“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