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.