+moral dignity and a natural self-respect which
+they needed in challenging the pride and complacency
+of the aristocratic world. These
+puritan virtues have moreover given the whole
+north European world and America (which is
+more puritan than any nation, because here the
+puritan life flourished on virgin soil and
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_99">[99]</span>
+remained unqualified by the vestiges of
+medievalism which remain firmly imbedded in
+the culture of even the most modern European
+nations) a robust vitality and moral urge
+which have had no small part in developing
+their political hegemony in the modern world.</p>
+
+<p>The conflict of puritan religion with the
+world has however resulted in the inevitable
+compromise between the religious ideal and the
+world’s primitive urges and desires. Its moral
+weakness lies in its naïve confidence of victory
+over the world and its inability to discover the
+relativities and qualifications which history has
+wrought upon its absolute. If the spiritual
+idealism of Jesus is the norm for Christians,
+the Calvinists and puritans diverged from it
+more seriously than they knew in the very conception
+of their ideal. The love and reverence
+for personality which is the basis of the ethics
+of Jesus is totally lacking in Calvinism. It
+knows how to create self-respect but lacks the
+imagination to inculcate a religious respect for
+others, except possibly for the respectable. Its
+confidence in the obvious rewards of virtue
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_100">[100]</span>
+tempted it to abhor poverty and hold the poor
+in contempt, though they might become the
+helpful occasion for the exercise of that philanthropy
+without which the idea of Christian
+stewardship could not be realized. While early
+Calvinism had an heroic mood which would
+have scorned to make a concession to the selfishness
+of man through the sanctification of
+prudential ethics, its ethical theories did nevertheless
+lend themselves to easy appropriation
+by moralists who were intent upon identifying
+the social good with a decent selfishness. The
+uncompromising spirituality of the ethics of
+Jesus is totally lacking in Calvinism. Its
+moral theories were in fact derived from the
+Old rather than the New Testament; and there
+is hardly a scintilla of evidence in Calvinistic
+thought that the Sermon on the Mount is
+recorded in the scripture which it accepted as
+revealed finality. Its very bibliolatry was
+partly responsible for its non-Christian type
+of ethics, for through it the casual moral
+theories of the early Hebrews achieved the dignity
+of absolute truth. Lack of historical perspective
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_101">[101]</span>
+in the use of the Old Testament further
+aggravated this error, for the real worth
+of the prophets was never appreciated and their
+high type of moral idealism could not serve
+to qualify the less heroic morality of the law
+and the superficial moralizing of the Wisdom
+literature. Incidentally it may be observed
+that bibliolatry is one of the handicaps to moral
+progress in almost all religions. Through it
+primitive cultures and moral customs which
+happen to be enshrined in the canon become
+absolutely authoritative, and the weight of
+their influence is set against new ventures in
+moral life.</p>
+
+<p>If Calvinistic and puritan idealism departed
+from its assumed norm in its very conception,
+the moral realities which issued from it bore
+even less resemblance to the absolute idealism
+of the ethics of Jesus. Its unqualified confidence
+in the power of individual virtue to overcome
+the world and change society contributed
+to the relaxation of moral restraints upon
+social institutions and the secularization of
+society to which reference has been made. Its
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_102">[102]</span>
+sanctification of secular tasks led inevitably to
+a sanctification of secular motives which it did
+not desire but could not prevent. Men were
+to serve God by diligence in their daily toil.
+But what was the end of industry which
+endowed it with virtue? The puritan answer
+was to regard work as an end in itself, an
+emphasis which it learned to make in its reaction
+to monastic and aristocratic idleness. But
+that answer alone could not suffice. Inevitably
+the material gains which were the rewards of
+industry were given a special religious sanction.
+“If God show you a way in which you
+may lawfully get more than in another way,
+without wrong to your soul or to any other, if
+you refuse this and choose the less gainful, you
+cross one of the ends of your Calling and refuse
+to be God’s steward,” said Governor Bradford.&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_8_8" href="#Footnote_8_8" class="fnanchor">[8]</a>
+The ancient and medieval world had
+been more or less scornful of the pursuit of
+wealth and abounded in characters among both
+the nobility and the peasantry who thought it
+beneath their dignity to increase their patrimony.
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_103">[103]</span>
+The religious sanction of material gain
+was a new thing in history and undoubtedly
+helped to fashion the moral temper of modern
+society in which diligence is the great virtue
+and greed the besetting vice.&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_9_9" href="#Footnote_9_9" class="fnanchor">[9]</a> It is the puritan
+heritage of America which gives a clew to the
+paradox of our national life. It explains how
+we can be at the same time the most religious
+and the most materialistic of all modern
+nations.</p>
+
+<p>If puritanism failed to see how easily the virtue
+of thrift might be transmuted into the vice
+of avarice, it was even less careful to guard the
+righteous soul against the perils to virtue which
+inhere in the power which wealth supplies.
+There are few men who can wield extraordinary
+power without making it the tool of
+their own desires and without magnifying their
+limitations which might pass unnoticed in less
+puissant individuals. Puritanism did indeed
+have a doctrine of stewardship, but it was
+applied to the privilege which flowed from
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_104">[104]</span>
+economic power and not to the possession of
+power itself. There was never enough imagination
+in puritanic religion to detect how
+nature in the soul of man, frustrated by a discipline
+of the senses, comes into its own through
+the sins of the mind. It knew how to redeem
+human life from its vagrant passions, but it did
+not know how to deal with those dominant
+desires, the lust for power and the greed for
+gain, which express themselves more frequently
+in a disciplined personality than in a chaotic
+one and which may be more detrimental to the
+welfare of others than the consequences of
+undisciplined and momentary passions. It was
+a spiritual discipline admirably suited to lift
+the middle classes to a dominant position in
+society but hardly designed to guide them in
+the use of the power once they had achieved it.
+Even its abhorrence of luxury and prohibition
+of extravagance is finally softened in a civilization
+which has profited all too well by its virtues
+and is tempted to destroy them by the
+very advantages which the virtues supplied.
+John Wesley, who revived puritan morality
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_105">[105]</span>
+after it had declined in its original form, saw
+this problem more clearly than his predecessors,
+but he had no answer for it except to
+advocate philanthropic generosity. He writes
+in his <i>Journal</i>: “Religion must necessarily produce
+both industry and frugality, and these
+cannot but produce riches. But as riches
+increase so will pride, anger and love of the
+world in all its branches.... So although the
+form of religion remains, the spirit is swiftly
+vanishing away. Is there no way to prevent
+this—this continual decay of pure religion?
+We ought not prevent people from being diligent
+and frugal; we must exhort all Christians
+to gain all they can and save all they can; that
+is, in effect, to grow rich. What way then can
+we take that our money may not sink us in
+the nethermost hell? There is one way and
+there is no other under heaven. If those who
+gain all they can and save all they can will
+likewise give all they can, then the more they
+give the more will they grow in grace and the
+more treasure will they lay in heaven.”&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_10_10" href="#Footnote_10_10" class="fnanchor">[10]</a>
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_106">[106]</span>
+Wesley, of course, could hardly be expected to
+appreciate that money represents power even
+more than privilege in modern society, and that
+philanthropy may become a method of satisfying
+the ego and displaying power.</p>
+
+<p>Many of the moral and religious limitations
+of modern civilization may be attributed first
+to the partial victory and then to the self-destruction
+of puritan religion in modern civilization.
+In puritanism religion made one of
+its boldest advances upon the world; and so
+confident was it of victory that it prepared no
+one for the moral relativities which were the
+inevitable issue of its enterprise. In dealing
+with the stubborn resistance of the material
+world it is better to expect victory than to
+assume defeat before the battle is begun. Yet
+an undue confidence may be as dangerous to
+the enterprise as a timorous spirit. The
+medieval ascetics who regarded all human
+relationships with a critical spirit, and rather
+expected the old Adam to assert himself in
+seemingly the most innocent human concerns,
+possessed spiritual insights which were totally
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_107">[107]</span>
+lacking in the typical puritan. He expected
+to build a society in which the scripture was
+“really and materially to be fulfilled.”</p>
+
+<p>It will have been noted that Calvinism and
+puritanism have been used in this discussion as
+interchangeable terms. The fact is that, while
+the two terms are not synonymous theologically,
+the moral temper of Calvinism was so
+potent in the whole non-Lutheran Protestant
+world that all of the various denominations
+were indoctrinated with its puritan spirit. The
+various sects had their own theological peculiarities,
+but in their puritan spirit they were
+essentially one. Only the Quakers departed
+from it; for George Fox had discovered the
+ethics of Jesus, and the religion of the Friends
+was ever after to express itself in terms relevant
+to the spirit of the Sermon on the Mount.
+Denominations such as the Baptists and
+Methodists who evangelized Western America
+gave a rebirth to the puritan spirit when it
+suffered decay in its more native haunts. Their
+history is additional evidence for the thesis that
+puritanism is a religious sublimation of the life
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_108">[108]</span>
+of the middle classes. For when the heroic
+spirit of puritanism declined in those classes
+which it had lifted to power, it was reborn in
+the lower middle classes of England and the
+Western pioneers of America. Methodism is
+theologically as unrelated to Calvinism as can
+be imagined. Its theological presuppositions
+are really more congenial to a dynamic puritanism
+than those of Calvinism; for the moral
+vigor of Calvinism was logically incompatible
+with its deterministic faith. Denominations
+such as the Baptists and Methodists with their
+strong emphasis on regeneration as the basis of
+church membership aggravated one weakness
+of Protestantism, for all of their spiritual
+vigor. Their tests of what constituted regeneration
+were drawn from religious experience
+rather than from its moral fruits; yet they were
+bound to assume that a marked moral contrast
+existed between the saved and the unsaved.
+Thus they accentuated what Professor A.
+Whitehead has defined as the Protestant oversimplification
+of ethics, i.e., a tendency to judge
+men, in spite of the intricacy of their inner life
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_109">[109]</span>
+and the complexity of their social relations, as
+being either good or bad. This is simply
+another aspect of Protestant individualism, but
+it is an aspect which emerges more clearly in
+the free churches which have renounced all
+ambition to have a membership coextensive
+with the citizenship of the state than in those
+churches in which some vestige of the state-church
+idea still remains. The superior
+spiritual vigor of churches which make a
+religious experience the prerequisite of fellowship
+in the church may well be conceded; but
+that does not change the fact that ethical values
+in a complex civilization are frequently
+imperiled by the oversimplification of moral
+issues, which is the inevitable by-product of
+simple religious tests. Men are neither totally
+good nor totally bad when they live in a society
+which may corrupt the virtuous intention of
+the most robust idealist, or when their own
+inner life is so complex that moral purpose
+may express itself in one of its areas and be
+betrayed in another. There is a moral simplicity
+in Protestantism which is closely related
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_110">[110]</span>
+to its individualism and which is particularly
+unfortunate, since it is the characteristic of a
+religion which orients the ethical life of peoples
+who have tremendous responsibilities in the
+complex life of Western civilization.</p>
+
+<p>Calvinism has frequently been referred to as
+Protestant asceticism.&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_11_11" href="#Footnote_11_11" class="fnanchor">[11]</a> Its robust moral
+energies are indeed commensurate with the
+strict ethical discipline of medieval monasticism,
+but with this difference: that one is developed
+within the world and the other outside
+of the world of ordinary human relations. But
+it is precisely this difference which makes
+Lutheranism more closely related to asceticism
+than Calvinism; for Lutheranism is the
+Protestant way of despairing of the world and
+of claiming victory for the religious ideal without
+engaging the world in combat. Both are
+founded upon an ethical dualism. The
+medieval ascetic flees from the world into the
+monastery and there attempts realization of
+his religious ideal; the Lutheran quietist flees
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_111">[111]</span>
+from the world into the asylum of his inner
+life where he comes into the emotional possession
+of the ideal without risking its refinements
+in the world of cruel realities. The one
+has a dualism which divides the monastic from
+ordinary men; the other draws the line within
+the soul of each individual and expects him to
+realize in his religious experience what he cannot
+reveal in ordinary human relations. If
+Calvinism is <i>Weltfreundlich</i>, Lutheranism like
+asceticism is <i>Weltfeindlich</i>. It has little hope
+that a kingdom of God will be established upon
+earth, except perhaps through supernatural
+intervention. It places all its emphasis upon
+the sentiment of Jesus: “The kingdom of God
+is within you.” It must be admitted that
+Jesus’ conception of the kingdom of God is
+probably as much related to quietistic religion
+as to puritan morality, though ascetic religion
+seems closer to him than either. The modern
+church has dismissed the eschatological element
+in Jesus’ teachings as the Semitic shell in
+which Jesus developed his conception of the
+kingdom of God as a social ideal; but it was
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_112">[112]</span>
+more probably his way of expressing doubt
+that his ideal could ever be realized in history
+except by a miracle of God. Yet the apocalyptic
+element in the gospel was qualified by
+the idea of the kingdom to be realized by evolutionary
+process. The kingdom of God was
+also “like unto a mustard seed.” Jesus in short
+was both pessimistic and optimistic in regard
+to the spiritual potentialities of human society,
+and in his paradoxical rather than consistent
+position he was able to maintain the tension
+between religion and life in a way which has
+escaped both parties in the churches of the
+Reformation. Of this more will be said later.
+The attitude of Lutheran piety toward the
+world has the merit and the limitation characteristic
+of all pessimism. It sharpens the
+ideal but despairs of its realization. Lutheran
+doctrine was fashioned out of the religious
+experiences of a tumultuous soul seeking peace
+and failing to find it in any of the institutions
+which were meant to incarnate the religious
+ideal or in any of the observance which were
+intended to express it. The institution shocked
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_113">[113]</span>
+him by their imperfections, and the observances
+and rituals had undergone the inevitable
+process which reduces a necessary symbolism
+to a kind of magic in which the symbol achieves
+potencies originally ascribed only to the
+ineffable truth or reality for which it stands.
+From all historic relativities of the institutions
+and superficialities of religious rites Luther
+reacted and discovered his absolute in the
+religious experience in which the soul appropriates
+the grace of God. In that mystic communion
+all natural imperfections of the human
+spirit are transcended and the soul is lifted out
+of the relativities of time and circumstance. It
+is easy to see how inevitable is this emphasis in
+the history of religion but also how perilous it
+may become to moral values. It is inevitable
+because every sensitive conscience suffers at
+times from a realization that “our reach is
+beyond our grasp,” that moral capacities are
+not equal to the goals set by imagination and
+hope. The apostle Paul, whose religious
+experience closely paralleled those of Luther
+and whose theology therefore became authoritative
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_114">[114]</span>
+for him, complained: “... the good
+that I would, I do not; but the evil which I
+would not, that I do.... For I delight in the
+law of God after the inward man. But I see
+another law in my members, warring against
+the law in my mind and bringing me into captivity
+to the law of sin that is in my members.
+O wretched man that I am. Who shall deliver
+me from the body of this death? I thank God
+through Jesus Christ our Lord.”&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_12_12" href="#Footnote_12_12" class="fnanchor">[12]</a> That is a
+classic statement of the dualism in life which
+every religion is tempted to overcome by transcending
+it. Lutheranism was in fact but a
+revival of Pauline Christianity and it was
+Pauline Christianity which had built the Christian
+church. In it the tension between religion
+and life which is maintained in the religious
+idealism of Jesus is relaxed and the sensitive
+soul is given the assurance that a merciful God
+will know how to complete what is so incomplete
+and how to perfect our manifest imperfections.
+Thus the same Jesus who in the
+gospels is a bold adventurer of the spirit who
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_115">[115]</span>
+challenges his disciples to be perfect as their
+Father in heaven is perfect becomes in the
+epistles the symbol of the divine grace which
+knows how to accept our intentions for our
+achievements. It may be unfair to speak of a
+conflict between the religion of Jesus and the
+religion of Paul; for it was a heavenly Father
+and not a jealous judge who was central in
+the thought of Jesus, and his emphasis upon
+forgiveness shocked the strict moralists of his
+day. But if there is no conflict at this point,
+there is a marked change in emphasis. In the
+one the appropriation of divine grace is a
+necessary part of the moral adventure; in the
+other it is separated from the moral enterprise
+and easily becomes a substitute for it. Paul
+had indeed disavowed all antinomian tendencies
+in his doctrine of grace. “What shall we
+then say? Shall we continue to sin that grace
+may abound? God forbid. How shall we that
+are dead to sin, live any longer therein?”
+Obviously the mystical experience in both the
+Pauline and the Lutheran religion was not
+unrelated to the life of moral purpose and was
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_116">[116]</span>
+not consciously used to obviate the necessity
+for moral enterprise. But what is to prevent
+men from making a premature appropriation
+of the peace it guarantees, before and without
+deserving it? In that lies a peril to morality in
+almost all religion which Pauline and Lutheran
+theology did not create but which it may
+accentuate. It is well to remember that some
+of the greatest perils to morality in the life of
+religion arise out of its most cherished and
+necessary characteristics. Religion is at once
+the necessary partner and the potential foe of
+moral life.</p>
+
+<p>The quietistic tendencies of religion, particularly
+as elaborated by Pauline and Lutheran
+theology, are less dangerous in a simple
+society than in a complex one. Ethical attitudes
+in simple social relations flow almost
+automatically out of a religious experience,
+even though the conscious interpretation of the
+experience is scornful of the “righteousness of
+works.” But in the secondary and more complex
+social relationships the moral urge which
+issues out of the religious experience is easily
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_117">[117]</span>
+frustrated by the intricacies and relativities of
+historic realities and institutions. How shall
+the soul preserve the sense of the absolute
+which it has gained in the religious experience
+from contamination by the sins which are
+covert in all social relations? It is in the varying
+answers of quietistic religion to that question
+that its ethical limitations are vividly
+revealed. One answer is to avoid conflict with
+political and social institutions on the score
+that they are divinely ordained. “Let every
+soul be subject unto the higher powers. For
+there is no power but of God; the powers that
+be are ordained of God,” said the apostle
+Paul. When it is remembered that the reference
+is to the government of the Roman
+empire, the social conservatism implicit in this
+logic is obvious. It was this attitude of Paul
+which made it easy for Luther to bring his
+church into such intimate union with the various
+governments of Germany and to maintain
+an attitude bordering on subservience toward
+the German princes. The political conservatism
+of Lutheranism has since been its
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_118">[118]</span>
+unvarying characteristic and has had its
+marked effects upon history, in no period more
+so than in that of the World War. State
+churches of any kind easily become the tools
+of the secular state, but Lutheran state
+churches have usually been more compliant
+tools than the Anglican church, for instance,
+which has never quite renounced the old
+Catholic ambitions of partnership with the
+state.</p>
+
+<p>Another method of which quietistic religion
+avails itself in dealing with the world is to
+assume that its ideal will somehow achieve
+automatic realization in the intricacies of economic
+and social life. This method is hardly
+consistent with its pessimism, but it satisfies
+the desire for practical results which is bound
+to assert itself in even the most supra-moral
+religion. Thus Luther declares:&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_13_13" href="#Footnote_13_13" class="fnanchor">[13]</a> “There can
+be no better instructions in ... all transactions
+in temporal goods than that every man
+who is to deal with his neighbor present to himself
+these commandments: ‘What you would
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_119">[119]</span>
+that others should do unto you, do ye also to
+them,’ and ‘Love thy neighbor as thyself.’ If
+these were followed out, then everything would
+arrange and instruct itself; all things would
+quietly and simply be set to rights, for everyone’s
+heart and conscience would guide him.”
+It is a conceit of religious people, by no means
+confined to Lutherans, that a vigorous statement
+of the ideal ought to result in its realization.
+No one can estimate how often the pulpit
+has insisted in these latter days that war could
+be abolished if only the nations “would live
+according to the law of Christ.” This characteristic
+frequently gives the church’s pronouncements
+a curious air of futility; for
+ideals are neither challenged nor applied if
+they are not finally embodied in concrete proposals
+for specific situations. It is in such
+situations that the ideal meets its real test and
+runs the peril of corruption. Frequently the
+tendency of religion to be content with the
+statement of abstract principles is due to a
+want of intellectual vigor which results easily
+from religion’s mistrust of reason.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_120">[120]</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>A method of dealing with the world which is
+more consistent with the essential dualism of
+quietistic religion is its effort to give some
+realization to the ideal by means of subjective
+religious emotion which transcends the imperfections
+of society without attempting to
+change them. Thus the ideal of brotherhood
+is to be realized by a religious appreciation of
+all men as brothers, however much economic
+and social facts may give the lie to the ideal.
+This was the apostle Paul’s method of dealing
+with slavery and Luther emulated it in his attitude
+toward the peasant’s revolt. Nothing
+gives a more illuminating clue to the conservative
+implications of this type of religion than
+this incident in the Reformation. The
+peasants, suffering in a state of semi-slavery,
+saw in Luther’s statement of the gospel principles
+of freedom, and in the religious ideal of
+the equal worth of all souls, implicit in Christian
+teaching, a justification for their revolt
+against the intolerable conditions of serfdom.
+They declared: “It has been custom hitherto
+for men to hold us as their own property, which
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_121">[121]</span>
+is pitiable enough considering that Christ has
+delivered and redeemed us all, the lowly as
+well as the great, by the shedding of his
+precious blood. Accordingly it is consistent
+with scripture that we should be free and
+should wish to be so. We therefore take it for
+granted that you will release us from serfdom
+as true Christians, unless it should be shown
+from the gospels that we are serfs.”&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_14_14" href="#Footnote_14_14" class="fnanchor">[14]</a> Luther
+violently disavowed this practical application
+of his gospel. “This article would make all
+men equal and so change the spiritual kingdom
+of Christ into an external worldly one. Impossible.
+An earthly kingdom cannot exist without
+inequality of persons. Some must be free,
+others serfs, some rulers, others subjects. As
+St. Paul says, ‘In Christ there is neither bond
+nor free.’” The violence of Luther’s reaction
+in this instance was partly due to considerations
+of expediency; for he feared to lose caste
+with the princes by having the Reformation
+identified with radical political movements; yet
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_122">[122]</span>
+it is fairly faithful to his general conceptions
+of the nature and function of religion. Obviously
+the dualism of Protestantism which
+separates the religious experience of the individual
+from the social realities in which alone
+personality can achieve significance has defects
+which are more perilous to social values than
+the ethical dualism of medieval monasticism.
+If the ideal is to be withdrawn from life to save
+it from corruption, it is better that it be realized
+in some social medium, however artificial,
+than that it be suspended in the thin air of
+religious sentiment and be realized only in subjective
+experience.</p>
+
+<p>An analysis of the various strategies of
+religion in establishing contact with the historic
+situations and social realities in which it must
+function reveals, in short, that it can pursue no
+course which is altogether free of peril to its
+moral values. Capitulation without conflict
+reduces religion to magic and secularizes life.
+A stubborn conflict with the intractable forces
+of nature and history results in some kind of
+compromise. Neither papal internationalism
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_123">[123]</span>
+nor puritan plutocracy are what the idealists
+who were responsible for them really desired.
+And what they really desired fell short of their
+pretended goals. Withdrawal from the world
+is equally dangerous. For it may lead either
+to the morbid artificialities of asceticism or to
+the sentimental subjectivism of quietistic
+religion. There are values in each of the various
+strategies as well as perils. Perhaps those
+who are too critical of their limitations can
+never create their values. Religion must
+create its values in naïve faith and subject their
+limitations to a critical intelligence. Of the
+various strategies asceticism is probably nearest
+to the real genius of religion and most adequate
+for the moral needs of our day. If a
+world is completely astray the higher perspective
+from which it may be convicted of sin
+and the greater dynamic which may function
+redemptively in its life both depend upon some
+kind of detachment of religion from life.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_124">[124]</span>
+</p>
+
+
+  <h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_VI">
+    CHAPTER VI
+    <br>
+    SOCIAL COMPLEXITY AND ETHICAL IMPOTENCE
+  </h2>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>While there is good reason to regret the
+individualism of Protestantism in a civilization
+which has increased the intimacy of all human
+relations and made social and economic interdependence
+a basic fact, yet it alone cannot be
+held responsible for the unethical nature of
+modern society. This is attributable as much
+to the greater difficulties which the human conscience
+faces in modern life as to any weakness
+in the moral and religious idealism by which
+it is informed. A much more adequate type of
+religious idealism might have been unequal to
+the task of preserving ethical values in modern
+life.</p>
+
+<p>The gradual secularization of economics
+through the growing complexity of commercial
+relations has been a previous interest of our
+study. When it became inconvenient and difficult
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_125">[125]</span>
+to make simple moral standards, expressed
+in prohibitions of usury and maintenance of a
+“just price,” fit the new intricacies of international
+commerce and industrial production,
+we have seen how men turned naturally and
+inevitably to the consoling reflection that “in
+the providence of God life is so arranged that
+each man seeking his own shall serve the common
+weal.” The doctrine of laissez faire was
+in other words as much an admission of defeat
+on the part of the moral forces of society as it
+was a conscious effort toward secularization.
+Other factors beside a growing complexity of
+social life helped however to secularize modern
+society. Modern commerce and industry tend
+to increase the extent of coöperative effort
+while they diminish personal contacts. World
+commerce and large-scale production make
+human beings interdependent without offering
+them the opportunity of entering upon personal
+associations. There is a natural sympathy
+in the soul which saves men from actions which
+are very obviously detrimental to their fellows.
+But if they are unable to survey the consequences
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_126">[126]</span>
+of their actions or to gauge the reactions
+to their attitudes in the lives of others,
+their temptation to unethical conduct is materially
+increased. The master of a manufacturing
+unit in the old handcraft period of industry
+thus found it much easier to maintain moral
+relations to his workers than a modern, frequently
+absentee, owner of a large factory. If
+in addition ownership becomes collective, with
+the resulting division of responsibility, while
+the number of workers increases until individuals
+lose their significance in the mass, the
+problem of making industrial relations ethical
+is further complicated. Ethical conduct is, in
+its last analysis, based upon reverence for personality;
+and personality fails to make its
+appeal to the conscience when considered in the
+mass and when regarded at too long range. In
+such circumstances a degree of intelligence and
+imagination, which mankind has not yet
+achieved, is required to gauge the effect of
+industrial and commercial policy upon the individuals
+who are involved in it. The unethical
+nature of modern civilization with its destruction
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_127">[127]</span>
+of confidence in the moral integrity of
+human nature and with its deterministic obsessions
+is largely due to its mechanical perfections
+which have increased the extent of social
+coöperation while they have decreased personal
+contacts.</p>
+
+<p>The same means of commerce and communication
+which have increased the size of industrial
+groups and extended the range of commercial
+transactions have also enlarged the
+political units and increased interdependence
+between them. We are living in a world in
+which a financial depression in America results
+in a panic upon the silk exchange of Tokio; in
+which a boycott upon cotton goods initiated by
+a Gandhi in India throws thousands of cotton
+spinners in Manchester into unemployment;
+and in which Western industrialism may
+exploit Chinese labor in the seaports of China
+without one beneficiary of this industrialism
+out of a million being able to make a mental
+picture of the social consequences of the commercial
+policies from which he benefits. The
+difficulty of these long-range relationships is
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_128">[128]</span>
+further complicated by the fact that the participants
+are separated not only by great distances
+but by the barriers of race and nationality.
+All social decencies in the past have
+developed within the bounds of the group, and
+men have not yet learned to treat individuals
+in other groups with confidence, respect and
+honesty. Attitudes of tenderness, sympathy
+and affection have been confined very largely
+to the family group. From this intimate group
+they were finally sluiced out to effect social
+relations in larger groups, but they have not
+changed inter-group relations. Civilization
+has increased the size of groups in which human
+relations have an ethical basis, but it has not
+moralized the action of the group nor taught
+individuals in one social group to treat individuals
+in other groups with the respect and
+confidence which a wholesome social life
+requires. The connotation of contempt which
+the Jews placed in the word “gentile” and the
+Greeks in the word “barbarian” may be matched
+in the terminology of practically every people.
+When groups are geographically separated, as
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_129">[129]</span>
+in the case of political states, fear and misunderstanding
+are multiplied by the ignorance
+which results from a lack of contacts. But
+contacts alone do not remove them; for the
+relations of political, social and racial groups
+within the boundaries of the same state are only
+slightly more ethical, as for instance the relation
+between white and colored people in the
+United States or of the Scotch and Irish in
+Ulster. Human imagination and intelligence
+have not been equal to the task of extending
+ethical attitudes beyond the boundaries of the
+group.</p>
+
+<p>The ethical problem of group relations is
+made still more difficult by the expansive
+desires and unethical attitudes which develop
+naturally within the group as a corporate
+entity. That is, groups as such find it even
+more difficult to maintain moral attitudes
+toward other groups than do the individuals
+within it toward individuals in other racial or
+political unities. All human groups tend to be
+more predatory than the individuals which
+compose them. The most tender emotions may
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_130">[130]</span>
+characterize the relations of members of a
+family to each other; but the family as such is
+easily tempted to gain its advantages at the
+expense of other families. The tendency of
+family loyalty to accentuate covetousness has
+been frequently noted by social observers who
+have seen the family instinct as the very basis
+of the sanctity which civilization has given
+private property. Religious organizations are
+not free of the imperial ambitions which come
+naturally to social groups of every kind. One
+fruitful cause of the dilution of religious idealism
+is the desire of religious groups to gain
+power and prestige among larger numbers.
+They therefore soften the rigor of their ideal
+that it may captivate the morally mediocre
+majority. Both employers and employees frequently
+find agreement in specific cases of conflict
+difficult because the policies of both are
+determined by considerations of loyalty to their
+respective groups. Of all human groups the
+political state is probably most inclined to
+unethical conduct. It was a dictum of George
+Washington’s that a nation was not to be
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_131">[131]</span>
+trusted beyond its interests, and history supports
+the justice of his observation. After
+shrewdly observing the statesmen of England
+equivocate on the attitude of their nation
+toward the southern rebellion until they could
+determine their policy by considerations of
+expediency, Henry Adams came to the melancholy
+conclusion that masses of men were
+always moved by interest and never by conscience
+and that morality is a private and a
+costly luxury.&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_15_15" href="#Footnote_15_15" class="fnanchor">[15]</a> One reason why the relations
+of nations to each other are still characterized
+by primitive fears and excessive caution is
+because their actions have not, as a matter of
+fact, been morally dependable. The problem
+of making nations and other groups conform
+to ethical standards of any kind is particularly
+difficult because the ethical attitude of the individual
+toward his group easily obscures the
+unethical nature of the group’s desires. The
+patriot identifies his tender emotions toward
+his nation with the attitude of the nation itself
+until he becomes incapable of a critical
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_132">[132]</span>
+appraisal of its policy; or he frankly condones
+the selfishness of the nation because he recognizes
+no ethical values beyond those implicit in
+group loyalty. The father of a family may
+feel moral pride in essentially selfish pursuits
+because he means to secure advantages by them
+not for himself but for his family. Loyalty to
+“the firm” may give the business man a consciousness
+of virtue even though it forces him
+to connive in predatory practices of his concern.
+The class-conscious worker may be willing
+to disrupt society in the interest of his class
+because all his moral needs are satisfied by his
+devotion to what he regards as the most significant
+social group. While this ethical paradox
+of patriotism is obviously not confined to
+political groups, the nation is most seriously
+tempted to unethical conduct because it is not
+a voluntary association, its group is conveniently
+isolated from others and loyalty to
+it is least qualified by other conflicting loyalties.
+It may be set down as a truth of almost
+axiomatic finality, that groups tend to be
+unethical in proportion to the degree of
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_133">[133]</span>
+unqualified loyalty which they are able to
+claim or exact of their members. In this connection
+it may be noted that democracy has
+increased rather than diminished the imperialism
+of nations, for it has given patriotism a
+higher moral sanction and thus reduced the
+moral scruples which might qualify the loyalty
+of their citizens. The arrogance of nations and
+their insistence on moral autonomy has developed
+simultaneously with the extension of
+democracy. It is this ethical paradox of
+patriotism which invalidates the contention
+that the root of all imperialism is the imperialism
+of the individual. It is true of course that
+group loyalty may become a device for delegating
+our vices to the group and imagining
+ourselves virtuous. Some types of political
+arrogance and race prejudice are obviously
+methods of compensating individuals for their
+lack of opportunity to bully their immediate
+neighbors. Yet on the whole the unethical
+character of group action is determined as
+much by the partial virtues as by the vices of
+individuals.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_134">[134]</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>The problem of bringing groups under some
+kind of ethical control is not new in history.
+It has become unusually difficult in the modern
+world not only because of the consolidation of
+the authority of the state but also because rapid
+means of communication have increased the
+size of social, political and economic units and
+made relations between them more intricate.
+The larger the unit the more unqualified seems
+to be the moral sanction which loyalty to it may
+claim. To an average citizen, immersed in his
+parochial interests, the nation appears in the
+light of a universal community in contrast
+to the smaller and voluntary communities
+within the nation. Yet this same nation is one
+of many human groups, most of which betray
+imperial desires reminiscent of Rome but
+which aspire in vain after the universal
+dominion which gave Roman imperialism a
+measure of moral worth. Treitschke, whose
+philosophy of history was the object of so
+much opprobrium during the World War that
+its faithfulness to the general prejudices of
+Western life would hardly be surmised, presented
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_135">[135]</span>
+the nation as the ultimate community
+because all smaller societies are too petty to
+deserve and all larger ones too vague and
+abstract to claim the unqualified allegiance of
+men.</p>
+
+<p>The intricacies and propinquities of an
+industrial civilization tend at some points to
+increase the imperial desires of nations and at
+others to make their ordinary lusts more
+deadly. The feud between Germany and
+France is a very ancient one, but the need of
+French industry for German coal and of German
+industry for French iron explains some
+aspects of their present difficulties which are
+not derived from ancient animosities. Modern
+industry needs a unified world and, lacking it,
+each nation is inclined to seek the completion
+of its industrial establishment by the forcible
+appropriation of territory, rich in needed
+resources. The economic imperialism of
+industrially advanced nations is a product of
+the high productivity of modern industry
+which produces more than one national unit
+can consume and which needs more raw
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_136">[136]</span>
+materials than the same nation can produce.
+Covetous eyes are consequently turned upon
+undeveloped portions of the globe, rich in raw
+materials and hungry for the products of
+modern industry. In one sense the European
+war was incubated in Africa. Rapid means
+of communication also extend the reach of the
+grasping nations. China is attempting to
+throw off the shackles of a Western imperialism
+which could never have gained the position
+it holds on Chinese soil but for the new contiguity
+which has destroyed the boundaries
+between East and West. Moreover, the intricacies
+of international commerce and finance
+offer opportunities for a new kind of economic
+imperialism which hardly needs, though it does
+not always avoid, the use of political force.
+The economic forces of one nation simply
+penetrate the economic life of another and, if
+there is a great disparity in economic power,
+the weaker nation is brought under the
+dominion of the stronger without the citizens
+of either being aware of the process by which
+this has been accomplished. This is the type
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_137">[137]</span>
+of imperialism which America is most fitted
+and inclined to develop. In South America
+political pressure does accompany economic
+penetration, but in Europe American power
+increases under a policy of political isolation.
+The isolationism of America, which has
+become a firmly established foreign policy
+since the war, is prompted partly by the sense
+of power which America feels as the richest
+nation of the world, and partly by a political
+infantilism which tempts us both to pharisaism
+and to fear when dealing with the supposedly
+more astute political bargainers of Europe.
+The relation of America to the rest of the
+world is a perfect example of the moral peril
+in the new intricacies of modern civilization.
+The citizen of the state is as ignorant of the
+actual character of his nation’s relation to other
+nations as of other peoples’ reactions to the
+real policy of his own government. Probably
+not one American in a thousand is able to comprehend
+a single reason why Europe should
+fear or hate America and not more than one
+in a hundred is actually aware of the existence
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_138">[138]</span>
+of such hatreds and fears. There is therefore
+an unconscious hypocrisy in the moral pretensions
+of the citizens of every nation, a more or
+less conscious hypocrisy in the attitudes of the
+governments which do not share but yet exploit
+the political ignorance of the people, and an
+inevitable reaction of cynicism on the part of
+those who know the real facts and suffer from
+the moral limitations of the nation’s policy.
+Group relations, particularly those which are
+intricate, are thus persistently unethical
+because part of the modern world is too
+ignorant to make them ethical and the other
+part is so worldly-wise that it has lost confidence
+in the possibility of ethical relations.
+Frequently hypocrisy and cynicism are united
+in the same person who knows how to discount
+the moral pretensions of other groups but
+lacks the perspective from which he might
+arrive at a critical evaluation of the real character
+of his own group. This curious combination
+of insincerity and cynicism is obvious in
+the relation of both economic and national
+groups, but it is particularly noticeable in international
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_139">[139]</span>
+difficulties. In the struggle between
+economic groups there is a growing inclination
+to make no moral pretensions on either
+side. Sometimes the group in power makes
+them but in that case its insincerity is usually
+conscious rather than ignorant. In international
+affairs the same patriots who ignorantly
+persecute every person who seeks to qualify
+national loyalty or to make a dispassionate
+appraisal of national policies frequently sink
+into moral despair and disillusionment when
+history unfolds the inevitable consequences of
+the anarchy of conflicting national lusts.</p>
+
+<p>The task of making complex group relations
+ethical belongs primarily to religion and education
+because statecraft cannot rise above the
+universal limitations of human imagination
+and intelligence. A robust ethical idealism, an
+extraordinary spiritual insight and a high
+degree of intelligence are equally necessary for
+such a social task. The difficulties of the problem
+are enhanced by the fact that the religious
+imagination and astute intelligence which are
+equally necessary for its solution are incompatible
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_140">[140]</span>
+with each other. Religion is naturally
+jealous of any partner in a redemptive enterprise;
+and the same intelligence which is needed
+to guide moral purpose in a complex situation
+easily lames the moral will and dulls the
+spiritual insight. It is possible that this difficulty
+may permanently destroy every vestige
+of morality in the group relations of modern
+society. The necessary partnership and the
+inevitable conflict between the religio-moral
+and the rational forces is obvious in both the
+political and the economic problems of the
+present age.</p>
+
+<p>The unqualified authority and the boundless
+lusts of a modern state need first of all to be
+brought under the scrutiny of clear minds who
+understand the implications and can gauge the
+consequences of its pretensions. Patriotism is
+a form of altruism and as such represents the
+victory of ultra-rational sanctions over the selfish
+inclinations of individuals which seem quite
+reasonable to the average man. The emotional
+attitude and ethical achievement in patriotism
+endows the patriot with a kind of madness and
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_141">[141]</span>
+pride which make him as scornful of more
+rational types of altruism as of the prudent
+and cautious selfishness with which he has his
+primary conflict. It is because patriotism represents
+a victory of an ethical ideal that religion
+so easily becomes its uncritical partner. When
+many hearts are cold anything that warms
+them will seem religious to the undiscriminating
+champion of religious values. The defects
+of patriotic altruism are thus left to the correction
+of rationalistic idealists who know how
+to discover the absurdities into which an
+uncritical devotion to partial values may issue
+and how to envisage the larger community of
+mankind of which the nation is a part. During
+the last war moral idealists of rationalistic persuasion,
+such as Bertrand Russell, Romain
+Rolland, Henri Barbusse and Bernard Shaw,
+were more detached in their perspective and
+freer of war hysterias than any religious leaders
+of equal standing. To envisage the larger
+community of mankind which lacks the physical
+symbols of the state and to dispel the
+parochial prejudices which are harbored in
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_142">[142]</span>
+mediocre minds and which make hatred of
+others the inevitable commitant of love for
+one’s own is clearly a task to which a discriminating
+intelligence must contribute.</p>
+
+<p>However the problem of group relations, as
+has been previously noted, is created not only
+by the parochialism of individuals but by the
+lust and greed of the group itself. The task
+of persuading the group to sacrifice some of its
+advantages for the sake of the whole of human
+society is so difficult that it almost leads to
+despair. If it will ever be accomplished religio-moral
+forces, whatever their present impotence,
+must come to the aid of reason. Prudence
+alone may prompt nations to a measure of self-sacrificing
+action, since unqualified self-assertion
+must lead to mutual destruction. But
+prudential morality reveals the same defects in
+inter-group relations which we have noted in
+simpler social problems. Its ends are always
+too immediate and its perspective is too narrow.
+Moral action which lacks some reference
+to an absolute standard and some ultra-rational
+dynamic inevitably falls short even of satisfying
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_143">[143]</span>
+the social necessities. The prudence of
+nations in the present state of international
+relations tends to prompt a few, usually neighboring
+nations, to compose their differences, but
+for the sake and at the price of sharpening the
+conflict with some other alliance of states. The
+net result of such an enterprise is simply to
+enlarge the unit of conflict once more without
+abolishing warfare. The manner in which the
+triple entente and the triple alliance, both
+formed with high moral pretensions, helped to
+make the World War inevitable is a matter of
+history. More recently there are indications
+that France and Germany will compose their
+differences “for the sake of Europe.” Such
+a reconciliation will hasten the unification of
+Europe but will also help to raise the specter
+of intercontinental wars with continental units
+of conflict. The unification of Asia upon a
+basis of common resentment against Western
+imperialism is an almost unavoidable development
+in international affairs. All these continental
+alliances are logical enough from any
+immediate perspective but dangerous from the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_144">[144]</span>
+perspective of the welfare of the whole race.
+There is no indication that prudential statecraft
+has the resources to prevent America
+from inciting the whole of Europe against our
+economic overlordship of that continent. The
+increasing feeling aroused by the problem of
+debt liquidations is symptomatic of the natural
+resentment which must inevitably issue out
+of a relation of economic interdependence
+between a very wealthy and a poor continent.
+For the settlement of this issue no policy will be
+wise except one which will appear very foolish
+to the wise statesmen. A prudent statecraft
+has made the anxiety of a wealthy creditor the
+dominant note in American international
+policy, and envy and fear the chief characteristics
+in the attitudes of the peoples who must
+deal with us.</p>
+
+<p>Social intelligence does of course produce a
+finer fruit than the type of prudence which characterizes
+the international policy of modern
+states. There is a whole class of social idealists
+who understand the economic basis of most
+international difficulties and who would bring
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_145">[145]</span>
+peace to the warring classes and nations by
+an economic reorganization of modern society.
+Since modern industrialism and capitalism
+have materially complicated the ancient feuds
+between races and classes, it is evident that no
+amount of moral and spiritual goodwill can
+produce an ordered and stable international
+society if the economic roots of war are not
+clearly discerned and finally eliminated. However
+the same intelligence which is capable of
+such discernment easily drifts into a cynicism
+which discounts all moral and personal factors
+in social reconstruction and places its hope
+entirely in a new social strategy. Loyalty to
+the class is substituted for loyalty to the state,
+and class conflict is expected to issue in a lasting
+peace for both classes and nations. Economic
+determinists show a superior discernment
+in recognizing that in a civilization which
+is forced to organize its economic life across
+national boundaries the conflict of interest
+between classes does become more significant
+than the conflict between states, particularly
+since the latter conflict is due either to economic
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_146">[146]</span>
+or to fantastic and imaginary causes. But
+their very realism betrays them into a cynicism
+which finally issues in the most romantic and
+unrealistic dreams. They imagine that social
+peace will result from the victory of one class
+over all other classes. They have not taken
+into account that modern capitalism produces
+a formidable middle class the interests of which
+are not identical with the proletarians. Moral
+and spiritual considerations may conceivably
+prompt this class to make common cause with
+the workers in the attainment of ethical social
+ends, but it will never be annihilated even by
+the most ruthless class conflict nor will it be
+persuaded by the logic of economic facts that
+its interests are altogether identical with those
+of the workers. Even if one class were able to
+eliminate all other classes, which is hardly
+probable, it would require some social grace
+and moral dynamic to preserve harmony
+between the various national groups by which
+this vast mass would be organized and into
+which it would disintegrate. Even within one
+national unit any economic class will dissolve
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_147">[147]</span>
+into various groups, according to varying and
+sometimes conflicting interests, as soon as its
+foes are eliminated. The Russian communists
+were not long able to preserve their absolute
+solidarity after their revolution was firmly
+established. The dominant group soon learned
+that no amount of ruthlessness was able to
+prevent the gradual formation of a minority
+group under Trotzky and Zinoviev. Significantly,
+the conflict of interest between peasants
+and industrial workers is the real basis of this
+schism within communist ranks.</p>
+
+<p>In Europe the qualification of patriotism by
+class loyalties has in some instances led to a
+mitigation of national animosities, but it has
+not destroyed them. On the contrary it has
+added new hatreds to the old and created a
+society which is divided not only by vertical but
+also by horizontal divisions. The Marxian
+idea of the unification of the world upon the
+basis of the common interests of the proletarian
+class must be relegated to the category
+of millennial dreams. It is based upon an illusion
+little better than that of nationalism.
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_148">[148]</span>
+The nationalists seek to escape the moral
+problem by delegating the vices of the individual
+to the group and the Marxians fantastically
+endow the group with virtues which
+it does not possess. Religious and moral idealism,
+preaching goodwill and peace without
+taking the brutal realities of the modern economic
+conflict into consideration, is little better,
+and probably less serviceable than a cynical
+realism which is blind to everything but the
+secular facts revealed in modern economic life.
+The moral futility of such idealism is one of
+the very roots of such a cynicism. Yet, finally,
+the problem of social reconstruction cannot be
+solved without the resources of religious insight
+and moral goodwill. The economic reorganization
+of society will not be effected without conflict
+between those who possess the privileges
+and those who suffer from the inequalities of
+modern industrialism. Neither can it be
+effected without the mutual sacrifice of rights,
+the mutual forgiveness of sins and a mutual
+trust going beyond the deserts of any party to
+the controversy. In England, where economic
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_149">[149]</span>
+theory and practice has never been as completely
+divorced from religious idealism as on
+the Continent, a gradual transfer political
+power and social privilege to the ranks of the
+workers is being made with much less peril of
+a social convulsion than in any nation of the
+Continent. Both the possessors of privilege
+and those who challenge the possession are
+stubborn in the defense of their advantages and
+in the championship of their rights; but at least
+a measure of influence upon the struggle is
+exercised by spiritual and moral considerations
+which Continental critics of England identify
+with the British capacity for compromise but
+which probably has deeper and more spiritual
+roots. Meanwhile religious idealism in
+America is almost completely corrupted by
+sentimentality and betrayed into social futility
+because the momentary unification of American
+society upon the basis of the interests of
+the middle classes absolves the religious conscience
+from facing the moral challenge in the
+social and economic facts of modern society.</p>
+
+<p>Economic determinists are not alone in
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_150">[150]</span>
+sharing with an ordinary prudential statecraft
+in the effort to organize the life of groups by
+means of the resources of intelligence. The
+hopes of the more conventional yet socially
+intelligent people for a new world are involved
+in the idea of a society or league of nations.
+Since an inchoate international society created
+by the new intimacy in which nations live exists
+in spite of international anarchy, it is reasonable
+to attempt the creation of more adequate forms
+and machinery for the crystallization and
+expression of its collective will, the conciliation
+of disputes among its members and the closer
+integration of its life. Moral and spiritual
+forces are sometimes frustrated merely by the
+lack of adequate machinery for the application
+of generally accepted principles to specific
+situations. There is therefore great need for
+an intelligent statesmanship which will give the
+soul of an international society a body, and
+incarnate its aspirations in the instruments of
+political order.</p>
+
+<p>From another point of view, however, international
+society does not yet exist and needs to
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_151">[151]</span>
+be created; and the means for its creation are
+not laws but attitudes, not organization but a
+type of life. Politically minded people easily
+suffer from the illusion that laws create morality,
+that organization creates society. Societies
+are not created by political mechanism but by
+attitudes of mutual respect and trust. Where
+these exist social relations are established and
+traditions formed. These in turn are gradually
+codified and given definition and precision by
+legal enactments. No one now takes the
+theory seriously that human society was
+created by a conscious mutual contract between
+individuals who suddenly realized that they
+could save themselves in no other way from
+mutual self-destruction. Society is older than
+human history and exists wherever individuals
+establish relations of mutual reverence and
+trust. The family is usually the beginning of
+society because here nature aids the imagination
+and consanguinity creates an atmosphere
+of mutual trust. The family is enlarged by
+the fortunes and the needs of war, the resulting
+clans may amalgamate into larger units
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_152">[152]</span>
+through intermarriage of leaders or through
+other exigencies, and the emerging national or
+racial group is formed by similar forces. The
+love and trust which unite a society are no
+more rational than the hatred and mistrust
+which divide one society from another. People
+do not regard each other as morally dependable
+because reason persuades or experience
+prompts them to such an attitude. The attitude
+is determined by natural and instinctive
+or by ideal and religious forces and, once it is
+assumed, is inevitably verified; for in an atmosphere
+of mutual trust human action finally
+becomes trustworthy and morally dependable.
+In so far as national and racial groups live
+in a state of mutual fear and hold life outside
+of the group in contempt rather than in reverence
+there is no international society nor can
+political machinery create it. Only in rare
+instances are new social traditions created by
+legal enactments. Political forms and legal
+measures are usually belated recognitions of
+previously established social facts and necessities.
+The problem of group relations in modern
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_153">[153]</span>
+society is as difficult as it is because natural
+causes have operated to make the social units
+larger and larger while no ideal forces have
+been strong enough to prompt the group to
+enter into ethical relations with other groups.
+If a higher degree of imagination than now
+seems probable does not inform the life of
+modern nations only, one further step is possible—the
+consolidation of continents. In such
+an eventuality the present League of Nations
+could easily become the instrument of pan-Europeanism
+in conflict with other Continents.
+A society of nations is impossible, in short,
+without those ultra-rational attitudes which
+either instinct or religion must create and
+which in the case of this final venture is
+beyond the resources of natural instincts—except
+in the event of a threat from some other
+planetary community.</p>
+
+<p>If the creation of an international society is
+a task to which moral and spiritual resources
+must contribute, its maintenance and development
+are no less dependent upon the coöperation
+of spiritual insight with political prudence.
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_154">[154]</span>
+Even at best human nature is so imperfect
+and relations between groups as well as individuals
+so fruitful in misunderstandings that
+it is impossible to maintain the mutual trust
+and confidence which are the basis of society
+without the spiritual achievement of mutual
+repentance and forgiveness. In the relation
+between groups the ability to detect flaws in
+one’s own and extenuating circumstances in the
+actions and attitudes of others is at once more
+necessary and more difficult than in intra-group
+relations. It is more difficult because
+the intricacy and long range of the relations,
+and the inevitable hypocrisy in the pretensions
+of governments, easily obscure the limitations
+of one and the virtues and good intentions of
+the other party of the relationship. It is more
+necessary because the frictions which fret the
+relations of national and other groups are
+much more generally due to mutual guilt than
+those of individual relations. They develop
+in a narrow world and in a society of but few
+members in which a suspected peril may lead
+to a gesture of defense, the defensive measure
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_155">[155]</span>
+be regarded as offensive and in turn prompt an
+actual attack which will be justified in turn as
+a defensive measure. Thus fears produce
+hatreds, hatreds express themselves in ugly
+grimaces and someone finally strikes the first
+blow. The World War resulted from a spontaneous
+combustion of fears and hatreds, and
+the partial mobilizations, full mobilizations
+and final declarations of war are so intimately
+related to each other that impartial historians
+find it increasingly difficult and irrelevant to
+decide who was responsible for the actual hostilities.
+The obvious fact is that every generation
+of every European state for several centuries
+had gathered fuel for flames of war.
+Yet each group declared its absolute innocence
+and heaped abuse upon the foe. Years after
+the conflict only a small minority in each of the
+participating nations has had the imagination
+to see or the grace to confess the share of its
+nation in the mutual guilt. Meanwhile ancient
+feuds are perpetuated because the hypocrisy of
+the victors is written into solemn treaties and
+produces a resentment among the vanquished
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_156">[156]</span>
+which makes them incapable of any higher sincerity.
+Issues between nations are so involved
+that only expert knowledge is able to ascertain
+the real facts, but the very intricacies of the
+problems involved make it possible to use the
+facts for the validation of almost any thesis
+which national pride may dictate. The real
+task of persuading groups to encourage forgiveness
+by repentance and repentance by forgiveness,
+and thus to overcome rather than
+perpetuate evil, is a spiritual and a moral one
+and cannot be accomplished in a completely
+secular atmosphere. There is little evidence
+to justify the hope that spiritual and moral
+forces, as they are now oriented, are prepared
+to aid in such a task. But their responsibility
+is obvious; social intelligence may be a partner
+in the process of conciliation but intelligence
+cannot bear the burden alone when a disposition
+to humility and a capacity for mercy is
+lacking.</p>
+
+<p>Urging the necessity of religious attitudes
+between social and political groups may seem
+to be a counsel of perfection when it is remembered
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_157">[157]</span>
+that intra-group relations, except in the
+circle of the family and in small religious fellowships,
+have never been able to profit by their
+aid. Society in general has usually contented
+itself with the expedient of composing social
+friction and arbitrating dispute by apportioning
+the relative guilt and innocence of the disputants
+through a presumably impartial
+judicatory which enforces its decisions upon
+the belligerents, however irreconcilable or
+obstreperous they may be. But the fact is that
+such a method is both easier and more effective
+in a society composed of individuals than in a
+society of groups. In an ordinary national
+society the impartiality of the court is guaranteed
+by a society of thousands and even
+millions of individuals who are supposed not
+to be biased in favor of one or the other litigants;
+and the parties to a controversy are
+therefore more inclined to accept the verdict
+of a court. Furthermore the society which supports
+the judicial tribunal is so powerful compared
+to whatever political or physical strength
+the litigants possess that it is able to enforce
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_158">[158]</span>
+the awards of the latter however recalcitrant
+the disputants may be. But the society of
+nations is too small, judged by the number of
+its member nations, to function with absolute
+impartiality in any major dispute. Judicial
+action is therefore immediately less effective.
+It is to be noted that courts are less serviceable
+instruments of social conciliation even within
+nations when they deal with large economic
+and social groups such as unions and trusts or
+when the issue involves basic economic problems;
+and the reason for this is that the parties
+to a litigation represent so large a part of the
+total community that the unbiased character
+of the court is not as readily assumed and ought
+not be taken for granted. Tradition and social
+custom usually bias the court in favor of one
+or the other litigants, generally the one most
+firmly established in the traditional organization
+of the society. In the case of nations it is
+obvious that for some time to come an international
+court must confine itself mainly to
+petty disputes among powerful nations and to
+the real disputes of the petty nations, from
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_159">[159]</span>
+whose perspective the large nations may represent
+an impartial international society.&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_16_16" href="#Footnote_16_16" class="fnanchor">[16]</a>
+Even at best no formal conciliation can heal
+wounds such as were made by the World War
+if nations cannot develop the capacity for
+repentance and mercy and learn how to
+restrain both the proud and the vindictive
+passions which are the natural products of
+unreflective social life.</p>
+
+<p>Though morally dependable action develops
+most readily in an atmosphere of mutual trust,
+it is not to be assumed that either nations or
+individuals always justify trust by trustworthy
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_160">[160]</span>
+action. Faith does not produce conscience
+automatically. Much of the pacifism now
+cultivated by socially effective religious forces
+has the defect that it fails to gauge the stubborn
+resistance to ideal forces in the predatory
+nature of national groups. It is difficult to
+develop moral attitudes sufficiently honest not
+only to give the bearer of trust the prestige of
+sincerity but to make the object of trust
+worthy of its faith. Trust united with selfishness
+results in moral futility; and when it is
+based upon illusion and fails to take account
+of the imperfect social attitudes which it must
+overcome, it issues in mere sentimentality. It
+is significant that the idea of the outlawry of
+war should be espoused particularly in
+America and find little favor in other nations;
+for here extraordinary power is united with
+remarkable political naïvete, so that American
+idealists find it difficult to appreciate the
+unsatisfied hungers of other nations or their
+resentful reaction to our own satiety. If
+nations cannot be moved to make some sacrifices
+for the sake of the ideal and to qualify
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_161">[161]</span>
+their expansive desires by moral purpose, all
+efforts to create an international society must
+finally prove vain. It may be that the secular
+ambitions of nations are so firmly established
+in social custom and their unethical attitudes
+so generally sanctioned by the popular mind
+that nothing will avail to give their actions even
+a touch of ethical character. It is difficult
+enough to subdue and discipline the immediate
+and anarchic desires which struggle for
+expression in the soul of the individual; but
+when they express themselves in the life of
+groups and are veiled in seeming sanctities
+even while they achieve new and more diabolical
+forms they can be subdued only by the most
+astute intelligence united with a high moral
+passion. Modern civilization lacks both this
+intelligence and this moral passion and is in the
+peril of losing what it has of the latter as it
+develops the former. Moral idealism which
+fails to gauge the measure of resistance which
+its ideals must meet in the confused realities of
+life or to fashion adequate weapons for its conflict
+degenerates into mere sentimentality.
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_162">[162]</span>
+But a social intelligence which is overwhelmed
+by the discouraging realities and despairs of
+the attainment of any ideal sinks into a morally
+enervating cynicism. Moral leadership in
+Western society is divided to-day between
+sentimentalists and cynics who combine to
+render the prospect of an ethical regeneration
+of modern life well-nigh hopeless. If men are
+really to be redeemed from the sins of greed
+and mutual fears and hatreds by which they
+make their common life intolerable they need
+a faith which is not held too cheaply but which
+is held nevertheless in defiance of every discouragement.
+The same intelligence which the
+complexities of modern life demand and create
+easily prompts not only to the cynicism which
+declares that “all men are liars” but to a moral
+ennui which cries, “Vanity, vanity, all is
+vanity.”</p>
+
+<p>Benjamin Kidd who understood the need
+for ultra-rational sanctions in social life better
+than most sociologists put the problem of modern
+society in these words: “The great problem
+with which every progressive society stands
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_163">[163]</span>
+confronted is: How to retain the highest operative
+ultra-rational sanctions for those onerous
+conditions of life which are essential to its life,
+and at one and the same time to allow freest
+play to those intellectual forces which, while
+tending to come into conflict with such sanctions,
+contribute nevertheless to raise to the
+highest degree of social efficiency the whole
+of its members.”&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_17_17" href="#Footnote_17_17" class="fnanchor">[17]</a></p>
+
+<p>To develop the wisdom of serpents while
+they retain the guilelessness of doves is the
+task which faces the religio-moral forces if they
+would aid in the moral regeneration of society.
+It may be that such a task is too difficult for
+the resources of this or any generation of the
+immediate future and that painful experience
+must first prove other strategies inadequate.
+Meanwhile even the possibility of future usefulness
+of religion demands the largest possible
+measure of immediate detachment from
+the unethical characteristics of modern society.
+If religion cannot transform society, it must
+find its social function in criticizing present
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_164">[164]</span>
+realities from some ideal perspective and in
+presenting the ideal without corruption, so
+that it may sharpen the conscience and
+strengthen the faith of each generation.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_165">[165]</span>
+</p>
+
+
+  <h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_VII">
+    CHAPTER VII
+    <br>
+    TRANSCENDING AND TRANSFORMING THE WORLD
+  </h2>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>The tendency of modern religion to make
+itself at home in the world and to enter into
+intimate relations with civilization is not due
+solely to the puritan confidence of victory over
+life. It is partly due to the influences of a sentimental
+and optimistic evaluation of human
+nature which came to the modern church
+through Rousseau and romanticism. It is also
+a product of the evolutionary optimism which
+has characterized religious thought since
+ethicists and religionists have learnt to overcome
+the melancholy conclusions implicit in
+the Darwinian theory and to see the bright side
+of evolution. Traditional religion is other-worldly.
+The modern church prides itself on
+its bright and happy worldliness. It is more
+interested in transforming the natural and
+social environment of personality than in persuading
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_166">[166]</span>
+the soul to transcend all circumstances
+and find its happiness in inner peace. The
+modern church regards this mundane interest
+as its social passion. But it is also the mark
+of its slavery to society. Whenever religion
+feels completely at home in the world, it is the
+salt which has lost its savor. If it sacrifices
+the strategy of renouncing the world, it has no
+strategy by which it may convict the world of
+sin. A movement which detaches religion from
+life to give it perspective and power over life
+must on the other hand run the risk of centering
+the interests of men on other than social
+problems. Religion thus faces a dilemma
+which is not easily solved. A religion of social
+amelioration easily becomes a beautiful
+romance which obscures the unlovely realities
+of life. A religion of detachment from the
+world may persuade the soul to find both happiness
+and virtue in defiance of physical and
+social circumstances and thus to regard all
+social problems as irrelevant to its main purpose.
+This dilemma is not due to any specific
+or historic weaknesses in types of religion but
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_167">[167]</span>
+arises out of the nature and constitution of
+religion as such.</p>
+
+<p>Religion in its unspoiled form is always
+other-worldly and disenchanted. Puritanism,
+romanticism and evolutionary optimism are
+really but reflections and refractions of the
+general temper of Western life, which has
+slowly gained the ascendancy over the religious
+spirit. It is a temper of friendliness to, or at
+least fearlessness before the world. In puritanism
+the tension between religion and life is
+maintained, but the soul is persuaded that it
+can bring the whole of life under the dominion
+of conscience. In romanticism there is a frank
+identification of human virtue with a sentimentally
+idealized natural world. Religious
+and ethical thought which has come under the
+influence of evolutionary optimism maintains a
+sense of tension between the soul and the natural
+world in rare instances; more frequently
+it regards human history as but the last chapter
+in the beautiful story of progress which all life
+has unfolded and which time and patience will
+inevitably bring to a happy issue. The foundation
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_168">[168]</span>
+for the Western strategy of life was laid
+by the Greeks who, overcoming the awe and
+reverence with which the Oriental brooded over
+nature’s mysteries, thrust impious hands into
+her secrets and made shrewd guesses about her
+varied phenomena. The Greeks learned to
+make only slight practical application of their
+knowledge, and the rise of Christianity eclipsed
+their scientific temper. It came into its own
+again at the close of the Middle Ages and at
+the dawn of the modern era. The fact that
+science developed in the West rather than the
+East is due to this attitude toward the natural
+world. The Orient is not less curious than the
+Occident, but it directs its mind to other problems.
+While it cradles philosophies and
+religions the West gives birth to science.</p>
+
+<p>Since the dawn of the industrial era scientific
+knowledge is used increasingly for the purpose
+of transforming the natural circumstance
+of human life. Nature is not transcended but
+transformed in the interest of human happiness.
+Comforts are multiplied; power is
+increased; time and distance are destroyed;
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_169">[169]</span>
+hours of toil are reduced; natural environment
+is changed; disease is eliminated and death
+postponed; the hostilities of nature are overcome
+and her benevolence multiplied for the
+sake of human welfare. Our birth may be
+“but a sleep and a forgetting” but our life is
+undeniably lived in natural conditions which
+profoundly affect not only physical well-being
+but cultural and spiritual character. It is evident
+therefore that there is profound wisdom
+in the scientific strategy which transforms the
+natural world in the interest of the human
+spirit. Not only is the Western world firmly
+committed to it, but there are indications that
+the Orient will adopt it in spite of the opposition
+of religious leaders such as Gandhi. Whatever
+perils to the spiritual life may lurk in the
+preoccupation of the soul with its physical circumstances,
+it is clear that human personality
+may be served by improving the natural
+environment which conditions it. Wealth may
+lead to sensual excess but it is also the basis of
+culture. Leisure may be secured by reducing
+physical wants to a minimum, but there are
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_170">[170]</span>
+cultural advantages in a leisure which does not
+preclude the satisfaction of all reasonable
+desires. Comforts may lead men to become
+obsessed with their external circumstances, but
+they also reduce irrelevant distractions to life’s
+main purpose. Physical health is not a necessary
+but a convenient condition for moral and
+spiritual enterprise.</p>
+
+<p>In spite of these advantages religion, except
+in a few contemporary forms, has always been
+either hostile or indifferent to the business of
+transforming nature in the interest of personal
+values. It has counseled the soul to seek its
+happiness not in changing but in becoming
+independent of circumstances. In Buddhism
+the highest happiness is sought by throttling all
+desires. Jesus was more careful to distinguish
+between the will to live and its physical expressions.
+But he was critical of all physical
+desires and satisfactions. He had the Orient’s
+profound indifference to the “business of
+earth.” If our ears were not so habituated to
+his words that they fail to catch their real significance,
+a modern congregation would be
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_171">[171]</span>
+shocked by the admonition: “Take no thought
+for your life, what ye shall eat or what ye shall
+drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put
+on. Is not life more than meat and the body
+more than raiment?” “Lay not up for yourselves
+treasures upon earth where moth and rust
+doth corrupt and where thieves break through
+and steal, for where your treasure is, there will
+your heart be also.” “Fear not them which
+kill the body but are not able to kill the soul;
+but rather fear him which is able to destroy
+both soul and body in hell.” The modern
+Christian is inclined to destroy the force of the
+profound other-worldliness of such sentiments
+by reflecting that they represent an Oriental
+cast which is incidental and not essential to the
+gospel of Jesus. They are Oriental no doubt,
+but precisely because they are religious; and to
+regard them as incidental is to miss the whole
+meaning of the gospel. Though the West is
+unable to accept them, it pays an unconscious
+tribute to the truth involved in them. For the
+absolute moral values incarnated in the personality
+of Jesus, which the West still reveres,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_172">[172]</span>
+are organically related to this other-worldliness.</p>
+
+<p>Whatever the limitations of this emphasis, it
+is evident that religion cannot escape it. Concerned
+with the soul’s inner peace and perfect
+virtue it is forced to lift it above the corruptions
+and irrelevancies of temporal conditions.
+The whole course of modern history is ample
+justification for Jesus’ warning: Where your
+treasure is, there will your heart be also. The
+instruments of personality’s victory over
+nature have become the chains for a new kind
+of thraldom. Western civilization is enslaved
+to its machines and the things which the
+machines produce. Spiritual forces are emancipated
+from the forces of nature only to
+become the victims of a mechanized civilization.
+It is a Pyrrhic victory. America, which has
+developed the Western strategy with greater
+consistency than any other nation, is at once
+the envy and the scorn of the world. The scorn
+may be a device for hiding the envy, but there
+is moral justification for reproach. What the
+world regards as our vulgarity is more than the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_173">[173]</span>
+awkwardness of youth; it is an undue preoccupation
+with life’s instrumentality and an
+obsession of the soul with the concrete world.</p>
+
+<p>The Orient may be more cruel than the
+West, but our superior tenderness is matched
+by our more expansive avarice. Having determined
+that life consists in things a man possesses,
+the West sacrifices both inner peace and
+social harmony in the mad scramble for the
+power and privilege which the conquests of
+nature has supplied. Neither the imperialism
+of nations nor the monstrous avarice of economic
+groups is confined to Western life, but
+covetousness and greed have been manifestly
+increased by the temper and strategy of the
+Occident. The Biblical analysis which discovers
+covetousness as the root of conflict is
+applicable to our own day: “Ye lust and have
+not; ye kill and desire to have, and cannot
+obtain; ye fight and war, yet ye have not
+because ye ask amiss.... Know ye not that
+the friendship of this world is enmity with
+God?”&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_18_18" href="#Footnote_18_18" class="fnanchor">[18]</a> However necessary it may be to make
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_174">[174]</span>
+a more equitable distribution of the physical
+blessings of life, religion’s true function is to
+develop an attitude of indifference toward the
+very goods for the possession of which men contend
+so frantically. When Jesus rebuked the
+young man who desired his aid in correcting the
+inequitable division of an inheritance, his
+unwillingness to assume a judicial function
+was manifestly dictated by the thought that
+the whole inheritance ought to have been a
+matter of indifference to the young man. It
+is easy to see that such an attitude may lend
+itself to abuse and be used to perpetuate
+inequalities. If advocated by religious groups
+which have profited by economic inequalities, it
+becomes the tool of hypocrisy. Yet it is an
+emphasis which religion cannot disavow. It is
+basic to its whole world view.</p>
+
+<p>The peril to happiness as well as to virtue
+in reliance upon the external fortunes of life
+justifies the counsel of religion that happiness
+must be founded on internal rather than
+external resources. The conquest of nature is
+really but a relative victory of personality over
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_175">[175]</span>
+circumstance. Though the caprice of nature’s
+forces has been checked, fortune remains fickle.
+If men cannot learn “how to be abased and
+how to abound,” there is no guarantee of happiness
+for them. Poverty may be a curse, but
+voluntarily chosen or consented to without
+sullenness it may become the way of the soul’s
+emancipation. The elimination of disease is a
+boon to mankind, but there is little likelihood
+that science will be able to overcome all ills to
+which the human flesh is heir. No scientific
+advance will obviate the necessity for the discovery
+of faith that “God’s strength is made
+perfect in weakness,” that the infirmities of the
+flesh may become the occasion for the cultivation
+of spiritual graces. Even at best science
+cannot destroy nature’s final irrelevancy—death.
+There can therefore be no real victory
+over nature except by the strategy of transcending
+her fortunes. The more hostages
+taken from her the greater will be the disappointment
+in the hour of her final victory.
+It is man’s sublime and tragic fate that he must
+find happiness in the search for infinitude
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_176">[176]</span>
+amidst the flux of time and he can therefore
+never accept the portion of mortality for himself
+with equanimity. Hence his final comfort
+must come from the counsel of religion which
+teaches him how he may identify himself with
+the eternal values of his devotion, so that
+“though the outward man perish yet the inward
+man is renewed day by day.”&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_19_19" href="#Footnote_19_19" class="fnanchor">[19]</a></p>
+
+<p>The temper of Western civilization has made
+the modern church quite ashamed of the
+other-worldly character of traditional religion,
+and intent upon discarding it as much as possible.
+Everything is done to impress the generation
+with the mundane interests of religious
+idealism and to secularize religion itself so that
+it may survive in a secular age as a kind of
+harmless adornment of the moral life. Yet its
+service to both human happiness and virtue are
+involved in its other-worldliness. It is through
+that element that it gains the power to raise
+morality above the utilitarian plane and to give
+human happiness a firmer foundation than
+fickle fortune. If men can find no basis for
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_177">[177]</span>
+happiness except in their adjustment to
+external realities, they will not suffer pain to
+realize a kingdom of righteousness. If they
+are taught to identify physical well-being with
+their cherished peace, they will not venture
+farther than such actions as a cool prudence
+prompts. The cross was inspired by devotion
+to a “kingdom which is not of this world”; but
+the cross was also the method by which that
+kingdom was changed from an ethereal to a
+concrete reality. It is the absolute ideal which
+has no basis in concrete reality which moves
+men to defy the limitations of the concrete and
+overcome them. A religion which is perfectly
+at home in the world has no counsel for it
+which the world could not gain by an easier
+method.</p>
+
+<p>Yet the reaction of modern religion to traditional
+other-worldliness is natural enough and,
+in a way, necessary. While religion cannot
+afford to discard its other-worldliness, the
+moral and social limitations which issue from
+it are obvious enough. We have previously
+observed the tendency of types of religion to
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_178">[178]</span>
+withdraw the ideal from life and to imagine
+that it has magic potencies over life’s realities,
+or that subjective devotion to it may absolve
+them of the duty of realizing it in history. All
+these defects are due to vagaries which are not
+inevitable characteristics of religious life. But
+the social limitations which result from the
+religious strategy of transcending the fortunes
+of life are constitutional and central. They
+therefore offer a very serious problem. If the
+soul is lifted above circumstances, it easily
+loses interest in changing them to better advantage.
+If its happiness is made independent of
+fortune, there is less purpose in making fortune
+secure. If personality discovers its highest
+satisfactions in defying environmental factors,
+it may become indifferent to the necessary
+projects of creating a more favorable environment
+for personal values. Human personality
+is an historic product, determined by specific
+forces of natural and social environment, and
+though it may attain its highest glory by transcending
+all circumstances, it will fall short if
+it adopts that strategy at the beginning and
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_179">[179]</span>
+not at the end of its efforts. The Orient, which
+produces more saints than the Occident, pays
+for them by the abject misery of its multitudes.
+Its highest moral achievements are really
+determined by a cruel law of survival. Only
+personalities of great spiritual resource can
+overcome the general physical conditions of its
+life which submerge the mass in hopeless
+poverty.</p>
+
+<p>Some credit for the advantages of Western
+life must be given to the moral superiority of
+Christianity over Buddhism, which represents
+the quintessence of the Oriental spirit. Christianity
+is a life-affirming and Buddhism a life-denying
+faith. The one does not destroy but
+refines the energy of life. The other destroys
+energy in the process of refinement. The
+Orient is pantheistic; and by deifying all of
+life, offers no avenue of escape from its imperfections
+except by annihilation of life itself.
+There is a difference between fleeing to God
+from life’s unbearable realities and identifying
+these with the divine will. At its worst the
+strategy of the Orient is a fatalistic acceptance
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_180">[180]</span>
+of life’s circumstances; at its best it is a stifling
+of all desires so that the soul may be free of the
+world. Yet there is a social peril even in the
+more wholesome strategy of Christianity which
+affirms life but divorces it from its physical
+necessities. This limitation is felt particularly
+when the conditions which invite change are
+social rather than natural. Nature is inexorable
+and it is well to learn that only they are
+able to escape her furies who also know how to
+renounce her delights. But the world which
+man has created retains its cruelties only by
+the sufferance of man. Anything which will
+incline men to assume an attitude of indifference
+toward projects of social reform and
+amelioration is therefore a potential peril to
+social progress. When Jesus rebuked the
+young man for his anxiety about an equitable
+division of his inheritance, he took a high
+spiritual ground which easily lends itself to
+abuse in the disillusioning realities of economic
+and social life. What if a sublime
+renunciation does not soften the hearts of those
+who hold more than their just share of the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_181">[181]</span>
+inheritance? And what if the welfare of others
+besides that of the moral idealist is involved in
+the renunciation? Shall the Biblical injunction
+to servants that they be obedient to their
+masters “not only to the good and gentle but
+also to the froward” apply to political tyrannies?
+Obviously an attitude which represents
+a high spiritual achievement in the individual
+instance has its limitations when raised to a
+general social policy. Social radicals who
+have been confronted with the conservatism of
+religion have parodied the other-worldly
+temper at the heart of this characteristic in the
+words: “Bye and bye, there’ll be pie in the
+sky.” The sneer in this parody hardly
+does justice to religious other-worldliness.
+The emphasis is not so much upon a future life
+as distinguished from the present existence as
+upon a type of life which can afford to regard
+“pie” with disdain whether in this or any other
+world. Nevertheless, even the highest type of
+other-worldliness may become the cause of
+indifference to social conditions. The very sensitiveness
+of religion which persuades it to
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_182">[182]</span>
+regard human society in the same category
+with the world of nature as “the world” may
+result in the completer secularization of society
+and its abandonment to the unchecked forces
+of nature.</p>
+
+<p>There is no easy formula for avoiding this
+social peril in the strategy of religion. The
+elimination of pantheism is a material aid in
+its solution. The superior energy of the West
+may be due to a tentative dualism in its
+religion which has been qualified from time to
+time by pantheistic and monistic thought but
+never completely destroyed. Yet even the
+dualism of Christianity does not save it altogether
+from positions which offer peril to social
+and moral values. Even an observer who is
+entirely sympathetic to religion must come to
+the conclusion that the West owes many of its
+advantages to the fact that religion has had no
+easy time in Western life, and that in the past
+centuries not only scientific thought but scientific
+life-strategy has challenged religion at
+every turn. Some of the excellencies of
+Western life are clearly the fruits of our
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_183">[183]</span>
+science rather than our religion. Of course,
+these advantages have been bought at a price.
+The empirical instincts of science drive it to
+deny the continuities in reality and to see
+everything only in its momentary and immediate
+situation. The modern behavioristic
+destruction of the concept of personality is
+therefore one of the natural results of scientific
+thought betrayed into absurdity by its own consistency.
+But a consistent religion is generally
+equally absurd. Regarding all reality, and
+personality in particular, <i>sub specie æternitatis</i>,
+it fails to see how truly personality is the
+product of specific social and natural forces and
+neglects to change the material environment
+in the interest of human welfare. Human personality
+can be understood neither in terms of
+its environment alone nor in absolute terms
+which leave the material world in which it
+develops out of account. The final victory of
+personality must be gained by transcending
+concrete situations and material circumstances;
+but it is a hollow victory if circumstances are
+not previously used and amended to improve
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_184">[184]</span>
+personal values. The soul is at once the victim
+and the master of the material world. It
+gains its highest triumph by renouncing the
+world, but the renunciation is premature if a
+futile and yet not futile effort is not made to
+make the natural world conform to the needs
+of human character.</p>
+
+<p>While the Western world has much to learn
+from the East in its strategy of life, there is no
+gain in substituting one strategy for the other;
+for they are both defective. The plight of the
+West is due to the complete bankruptcy of
+religious forces and the unchallenged dominion
+of science; just as the plight of the East is due
+to the unchallenged sway of religion. Applied
+science has created a civilization which may be
+as destructive of personality for the meagerly
+endowed multitudes as the natural poverty of
+Asia. But Western civilization may at least
+boast of developing a middle class which enjoys
+physical and spiritual advantages which no
+considerable class of the Orient possesses.
+Neither the West nor the East has arrived at
+a perfect basis for happiness. The Oriental
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_185">[185]</span>
+soul is like a bird, freed of its cage, but with no
+wings to fly. The Occidental soul has wings
+but is so fascinated by its gilded cage that it
+does not care to fly.</p>
+
+<p>The conclusion which emerges from such
+reflections will shock orthodox religionists. It
+is that the values of religion are conditioned
+and not absolute and that they attain their
+highest usefulness not when they subdue all
+other values but when they are in perpetual
+conflict with them, or it may be truer to say
+when they are coördinated with them. Western
+life gained an advantage over the East by centuries
+of conflict between the religious and
+scientific strategy of life. It is losing the
+advantage by an excessive devotion to concrete
+interests and by the capitulation of religion.
+The supreme tragedy of history would be the
+not improbable armed conflict between West
+and East, with the Orient in a frenzy of resentment
+against the greed of the Occident and
+the Occident in a natural fear of the low living
+standards of Asia. Part of the truth would
+be on either side and the conflict could result
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_186">[186]</span>
+only in exaggerating the limitations of the
+partial truth which each side holds.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile there is the possibility of coördinating
+the values of East and West, of
+science and religion. Let the East learn to
+live in time and the West to view its temporalities
+with indifference. The coördination is not
+easy because men are not inclined to be at once
+critical and appreciative of the values with
+which they must deal. They always tend to
+increase the limitations of certain values by an
+uncritical devotion, or to destroy the values in
+mad resentment against their limitations.
+Since man is a citizen of two worlds, he cannot
+afford to renounce his citizenship in either.
+He must work out his destiny both as a child
+of nature and as a servant of the absolute.</p>
+
+<p>The prospects for an exchange of values
+between the East and the West are not particularly
+bright. The Orient is indeed being
+“Americanized,” but partly through the policy
+of Western imperialism exploiting the low
+living standards of Asia to the advantage of
+Western industry. There is no powerful
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_187">[187]</span>
+movement in the West to dissuade it from its
+complete trust in physical power as the method
+of self-realization, and in physical comfort as
+the way to happiness. Modern religion has
+not been totally ineffective in qualifying racial
+arrogance and parochial prejudices. But it
+has had practically no effect upon the instincts
+of avarice which dominate Western life. The
+religious groups which are still ambitious to
+defy civilization in the name of their faith have
+a theology which cannot gain the respect of
+the thoughtful leaders of modern life; and the
+sins of which they convict modern society are
+not its real sins. The intellectually emancipated
+religious groups are too thoroughly
+acclimatized to the atmosphere of Western life
+to have any sensitiveness for its imperfections.</p>
+
+<p>The greatest hope lies in the missionary
+enterprise, which through its very effort
+toward the universalization of the Christian
+faith has a tendency to strip it of its Occidental
+accretions, so that it may become intrinsically
+worthy of its world expansion. The missionary
+enterprise may thereby contribute as much
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_188">[188]</span>
+toward the spiritualization of Western life as
+toward the regeneration of the East. Its very
+contact with the East gives it a perspective on
+the limitations of Western life which churches
+at home do not possess. There is, of course,
+the possibility that Western imperialism will
+so thoroughly discredit the missionary enterprise
+before it can function in this way that it
+will lose its whole prestige in the Eastern
+world. In that case Japan will probably continue
+to unify and occidentalize Asia in the
+hope of fighting fire with fire. A small minority
+of thoughtful missionaries are making a
+desperate effort to disassociate the missionary
+enterprise from the politics of Western
+imperialism in the Orient. Considering the
+difficulty of their task, they have made commendable
+progress. Yet if Christianity at
+home does not become disassociated from and
+does not qualify the greed of which the Oriental
+politics of Western nations is but one expression,
+the heroic efforts of the missionaries may
+be vain. Men of prudence in the Orient may
+be willing to concede that ideals have validity
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_189">[189]</span>
+even if they are outraged by those who ostensibly
+accept them. But the final test of ideals
+must include their ability to qualify human
+action. If Christian idealism is to be a force
+which will help to create a unified world culture,
+capable of destroying the moral limitations
+of both the Oriental and the Occidental
+strategy of life, it must detach itself more completely
+from the temper of Western life even
+while it seeks to influence the thought of the
+East.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_190">[190]</span>
+</p>
+
+
+  <h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_VIII">
+    CHAPTER VIII
+    <br>
+    A PHILOSOPHICAL BASIS FOR AN ETHICAL RELIGION
+  </h2>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>The ethical problem of religion may be more
+important than the metaphysical one, as previously
+observed, but it cannot be solved without
+a reorientation of the present philosophical
+basis of religious conviction. The Western
+world has had a slight advantage over the East
+in the tentative dualism of Christianity, but
+this advantage has been lost by the inevitable
+drift toward pantheism in Western thought.
+Pantheistic tendencies are potential perils to
+moral values in practically all religions. By
+identifying God and the natural world they
+either persuade men to resign themselves to
+the inadequacies of nature, under the illusion
+that divine sanctity has rendered them immutable,
+or they blind the eye to the imperfections
+of nature and thus destroy the moral sensitiveness
+of religion. The Orient has usually
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_191">[191]</span>
+derived a morally enervating pessimism from
+its pantheism, while the Occident has chosen
+the other horn of the monistic dilemma and
+fallen into a sentimental optimism. Both
+alternatives are as untrue to the facts as they
+are inadequate to men’s moral needs.</p>
+
+<p>In the Western world religious optimism
+has been gradually destroyed by the advance
+of science which discredited the moral overestimate
+of the cosmic order, implicit as one of
+two tendencies in pantheism. The practical
+and tragic realities of its international and
+industrial life have added to the disillusionment
+and made men as sceptical of human as of
+cosmic virtue. Thus the cynicism of disillusioned
+intelligence is added to the despair
+of an outraged conscience to unite in a
+pessimism which questions both the rationality
+of the universe and the morality of man. The
+despair of the West is even more devastating
+to moral values than the pessimism of the East,
+for the Orient is prompted by its religion to a
+serene resignation while the West spends itself
+in blind fury or sensual excess. When all confidence
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_192">[192]</span>
+in moral values is destroyed, the strong
+express themselves by asserting their power
+or resenting their seeming impotence, while
+the weak sink into an easy indulgence of natural
+appetites. The real history of Western
+society is being written by Nietzschian and
+Marxian cynics who have subdued every
+scruple which might qualify their contest for
+power. Meanwhile their conflict is lazily witnessed
+by vast hordes whose main purpose in
+life is to gratify their senses and who give their
+sympathy to one or the other side according as
+it offers least hindrance to their enjoyments.
+In such a situation religion is easily relegated
+to the position of restraining the petty and
+obscuring the major vices of the small minority
+which still profess it. This is particularly
+true when optimism and sentimentality, such
+as characterize modern religion, make it incapable
+of a realistic evaluation of the forces
+which reveal themselves in human society.</p>
+
+<p>Albert Schweitzer&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_20_20" href="#Footnote_20_20" class="fnanchor">[20]</a> interprets the whole
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_193">[193]</span>
+moral bankruptcy of Western civilization as a
+pessimistic reaction to the extravagant optimism
+of its traditional religions and philosophies.
+While other factors, such as the complexity
+and the impersonal nature of industrial
+society, have been contributory factors to the
+disillusionment of the age, it is probably true
+that men are inclined to expect too little of the
+world and of man mostly because too much
+has been claimed for them and extravagant
+hopes have been disappointed. A regeneration
+of the ethical life of Western society must
+depend, therefore, upon the revival of a
+religion in which the Scylla of pantheism and
+the Charybdis of pure naturalism are avoided.
+While the Orient has a serenity which will
+contribute much to the art of living in a unified
+world civilization, there is no health for our
+sickness in its religious philosophies. Its pantheism
+cannot be maintained in the scientific
+atmosphere of the West, and if it could, as it
+is in rare instances, it would only present us
+with the impossible choice between the moral
+ennui of pessimism and the sentimentality of
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_194">[194]</span>
+an unqualified optimism. The youthful
+exuberance of the Western mind invariably
+inclines it to the least defensible of these two
+bad alternatives, the optimistic one. When
+the West borrows religion from the East, as
+for instance in theosophy and Christian
+Science, it is used to support optimistic illusions
+so palpably absurd that they flourish only
+in those circles of society in which life is
+extremely comfortable and not too intelligent.</p>
+
+<p>The only fruitful alternative to a monism
+and pantheism which identifies God and the
+world, the real and the ideal, is a dualism which
+maintains some kind of distinction between
+them and does not lose one in the other. Dualistic
+solutions to the riddles of life are not new
+in the history of religious thought. They are
+in fact as numerous as pantheistic ones, but
+their metaphysical limitations have usually
+outweighed their moral advantages and shortened
+their life. In Zoroastrianism, the noblest
+of purely Aryan faiths, Ahirman the spirit of
+evil exists independently of Ormuzd the good
+spirit. The influence of this Persian dualism
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_195">[195]</span>
+is seen in both Hebrew and Christian thought.
+The satanology of the Old Testament is
+partly derived from it; and Manichæism,
+through which Augustine passed before he
+embraced and elaborated Catholic orthodoxy,
+is a compound of Persian and Christian
+religion. Mythology is filled with efforts to do
+justice to the conflicts which the world reveals
+as obviously as its unities, as for instance in the
+myth of Prometheus and Zeus. Even Plato,
+from whom most Western pantheism has been
+indirectly derived, held that God’s perfect
+goodness was thwarted by the intractableness
+of the materials with which he worked.</p>
+
+<p>Early Hebrew religion was naïvely dualistic,
+and that is one reason why it has been so
+potent in the history of religion. God was
+indeed conceived of as omnipotent; that conception
+was the path that led to monotheism.
+But the idea of omnipotence was elaborated
+dramatically rather than philosophically. The
+heavens might declare his glory and the firmament
+show his handiwork, but he was revealed
+in national history and (according to the conception
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_196">[196]</span>
+of the later prophets) in personal experience
+more than in natural phenomena. Even a
+very early prophet discovered that the still small
+voice rather than the earthquake or the fire was
+the symbol of his presence. The Genesis
+account of the fall solves the problem of evil
+upon an essentially monistic basis by making
+human sin responsible for even the inadequacies
+of nature and attributing everything from
+weeds to mortality to the luckless error of the
+first man. Neither the goodness nor the omnipotence
+of God is abridged in this naïve but
+sublime conception in which the human conscience
+assumes responsibility for more than its
+share of human ills in order to save the reputation
+of divine virtue. The monism of this
+account is, however, qualified by the injection
+of the tempting serpent, an element which is
+precursory of the belief in the devil, which the
+Jews inherited from Babylonia and Persia and
+which has fortunately qualified all monistic
+tendencies in Jewish and Christian orthodoxy
+until this day. A profounder instinct than
+reveals itself to the casual observer persuades
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_197">[197]</span>
+fundamentalism to defend the reality of the
+devil with such vehemence. It may be metaphysically
+inconsistent to have two absolutes,
+one good and one evil, but the conception provides
+at least for a dramatic portrayal of the
+conflict which disturbs the harmonies and
+unities of the universe, and therefore, it has a
+practical and ethical value. The idea of
+attributing personality to evil may be scientifically
+absurd but it rests upon a natural error.
+When the blind and impersonal forces of
+nature come to life in man they are given the
+semblance of personality.</p>
+
+<p>Professor Albert Schweitzer&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_21_21" href="#Footnote_21_21" class="fnanchor">[21]</a> ascribes the
+moral superiority of prophetic Judaism and
+Christianity over other world religions to the
+naïve dualism of the prophets and Jesus, who
+emphasized the moral rather than the metaphysical
+attributes of God in such a way as to
+develop a practical and morally potent distinction
+between God and the universe, between
+the ideal of religious devotion and the disappointing
+realities of life. The distinction
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_198">[198]</span>
+between Oriental monism and the practical
+dualism of Christianity in its unspoiled form
+is succinctly stated by Professor Alfred
+Whitehead: “Christianity has always been a
+religion seeking a metaphysics in contrast to
+Buddhism which is a metaphysics generating a
+religion.... The defect of a metaphysical
+system is the very fact that it is a neat little
+system which thereby oversimplifies its expression
+of the world.... In respect to its treatment
+of evil, Christianity is therefore less clear
+in its metaphysical idea but more inclusive of
+the facts.”&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_22_22" href="#Footnote_22_22" class="fnanchor">[22]</a></p>
+
+<p>In the early Christian church the naïve
+dualism of Jesus was given dramatic and
+dynamic force through his deification, so that
+he became, in a sense, the God of the ideal, the
+symbol of the redemptive force in life which
+is in conflict with evil. Since no clear distinction
+was made between the spirit of the living
+Christ and the indwelling Holy Ghost, the
+doctrine of the trinity was, in effect, a symbol
+of an essential dualism. Orthodox Christianity
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_199">[199]</span>
+did indeed renounce the gnostic heresy
+which tried to give this implicit dualism explicit
+character by its distinction between the God
+who was revealed in Jesus and the God of
+creation. And history has justified the wisdom
+of its course. The scientific precision necessary
+to save such theology from essential polytheism
+was lacking and Christianity was intent upon
+guarding its monotheism. Yet it preserved
+enough metaphysical inconsistency to retain
+dualistic tendencies in its monistic orthodoxy.
+Its symbols lacked philosophical precision but
+they did give vivid and dramatic force to the
+idea of a conflict between evil and the redemptive
+and creative force in life. Thus it could
+fulfill the two great functions of religion
+in prompting men to repent of their sins, and
+in encouraging them to hope for redemption
+from them. No mechanical or magical explanations
+of the significance of the crucifixion
+have ever permanently obscured the helpful
+spiritual symbolism of the cross in which the
+conflict between good and evil is portrayed and
+the possibility as well as the difficulty of the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_200">[200]</span>
+triumph of the good over evil is dramatized.
+An absolute dualism either between God and
+the universe or between man and nature, or
+spirit and matter, or good and evil, is neither
+possible nor necessary. What is important is
+that justice be done to the fact that creative
+purpose meets resistance in the world and that
+the ideal which is implicit in every reality is
+also in conflict with it. The reason why naïve
+religions are “more inclusive of the facts” in
+portraying this struggle than highly elaborated
+theologies is that the latter are always
+prompted by the rational need of consistency
+to obscure some facts for the sake of developing
+an intellectual plausible unity. Religions
+grow out of real experience in which tragedy
+mingles with beauty and man learns that the
+moral values which dignify his life are
+embattled in his own soul and imperiled in the
+world. He is inclined neither to obscure the
+reality of the struggle nor to sacrifice the hope
+of victory until too much reflection persuades
+him to believe either that all partial evil is
+universal good or that destiny makes his
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_201">[201]</span>
+struggle futile and his defeat inevitable. That
+is how morality dies with religion when an age
+has become too sophisticated.</p>
+
+<p>Naïve Christianity was unable to maintain
+itself in the Græco-Roman world without
+making concessions to its intellectual scruples
+and paying for its conquests by incorporating
+Hellenic philosophies in its theology. The
+gospel was diluted with neo-Platonism to make
+it more palatable for a cultured world. The
+naïvely and dramatically conceived omnipotence
+of God was metaphysically elaborated
+and inevitably betrayed the church into an
+essential pantheism, which “turns the natural
+world, man’s stamping-ground and system of
+opportunities, into a self-justifying and sacred
+life, endows the blameless giant with an
+inhuman soul and worships the monstrous
+divinity it has fabricated.”&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_23_23" href="#Footnote_23_23" class="fnanchor">[23]</a> The process of
+compounding the simplicities of the gospel with
+the dialectic achievements of Greek philosophy
+culminated in St. Augustine who laid the
+foundation for Christian orthodoxy and made
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_202">[202]</span>
+the simple Christian epic the basis of an elaborate
+theological structure in which God
+becomes at the same time the guarantee of the
+reality of the ideal and the actual cause of every
+concrete reality. Christianity has always
+anathematized pantheism officially, but probably—as
+Professor Santayana suggests—because
+it suspected that it was a suppressed
+but not entirely quiescent half of its dogma.
+Vital religion has a way of expressing itself
+outside the limits of its rationally fixed concepts
+and the essential pantheism of orthodox
+Christianity therefore did not destroy the
+moral vigor of even such resolute determinists
+as Augustine or John Calvin. Yet in the end
+the logic of a system of ideas becomes the pattern
+of human action. A rigorous determinism
+as well as an unqualified pantheism destroys
+moral vigor because it either makes the attainment
+of the ideal too certain or idealizes the
+real beyond all evidence. If reality only thinly
+veils the ideal implicit in it, or if the implicit
+ideal is certain to become real in history, there
+is no occasion for moral adventure and no
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_203">[203]</span>
+reason for moral enthusiasm. In a sense pantheism
+is naturalism with an unnatural light
+upon it. That is why the determinism implied
+in pantheism may lead so easily to a reaction
+of naturalistic determinism. Thus Karl Marx
+appropriated Hegel’s determinism and put it
+to his own use. When the whole wealth of
+Hegel’s dialectical skill served no better purpose
+than to deify the Prussian military state,
+as a kind of ultimate revelation of the counsels
+of God, it was easy enough to discredit its
+optimistic illusions without destroying its
+determinism. The residual determinism
+became the basis of a new philosophy of history
+in which natural instinct and economic
+necessity took the place of divine will as man’s
+inexorable fate. The reaction from Hegel to
+Marx is a perfect symbol of the whole course
+of Western thought in the last hundred years
+with its change from a supernatural to a
+naturalistic determinism.</p>
+
+<p>Religion left to itself, even when it elaborates
+theologies, tries to do some justice to the
+reality of moral conflict even though it may
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_204">[204]</span>
+confuse the issue by a faulty definition of
+divine omnipotence. But its necessary coöperation
+with metaphysics drives it inevitably
+into more and more consistent monisms in
+which moral enthusiasms are destroyed. The
+monistic and pantheistic element in Western
+religion was greatly increased by its intimate
+collaboration with philosophies which dealt
+chiefly with the problem of knowledge. For
+the solution of the epistemological problem the
+philosophical idealists thought it necessary to
+posit an all-knowing intelligence. It was this
+all-knowing absolute which became the support
+of religion’s faith in God against the attacks of
+realists and empiricists, though there was little
+enough affinity between the God of any healthy
+religious theism and the impersonal absolute of
+monistic philosophers.</p>
+
+<p>When religious apologists found it necessary
+to readjust the age-old affirmations of faith to
+the evolutionary facts revealed by science they
+usually sank even more deeply into the morass
+of pantheistic and monistic philosophy. The
+old and naïve conceptions of a capricious omnipotence
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_205">[205]</span>
+working its will upon natural phenomena
+became manifestly untenable and a
+way had to be found to relate divine purpose
+to and discover the area of creativity in the
+natural and cosmic processes. It was practically
+inevitable that such a task would be accomplished
+only by an overemphasis on divine
+immanence and a consequent betrayal of
+religion into a sentimental optimism. When
+defenders of religious faith were borrowing
+from the quiver of their opponents they would
+have done well to consult Thomas Huxley
+more and Herbert Spencer less; for Huxley
+was morally much more realistic than Spencer.
+Spencerian doctrines lent themselves more
+easily to the strategy of linking religious
+theism with the faith of science in the dependability
+of the universe; but there was something
+lacking in Spencerian optimism which is very
+vital to religion, a sense of the tragic in life
+and an awareness of the frustration which
+moral purpose and creative will must meet
+in nature and in man. The sentimentality of
+modern religion is of course older than the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_206">[206]</span>
+optimism which it derived from Spencer.
+Part of it is derived from Rousseau and the
+romanticism of the eighteenth century. Here
+again religion suffered the fate of snatching
+error while it was borrowing truth from its
+opponents. Renouncing the idea of total
+depravity which was central in medieval
+religion, and in orthodox Protestantism for
+that matter, it evolved a sentimental overestimate
+of human virtue which is no nearer
+the truth than the medieval conceptions of
+original sin. It is a strange irony in history
+that to-day irreligion, in the form of deterministic
+psychology, should elaborate doctrines
+strangely akin to the derogatory estimates of
+human resources made by medieval theologians.
+So modern churches are involved in an optimistic
+overestimate of the virtue of both man
+and nature at the very time when science
+tempts men to despair of discovering moral
+integrity in the one and moral meaning in the
+other. Modern religion is, in short, not sufficiently
+modern. In it eighteenth-century
+sentimentality and nineteenth-century individualism
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_207">[207]</span>
+are still claiming victory over the
+ethical and religious prejudices of the Middle
+Ages. Meanwhile life has moved on and the
+practical needs of modern society demand an
+ethic which is not individualistic and a religion
+which is not unqualifiedly optimistic.</p>
+
+<p>The practical effects of this lack of contact
+of modern religion with the real temper of
+modern life may be gauged by comparing the
+observations of any average denominational
+journal of religion upon the events of contemporary
+history with the realistic analyses of
+secular journals. The brutalities of the economic
+conflict, the disillusioning realities of
+international relations, the monstrous avarice
+of nations and the arrogance of races, all these
+sins with which the life of modern society is
+cursed are treated with an easy complacency
+by religious observers which contrasts strangely
+with the frantic anxiety of secular idealists.
+In a recent world conference of the churches
+at Stockholm members of the German delegation
+objected to what they regarded as an
+identification of the Kingdom of God with the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_208">[208]</span>
+League of Nations made by a good bishop in
+the opening sermon. National prejudice may
+have prompted this criticism but the superior
+perspective lent by bitter experience gave
+it a measure of justification, and it would
+be applicable to other sermonic interpretations
+of current history besides those of the
+bishop.</p>
+
+<p>The war itself was a disheartening revelation
+of the moral obfuscation of modern religion
+when dealing with the tragedies of history.
+The easy partnership of religious sentiment
+with patriotic fervor has been previously
+ascribed to the natural relation between
+religion and any devotion to an ethical ideal,
+however imperfect. There is, however, yet
+another reason for the blindness of religious
+idealists to the horrors of war. The monistic
+orientation of modern religion made it necessary
+for the church to save religious faith by
+discovering the saving virtues in the great evil.
+It was therefore unable to view the realities in
+proper proportion. For a realistic interpretation
+of the great tragedy modern society had
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_209">[209]</span>
+to depend upon secular idealists who did not
+feel called upon to save either God’s or man’s
+reputation.</p>
+
+<p>Sentimentality is a poor weapon against
+cynicism, and idealistic determinism has no
+way of defeating determinism of the naturalistic
+type. Since both the latter represent reactions
+to the former, they can be overcome only
+by bringing these into closer conformity with
+the facts. The freedom and moral integrity of
+man is not an illusion but it is a fact very seriously
+circumscribed. Transcendent purpose
+and creative will in the universe may be scientifically
+validated but do not thereby become
+the effective cause of every natural phenomenon.
+What is needed is a philosophy and a
+religion which will do justice both to the purpose
+and to the frustration which purpose
+meets in the inertia of the concrete world, both
+to the ideal which fashions the real and to the
+real which defeats the ideal, both to the essential
+harmony and to the inevitable conflict in
+the cosmos and in the soul. In a sense there is
+not a single dualism in life; rather there are
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_210">[210]</span>
+many of them. In his own life man may
+experience a conflict between his moral will and
+the anarchic desires with which nature has
+endowed him; or he may experience a conflict
+between his cherished values and the caprices
+of nature which know nothing of the economy
+of values in human life. In the cosmic order
+the conflict is between creativity and the
+resistance which frustrates creative purpose.
+Whether the dualism is defined as one of mind
+and matter, or thought and extension, or force
+and inertia, or God and the devil, it approximates
+the real facts of life. It may be impossible
+to do full justice to the two types of facts
+by any set of symbols or definitions; but life
+gives the lie to any attempt by which one is
+explained completely in terms of the other.
+There is no more reason to-day to deny the
+reality of God than to explain every casual
+phenomenon in terms of his omnipotent will.</p>
+
+<p>Our interest is in the moral fruits of religious
+and philosophical ideas rather than in their perfect
+consistency, but it may be noted in passing
+that philosophically competent scientists and
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_211">[211]</span>
+scientifically competent philosophers arrive at
+conclusions to-day which are in closer accord
+with a naïve theism than with the monism of
+absolute idealism. They do not of course picture
+a God who is outside of the world and at
+work upon it as a potter upon his clay; but they
+do justice to both the purpose and the limitation
+of purpose in the creative process. Professor
+Hobhouse writes: “The evolutionary
+process can best be understood as the effect of
+a purpose slowly working itself out under
+limiting conditions which it brings successively
+under control.... This would mean not that
+reality is spiritual or the creation of an unconditioned
+mind ... but that there is a spiritual
+element integral to the structure and movement
+of reality and that evolution is the
+process by which this principle makes itself
+master of the residual conditions which at first
+dominate its life and thwart its efforts.”&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_24_24" href="#Footnote_24_24" class="fnanchor">[24]</a> It
+may be a natural overbelief and an inevitable
+anthropomorphism if religion attributes all the
+characteristics of personality to the purpose,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_212">[212]</span>
+“the spiritual element integral to the structure
+and movement of reality.” But if a place for
+freedom and purpose in the cosmic order, however
+conditioned, is discovered the essential
+affirmation of religious faith is metaphysically
+verified. The values of personality are related
+to cosmic facts. Professor Alfred Whitehead
+defines God as that in reality which is not concrete
+but the principle of every concrete actuality.
+He makes the telling observation that
+while a dynamic view of reality may dispense
+with God as the prime mover it must substitute
+for Aristotle’s prime mover a principle of
+limitation and concretion, since the dynamic
+nature of reality does not account for the various
+forms in which it is made concrete.&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_25_25" href="#Footnote_25_25" class="fnanchor">[25]</a> In
+other words the faith of religion in both the
+transcendence and immanence of God is given
+a new metaphysical validation. His unchangeableness
+is “his self-consistency in relation to
+all change”; but this does not justify the deterministic
+conclusion of a “complete self-consistency
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_213">[213]</span>
+of the temporal world.” The reality
+of God and the reality of evil as a positive
+force are thus both accepted.</p>
+
+<p>There is, in short, no reason why religion
+should not hold to its faith in God without
+either identifying him with or losing him in
+the concrete world. The moral and spiritual
+values in which religion is interested have a
+basis in concrete actuality. They are on the
+one hand not a mere effervescence on the surface
+of the concrete, and on the other hand
+they are not the only basis of historical realities.
+The pluralism of William James, which
+has been criticized as scientifically inaccurate
+and metaphysically inconsistent, seems
+to have both scientific and metaphysical
+virtues. There is good reason to accept
+at least a qualified dualism not only because
+it is morally more potent than traditional
+monisms, but because it is metaphysically
+acceptable. It is not to be expected that
+science will ever invest the concept of God with
+the attributes which religious devotion assigns
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_214">[214]</span>
+to it. But there is no reason why religious
+and moral experience should not build further
+upon the foundation laid by science. It is
+manifestly necessary to have some metaphysical
+basis for religious conviction, for there is no
+spiritual vigor in the conscious self-deception
+of purely subjective religions. But it is not
+necessary to limit religion to the bare concepts
+which science establishes. It is in fact better
+for religion to forego perfect metaphysical
+consistency for the sake of moral potency. In
+a sense religion is always forced to choose
+between an adequate metaphysics and an adequate
+ethics. That is not to say that the two
+interests are incompatible but that they are not
+identical. When there is a conflict between
+them it is better to leave the metaphysical problem
+with some loose ends than to develop a
+religion which is inimical to moral values. The
+reason why naïve religions have frequently
+been morally more potent than highly rationalized
+ones is not because the faith which gave
+them moral fervor was necessarily inconsistent
+with the facts, but because they based their
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_215">[215]</span>
+affirmations upon facts and experiences which
+were inconsistent with each other or seemed to
+be but were equally true and equally necessary
+for the maintenance of moral and spiritual
+energy.</p>
+
+<p>The objection to religious dualism comes
+not only from those who subordinate all advantages
+to that of rational consistency but also
+from those who believe that it imperils purely
+religious values. It robs God of omnipotence
+(so the argument runs) and the universe of
+dependability. It gives no certain guarantee
+of the triumph of personal and spiritual
+values. It may put a note of challenge in
+religion, but it also destroys its comforting
+assurances. The answer to such a criticism is
+that the moral virtues of dualism are derived
+from precisely that characteristic. It is not
+easy to challenge to conflict and to guarantee
+victory at one and the same time. By dignifying
+personality religion runs the peril of
+obscuring the defects of human nature; if it
+makes the triumph of righteousness certain, it
+may incline men to take “moral holidays.”
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_216">[216]</span>
+Too much emphasis upon the harmonies of the
+universe may make evil seem unreal. If men
+are given the opportunity, they will extract
+comfort from religion and forget the challenge
+implied in its faith; which simply means that
+they will use religion to sublimate rather than
+to qualify their will to live. They will accept
+the assurance of faith that the frustrations of
+the natural world are not permanent, but they
+will not accept the challenge of faith to overcome
+the corruptions of nature in their own
+souls.</p>
+
+<p>The perennial conflict between priest and
+prophet is given in the double function of
+religion. The priest dispenses comfort and the
+prophet makes the challenge of religion potent.
+The priest is more numerous than the prophet
+because human selfishness is as determining in
+religion as in other fields. Though the priest
+always defeats the prophet in the end, the
+prophet is avenged because his original experience
+is the reality which makes the priest’s
+assurance plausible. There is no way of guaranteeing
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_217">[217]</span>
+the reality of God if someone does not
+make him real in experience, and there is no
+way of declaring the victory of the ideal if
+someone does not defeat reality in the name of
+the ideal in history. Religion validates itself in
+spiritual experience and moral triumph. Speculation
+and deduction contribute to religious
+certainty only after experience has laid the
+foundation for faith. It is not possible to free
+religion altogether of its priestly corruptions.
+But anything which will make it more difficult
+to accept the comforts of faith without accepting
+its challenges will increase the moral
+potency of religion and decrease the possibility
+of its corruption by those who want to use it
+for the purpose of insuring the dignity of
+human life without paying the price of moral
+effort for the boon.</p>
+
+<p>There is no reason why the comforting
+assurances of religion should be sacrificed
+completely. Science is not inimical to the
+assumption of religion that personal and moral
+values have a basis in the universe itself which
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_218">[218]</span>
+insures their permanence and their further
+refinement. Though God works his will
+against the inertia of the concrete world and
+the waywardness of man, neither science nor
+history justifies the conclusion that his
+resources are not ultimately equal to the creative
+task. The intractableness of the world
+makes the creative and redemptive struggle
+real but not hopeless. Religion has as much
+right to preach hope as it has to preach
+repentance. It fails in its task if it does not
+save men from despair as well as from undue
+pride and complacency. There is nothing in
+either science or history which invalidates
+either function of religion. But science unites
+with moral experience in insisting on the
+reality and the painfulness of the creative
+process in man and in nature. If the resistance
+to moral purpose in cosmic history is underestimated,
+it merely serves to increase that
+resistance in the life of man by justifying his
+moral inertia. The needs of a dynamic
+religion are consistent with scientific fact,
+though not always compatible with a completely
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_219">[219]</span>
+consistent metaphysics. Science may
+well combine with religion in persuading man
+that “if hopes are dupes, fear may be liars,”
+and that he must “work out his salvation with
+fear and trembling.”</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_220">[220]</span>
+</p>
+
+
+  <h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_IX">
+    CHAPTER IX
+    <br>
+    CONCLUSION
+  </h2>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>At the risk of unnecessary repetition it may
+be well to capitulate the most important conclusions
+which emerge from our study of
+religion in contemporary civilization. Religion
+is dying in modern civilization not only because
+it has not yet been able to restate its affirmations
+so that they will be consistent with scientific
+fact, but also because it has not been able
+to make its ethical and social resources available
+for the solution of the moral problems of
+modern civilization. Its rejuvenation therefore
+waits upon a reorientation of its ethical
+traditions as well as of its theological conceptions.
+It is under the necessity of finding some
+metaphysical basis for its personalization of
+the universe, but its scientific and philosophical
+respectability will be of no avail if the moral
+fruits which issue from its affirmations and
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_221">[221]</span>
+experiences do not actually qualify the brute
+struggle of life, so largely determined by
+natural forces.</p>
+
+<p>Religion is scientifically verified if freedom
+and purpose are found to have a place in the
+cosmic processes, and it is ethically justified if
+it helps to create and maintain creative freedom
+and moral purpose in human life. The present
+moral impotence of Protestant Christianity is
+partially derived from the inadequacy of some
+of its traditions which it inherited out of
+periods of history which had different moral
+needs than our own day. Its individualism
+rendered a universal service at the dawn of the
+modern era but survives to-day chiefly as a
+sanctification of the peculiar interests and
+prejudices of one particular class in Western
+society. The limitations of its ethical traditions
+are easily obscured not only because all
+religion easily gives the semblance of finality
+to the relativities of history, but because a
+religion which imagines itself devoted to
+the spirit of Jesus is under the temptation
+of exploiting the prestige of his absolute
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_222">[222]</span>
+ethics without approximating his ethical position.</p>
+
+<p>The moral effectiveness of religion depends
+upon its ability to detach itself from the historical
+relativities with which its ideals are
+inevitably compounded in the course of history.
+The avowed loyalty of the Christian church to
+the spirit of Christ may become the basis of
+such a detachment, since there is little in the
+gospel of Jesus which conforms to the dominant
+interests of modern life. But the very
+reverence in which Jesus is held may operate
+to obscure the essential genius of his life.
+Religion is therefore under the necessity of
+developing the critical faculty even while it
+maintains its naïvete and reverence. The
+necessity of coöperation between the naturally
+incompatible factors of reason and imagination,
+of intelligence and moral dynamic, is really the
+crux of the religious and moral problem in
+modern civilization. The complexity of modern
+life demands that moral purpose be
+astutely guided; but moral purpose itself is
+rooted in ultra-rational sanctions and may be
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_223">[223]</span>
+destroyed by the same intelligence which is
+needed to direct it. Both humility and love,
+the highest religious virtues, are ultra-rational;
+yet they cannot be achieved in an intricate
+social life without a discriminating intelligence
+which knows how to uncover covert sins and to
+discover potential virtues. The incidental
+limitations which every historic type of religion
+reveals can be dealt with only if the religious
+devotee can be persuaded to regard the values
+of his religion critically; yet the cultivation of
+such a critical spirit may easily lead to the
+enervation of the religious spirit itself. If the
+highest values of religion are themselves conditioned
+rather than absolute, it must be possible
+to assign them a place in the hierarchy
+of values, without encouraging a complete loss
+of confidence in them. Such a task is difficult
+but not impossible. A robust moral idealism
+will help to create a spiritual fervor which will
+not be easily defeated by any superficial intellectualism.
+If institutions of religion gave
+preference to the ethical rather than the intellectual
+problem of religious faith, it might be
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_224">[224]</span>
+possible to create a religious spirit sufficiently
+vigorous to permit the free play of the critical
+faculties without a loss of moral or spiritual
+dynamic. Obviously civilization cannot afford
+to dispense with either the irrational moral will
+or the critical intelligence by which it is made
+effective in complex situations. Men need to
+subject all partial moral achievements to comparison
+with the absolute standards of truth,
+beauty and goodness of their religious faith,
+and yet be able to see and willing to concede
+the relativities in the absolute values of their
+devotion. They can be saved from a morality
+of mere utilitarianism only by the religious
+quest for an absolute moral standard; yet they
+need to be discerning enough to see that every
+ethical achievement, even when inspired by
+religious motives, is tinged with prudential self-interest.
+They must continue to strive after
+freedom and yet realize that human life and
+character is largely determined by environment.
+If they seek happiness, divorced from
+fortune, they nevertheless cannot escape the
+duty of making the material world serve human
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_225">[225]</span>
+welfare. Their ability to discover the transcendent
+values in human personality has value
+only if they maintain faith in human nature
+after they have discovered its imperfections.
+They must search after the perfect goodness
+in God and yet be prepared to face the cruelties
+of life without either denying their reality
+or being driven to despair by them.</p>
+
+<p>If it is true that moral sincerity is even more
+necessary to a vital religion in modern life than
+intellectual modernity, a strategy must be
+developed to sever religious idealism from the
+unethical tendencies in modern civilization.
+Any strategy which will succeed in such an
+enterprise will savor of asceticism. The limitations
+of historic asceticism may teach the
+present how to avoid inevitable pitfalls in the
+task of detaching religious idealism from the
+corruptions of society. An asceticism which
+flees the world and develops its saints at the
+price of abandoning industrial civilization even
+more completely to the natural and anarchic
+forces which operate in its life, is obviously of
+no use to modern civilization. Yet a type of
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_226">[226]</span>
+asceticism is needed, if for no other reason,
+because greed is the dominant motive of
+Western civilization and nothing less than an
+ascetic discipline will free religious idealism
+from its entanglement with the covetousness
+of modern life. Since Western life is intent
+upon material advantages, no religious idealism
+can maintain any degree of purity if it does
+not enter into a conscious conflict with the civilization
+in which it functions and succeed in
+setting some bounds to the expansive desires
+of men and of nations.</p>
+
+<p>The church as such has sufficient spiritual
+resources to become the recruiting ground for
+such a movement of detachment, but it is too
+much to hope that it will take the leadership
+in it. It is too deeply enmeshed with the interests
+and prejudices of contemporary civilization
+to possess the insight and courage which
+the enterprise requires. Such a movement of
+detachment must be, as it has always been, a
+minority movement. But the minority ought
+not detach itself from the majority so completely
+that it will sacrifice the possibility of
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_227">[227]</span>
+acting as a leaven in it. There is no force or
+strategy which can prevent the great majority
+from using religion to give human personality
+dignity and self-respect without a serious effort
+to approximate a moral ideal which would
+justify religion’s estimate of human worth.
+Some types of religion will continue to obscure
+the defects in nature and human nature. They
+will reassure the perplexed soul by recounting
+the victories of the past without seeking new
+triumphs. They will build systems of faith
+upon past experiences without any effort to
+validate or amend them in fresh experience.
+Thus rejuvenation and progress must come
+from the few who understand the fuller implications
+of the faith which they share with the
+multitudes whose eyes are holden and who lack
+the courage to follow even such visions as may
+come to them.</p>
+
+<p>A highly spiritual religion cannot be an
+esoteric possession to which the multitudes
+may never aspire. It cannot afford to lose confidence
+in the multitudes; yet it must resist the
+gravitation toward moral mediocrity among
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_228">[228]</span>
+them. It certainly must avoid the cultivation
+of a priestly cult into which the layman cannot
+be initiated. If the modern movement of
+detachment is to be effective it must in fact be
+a layman’s movement; for it must express itself
+in rebuilding the social order rather than
+in building new religious institutions. Its
+most effective ministers will be laymen who
+will lack neither the technical skill nor the
+spiritual resource to deal with the practical
+problems of industry and politics. Religious
+teachers may help to inspire such a movement,
+but its efficacy will depend upon those who are
+engaged in the world’s work. If the greed of
+Western civilization is to be qualified by
+religious idealism, it will be accomplished by
+men who use and direct the machines of modern
+industry without making mechanical efficiency
+an end in itself and without succumbing to the
+lure of the material rewards which come so
+easily to those who are proficient in the industrial
+enterprise. A revival of either puritan or
+monastic asceticism will be unequal to the task
+which faces modern religion. Puritanism sanctified
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_229">[229]</span>
+economic power, and monasticism fled its
+responsibilities. The new asceticism must produce
+spiritualized technicians who will continue
+to conquer and exploit nature in the interest
+of human welfare, but who will regard their
+task as a social service and scorn to take a
+larger share of the returns of industry than is
+justified by reasonable and carefully scrutinized
+needs. The new asceticism must, in short,
+be in the world and yet not of the world. It
+must be truly scientific in gauging the advantage
+to human personality in the conquest of
+nature and truly religious in finding a basis
+for human happiness beyond the material
+rewards which this conquest returns.</p>
+
+<p>If Christian idealists are to make religion
+socially effective they will be forced to detach
+themselves from the dominant secular desires
+of the nations as well as from the greed of
+economic groups. The socially minded portion
+of the church has in fact made some progress
+in this direction. The lessons of the World
+War have not been altogether futile, and there
+is a wholesome mood of repentance in the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_230">[230]</span>
+church for its easy connivance with an unethical
+nationalism in the past centuries. The church
+has not yet had an opportunity to prove the
+sincerity of its contrition in this matter, for the
+moment of crisis has not yet come. In that
+moment, which will come inevitably, many
+religiously inspired peace idealists will no
+doubt bow their knees to Baal; but there is
+real reason to hope that there is a new conscience
+in the church which will resist the claims
+of an unethical nationalism to the utmost.
+Perhaps the greatest weakness of the religious
+idealists who have become critical of an
+unethical nationalism is that they are not sufficiently
+aware of the intimate and organic relation
+between the imperialism of nations and
+the whole tendency of avarice which characterizes
+Western life. Too few realize that it is
+not possible to detach oneself from an
+unethical nationalism if one continues to enjoy
+the material advantages which flow from the
+nation’s unqualified insistence upon the right
+to hold its advantages against the world. It
+may be impossible to arrive at a complete
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_231">[231]</span>
+equalization of living standards among all individuals
+who desire to achieve and express the
+ideal of the brotherhood of man. But a
+religious idealism which does not move in that
+direction will be convicted of insincerity and
+moral confusion. Unrepentant political realists
+may well pour contempt upon it and justly
+accuse those who profess it of profiting from
+policies which they ostensibly condemn. Religious
+idealism is in desperate need of a strategy
+which will express its detachment from the
+dominant desires and impulses of modern civilization
+by something more than desultory and
+usually qualified criticism of unethical political
+ideals and industrial policies.</p>
+
+<p>The old challenge “be ye not conformed to
+this world” must be accepted anew in a more
+heroic fashion than is customary in enlightened
+religious circles. The policy of building a
+Kingdom of God by regenerating individual
+lives has become discredited, not because moral
+character is dispensable to a wholesome social
+life, but because the criteria of moral character
+have been too individualistic to serve the needs
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_232">[232]</span>
+of modern society. It is important enough
+that men gain some control over their immediate
+desires and discipline their momentary
+passions. Society is always in need of integrated
+personalities. But the validity of the
+religious ideal must finally be judged by its
+capacity to create not only unified personalities
+but personalities which know how to restrain
+their expansive desires for the sake of social
+peace. Religion intensifies selfishness when it
+adds sanctity to a respectable selfish life and
+creates a self-respect which is impervious to
+emotions of contrition. If the religious ideal
+is to gain any potency in modern life it must be
+able to convict men of sin and inspire them to a
+conversion. But the sins of which they need
+most to be convicted are those which are covert
+in the social and economic relations which custom
+has hallowed; and the conversion of life
+which is most needed is that which will express
+itself in terms of the economic and political
+relationships in which men live. Not to be conformed
+to this world, if it is to have any real
+meaning in modern life, will mean that the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_233">[233]</span>
+religiously inspired soul knows how to defeat
+the avarice and to overcome the indifference to
+the worth of human personality which inheres
+in the whole economic and industrial structure
+of modern society. Practically and individually
+such a detachment from the world will
+express itself in the sacrifice of material advantages
+for the sake of realizing a more intimate
+fellowship with the underprivileged, in the
+careful analysis of industrial policies from the
+standpoint of their effect upon personality, in an
+unwillingness to profit by social and economic
+practices and policies which are fundamentally
+unethical and in a willingness to bear some
+pain for the sake of expressing loyalty to the
+community of mankind as against all lesser and
+conflicting loyalties.</p>
+
+<p>The hope of persuading any large number
+of religious people to express their spiritual
+convictions in any such socially tangible and
+revolutionary terms is made rather desperate
+by the fact that the modern church seems no
+more inclined to undertake the task of spiritual
+regeneration than the orthodox church. The
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_234">[234]</span>
+orthodox church still possesses some of the
+religious fervor which is required to defy the
+world, but it is too anti-rational in its theology
+to gain the respect of the intelligent classes and
+too individualistic in its ethics to express religious
+idealism in socially helpful terms. The
+modern churches are not acutely conscious of
+any serious defects in contemporary civilization.
+If they do recognize limitations in the
+social order, they give themselves to the pleasant
+hope that time and natural progress will
+bring inevitable triumph to every virtuous
+enterprise. They have relegated the eschatological
+note of the gospel, by which Jesus
+expressed his sense of the tragic, to the limbo
+of theological antiquities. The possibility of a
+catastrophe seems never to arouse their fears
+or to give energy to their ambitions. Life,
+according to their gospel, goes automatically
+from grace to grace and from strength to
+strength.</p>
+
+<p>Though neither the orthodox nor the modern
+wing of the Christian church seems
+capable of initiating a genuine religious
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_235">[235]</span>
+revival which will evolve a morality capable of
+challenging and maintaining itself against the
+dominant desires of modern civilization and
+yet expressing itself in terms relevant to
+civilization’s needs, there are resources in the
+Christian religion which make it the inevitable
+basis of any spiritual regeneration of Western
+civilization. Christianity, as Dr. Ernst
+Troeltsch has observed, is the fate of Western
+society. Spiritual idealisms of other cultures
+and societies may aid it in reclaiming its own
+highest resources; and any universal religion
+capable of inspiring an ultimately unified
+world culture may borrow from other religions.
+But the task of redeeming Western society
+rests in a peculiar sense upon Christianity. It
+is congenial to the energy and activism of
+Western peoples and is yet capable of setting
+bounds to their expansive desires. It has
+reduced the eternal conflict between self-assertion
+and self-denial to the paradox of self-assertion
+through self-denial and made the
+cross the symbol of life’s highest achievement.
+Its optimism is rooted in pessimism and it is
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_236">[236]</span>
+therefore able to preach both repentance and
+hope. It is able to condemn the world without
+enervating life and to create faith without
+breeding illusions. Its adoration of Jesus
+sometimes obscures the real genius of his life
+but cannot permanently destroy the fruitfulness
+of his inspiration. If there is any lack of
+identity between the Jesus of history and the
+Christ of religious experience, the Jesus of history
+is nevertheless more capable of giving
+historical reality to the necessary Christ idea
+than any character of history. Intelligence
+will gradually soften prejudices and allay the
+conflict between Christianity and the Judaism
+out of which it emerged and with which it is
+organically related so that the religions of the
+prophetic ideal may make common cause.
+Such a coöperation will probably never lead
+to complete fusion because Christianity cannot
+afford to sacrifice the Christ idea and the Jews
+will continue to regard this as a Hellenistic
+and unacceptable element in the Christian
+religion. Christianity will not disavow it, for
+it gives dramatic force and historical concretion
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_237">[237]</span>
+to its theism and dualism. The God of our
+devotion is veritably revealed most adequately
+in the most perfect personality we know, as he
+is potentially revealed in all personal values;
+and his conflict with the inertia of the concrete
+and historical world is expressed most vividly
+in the cross of Christ. When dealing with
+life’s ultimates, symbolism is indispensable,
+and a symbolism which has a basis in historic
+incident is most effective. The idea of a potent
+but yet suffering divine ideal which is defeated
+by the world but gains its victory in the defeat
+must remain basic in any morally creative
+world view.</p>
+
+<p>It is possible of course that the resources of
+the Christian religion will not be made available
+in time to save Western civilization from
+moral bankruptcy. It is possible that life will
+continue to run its course of conflict between
+the unrestrained ambitions and desires of individuals
+and groups until unqualified self-assertiveness
+will issue in mutual destruction.
+It is possible that cynicism will continue to discount
+the moral potentialities of human nature
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_238">[238]</span>
+while science continues to give plausibility to a
+depreciation of the moral factors in life by
+arming the brute in man and making his vices
+more deadly. Civilization may be beyond
+moral redemption; but if it is to be redeemed
+a religiously inspired moral idealism must aid
+in the task. A purely naturalistic ethics will
+not only be overcome by a sense of frustration
+and sink into despair, but it will lack the force
+to restrain the self-will and self-interest of men
+and of nations. If life cannot be centered in
+something beyond nature, it will not be possible
+to lift men above the brute struggle for survival.
+Intelligence may mitigate its cruelties
+and prudence may prompt men to eliminate its
+worst inhumanities; but the increased power
+which the conquest of nature supplies merely
+substitutes unintended cruelties for those which
+have been consciously abolished. Living on
+the naturalistic level men are bound to contend
+for life’s physical prizes and to use physical
+force in the contest with more and more deadly
+effect.</p>
+
+<p>It is the virtue of a vital religious idealism
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_239">[239]</span>
+that it lifts life above the level of nature and
+makes the development of an ethical personality
+the ultimate goal of human existence.
+Without the vivid and realistic other-worldly
+hopes and fears with which the medieval
+church disciplined life and which the modern
+church cannot restore, it may seem that religion
+possesses no force which could counteract the
+primitive impulses which move men and
+nations. But these hopes and fears were
+merely crude ways of expressing the idea that
+life is fundamentally moral and that its destiny
+transcends the animal conflict. Life will continue
+to develop in the direction of the ideal
+implicit in it and every organism is impelled to
+move toward the goal of its own completeness.
+The ideal implicit in human character is that of
+ethical freedom; and awakened personalities
+will seek to realize that ideal. They will seek
+to realize it even at the expense of physical
+sacrifices and pain. They will learn how to
+find life by losing it. It is the quest for what
+is not real but is always becoming real, for what
+is not true but is always becoming true, that
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_240">[240]</span>
+makes man incurably religious. Modern
+religion is therefore not without resource in
+contending against the forces of nature. The
+great difficulty is that the struggle for ethical
+integrity is so painful that most men are
+tempted to seek some short-cut to it; and
+organized religion generally expresses the
+hopes and desires of this easygoing multitude.
+In the medieval church magic provided the
+short-cut. In the modern church it is provided
+by a sanctified prudence which teaches
+men how to be unselfish and selfish at the same
+time, how to gain moral self-respect without
+sacrificing too many temporal advantages.
+The hope of a revival of ethical religion and
+of an ethical reconstruction of society therefore
+depends, as it did in the past, upon a
+renunciation of the religious short-cuts which
+lead to hypocrisy.</p>
+
+<p>If religious aspiration can be united with
+perfect moral sincerity a fruitful partnership
+may again be established between religion and
+morality. The moral struggle will give meaning
+to the affirmations of religion and the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_241">[241]</span>
+religious experience will strengthen the moral
+purpose. While religion does not issue automatically
+in moral action and the moral enterprise
+does not inevitably create religious
+experience and hope, there is nevertheless a
+relation of interdependence between religious
+aspiration and moral endeavor. This relationship
+is due to the fact that a perfect ethical
+freedom is possible only if personality is withdrawn
+from or lifted above the immediate
+necessities of the physical life. The other-worldly
+hopes and the mystical experience of
+religion by which the strategy of withdrawal
+and transcendence has been effected is momentarily
+discredited because it has resulted too
+frequently in absolving the soul of its moral
+responsibilities in the specific problems of
+society. But the fact that religious hopes and
+religious experiences may help people to escape
+the onerous duties of the moral enterprise cannot
+permanently obscure the need of religious
+experience and religious hope for the development
+of an ethical life. If men are to center
+their life in moral purpose they must reassure
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_242">[242]</span>
+themselves periodically on the moral purpose
+in life itself. That is mysticism and prayer.
+If they are to develop a perfect ethical freedom
+which makes no compromises with life’s
+immediate necessities, they must find a content
+and a meaning in life beyond its present conflict
+of interests and desires. That is other-worldliness.
+If the quest for ethical freedom
+and integrity does not lead to religious experience
+and religious hope, it will issue in despair.
+If the assurances of religious hope and the certainties
+of religious experience are not accompanied
+by sincere moral effort, they result in
+hypocrisy. The hope of an ethical society is
+therefore bound up in the possibility of restoring
+ethical integrity to religion and religious
+dynamic to the moral effect.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+<div class="chapter">
+  <h2 class="nobreak" id="FOOTNOTES">
+    FOOTNOTES
+  </h2>
+</div>
+
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_1_1" href="#FNanchor_1_1" class="label">[1]</a> Professor Alfred Whitehead, in his <i>Science and the Modern
+World</i> and <i>Religion in the Making</i>, indicates the inevitable
+anti-mechanistic trend of philosophical thought as it achieves
+mastery of the varied fields of modern science.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_2_2" href="#FNanchor_2_2" class="label">[2]</a> <i>Prospects of Industrial Civilization</i>, page 218.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_3_3" href="#FNanchor_3_3" class="label">[3]</a> Matthew v. 43–48.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_4_4" href="#FNanchor_4_4" class="label">[4]</a> <i>The Decline of the West.</i></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_5_5" href="#FNanchor_5_5" class="label">[5]</a> Stuart Mill’s refutation of LePlay’s thesis that the salvation
+of the working classes can come only through the benevolence
+of their superiors is worth quoting in this connection:
+“No times can be pointed out in which the higher classes of
+this or any other country performed a part even distantly
+resembling the one assigned to them in this theory. All
+privileged and powerful classes have used their power in the
+interest of their own selfishness. I do not affirm that what
+has always been must always be. This at least seems to be
+undeniable, that long before superior classes could be sufficiently
+inspired to govern in the tutelary manner supposed,
+the inferior classes would be too much improved to be
+governed.”</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_6_6" href="#FNanchor_6_6" class="label">[6]</a> <i>Gesammelte Aufsaetze zur Religions-Sociologie.</i></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_7_7" href="#FNanchor_7_7" class="label">[7]</a> <i>Religion and the Rise of Capitalism.</i></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_8_8" href="#FNanchor_8_8" class="label">[8]</a> Quoted by Tawney, <i>op. cit.</i></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_9_9" href="#FNanchor_9_9" class="label">[9]</a> The relation of puritanism to modern capitalism has been
+most exhaustively treated by Max Weber in his essay on “Die
+Protestantische Ethic und der Geist des Kapitalismus.”</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_10_10" href="#FNanchor_10_10" class="label">[10]</a> Quoted in Southey’s <i>Life of Wesley</i>, Chapter xxix.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_11_11" href="#FNanchor_11_11" class="label">[11]</a> Both Max Weber and E. Troeltsch make much of the relation
+of Calvinism to medieval asceticism. See Max Weber,
+<i>op. cit.</i>, and E. Troeltsch, <i>Sociallehren der Christlichen Kirche</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_12_12" href="#FNanchor_12_12" class="label">[12]</a> Romans vii. 19–25.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_13_13" href="#FNanchor_13_13" class="label">[13]</a> <i>Grosser Sermon vom Wucher</i> (<i>Werke</i>, Vol. IV, page 49).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_14_14" href="#FNanchor_14_14" class="label">[14]</a> Article 3 in Twelve Articles, quoted by J. S. Shapiro in
+<i>Social Reform and the Reformation</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_15_15" href="#FNanchor_15_15" class="label">[15]</a> In his <i>Education of Henry Adams</i>, Chapter x.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_16_16" href="#FNanchor_16_16" class="label">[16]</a> Commenting on the first Hague conference Count Holstein
+of the German foreign office made some realistic observations
+which may not have justified his obstructive conclusions but
+which are nevertheless pertinent. He wrote: “Subjects of
+international law are states and not individuals. It will
+therefore be formally difficult and practically impossible to
+isolate the individual judge from the passions and interests
+of the whole in a way that happens or is supposed to happen
+in private law. Of all conceivable judges Great Powers are
+least disinterested, for in every conceivable question of any
+importance that may come up all Great Powers are interested
+<i>à un degre quelconque</i>. An impartial decision is therefore
+excluded by the nature of things.... Small disinterested
+states as subjects, small questions as objects of arbitral decision
+are conceivable; great states and great questions are not.”
+(Quoted by Dickinson in <i>International Anarchy</i>, p. 351.)</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_17_17" href="#FNanchor_17_17" class="label">[17]</a> <i>Social Evolution</i>, page 140.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_18_18" href="#FNanchor_18_18" class="label">[18]</a> James iv. 2–4.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_19_19" href="#FNanchor_19_19" class="label">[19]</a> II Corinthians iv. 16.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_20_20" href="#FNanchor_20_20" class="label">[20]</a> In <i>Civilization and Ethics</i> and <i>The Decay and Restoration
+of Civilization</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_21_21" href="#FNanchor_21_21" class="label">[21]</a> <i>Christianity and Other World Religions.</i></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_22_22" href="#FNanchor_22_22" class="label">[22]</a> <i>Religion in the Making</i>, page 50.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_23_23" href="#FNanchor_23_23" class="label">[23]</a> George Santayana in <i>Religion and Reason</i>, page 176.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_24_24" href="#FNanchor_24_24" class="label">[24]</a> In <i>Development and Purpose</i>, page 360.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_25_25" href="#FNanchor_25_25" class="label">[25]</a> In <i>Religion in the Making</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div style='text-align:center'>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 77050 ***</div>
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