The task of analyzing and isolating the ethical limitations and the social deficiencies of religion is to no purpose if there is not in religion itself, at its best, some resources which civilization and society need for the solution of their problems. Some critics of religion discount it entirely as a social force, or at least as a force of social progress. Bertrand Russell’s prejudices on this subject are too violent to make his testimony against religion particularly weighty. Yet he speaks for a large number of ethically sensitive individuals who share his critical attitude, if not his vehemence, when he declares: “Since the thirteenth century the church has consistently encouraged men’s blood lust and avarice and discouraged every approach to human and kindly feeling.... Emancipation from the churches is still an essential condition of improvement, particularly in America where the churches have more influence than in Europe.... Of all requisites for the regeneration of society the decay of religion seems to me to have the best chance of being realized.”[2] The number of people among the middle and higher classes who would subscribe to such a denunciation of organized religion is probably not very large. But there are very many who ignore the church as a force for social amelioration; and in the class of industrial workers a temper against the church exceeding even Mr. Russell’s violence is very general. Whatever may be the facts in regard to contemporary religion and to other specific types of organized religious life, it is relevant to ask whether religion as such, freed from its specific limitations, contains indispensable resources for the ethical reconstruction of society.