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 This relationship is due to the fact that a perfect ethical freedom is possible only if personality is withdrawn from or lifted above the immediate necessities of the physical life.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._