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.