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.