Religion is not in a robust state of health in modern civilization. Vast multitudes, particularly in industrial and urban centers, live without seeking its sanctions for their actions and die without claiming its comforts in their extremities. While its influence is still considerable among agrarians and the middle classes of the city, an ever-increasing number of the privileged classes are indifferent to its values. Spiritual and moral forces have always been in a perennial state of decay in those circles of society in which physical ease and cultural advantages combine to make intellectual scruples more pressing than moral ones. But modern scientific education has greatly multiplied the intellectual difficulties of religion and the increasing opulence of Western life has rendered its moral problems more perplexing. Industrial workers, in as far as they are socially self-conscious, are almost universally inimical to religion, and their opposition represents a type of anti-religious sentiment which is entirely new in history. Since the dawn of the modern era the tides of faith have ebbed and flowed so that it is not easy to chart their general course; but it is difficult to escape the conclusion that each new tide has barely exceeded the mark left by a previous ebb. The stream of religious life has been deepened at times, as in the Protestant Reformation, but the impartial observer will note that it has been narrowed as well. A psychology of defeat, of which both fundamentalism and modernism are symptoms, has gripped the forces of religion. Extreme orthodoxy betrays by its very frenzy that the poison of scepticism has entered the soul of the church; for men insist most vehemently upon their certainties when their hold upon them has been shaken. Frantic orthodoxy is a method for obscuring doubt. Liberalism tries vainly to give each new strategic retreat the semblance of a victorious engagement. To retreat from untenable positions is no doubt a necessary step in preparation for new advances; but this necessary strategy has not been accompanied by the kind of spiritual vigor which would promise ultimate victory. The general tendencies toward the secularization of life have been consistent enough to prompt its foes to predict religion’s ultimate extinction as a major interest of mankind and to tempt even friendly observers to regard its future with grave apprehension. There are indeed many forms of religion which are clearly vestigial remnants of another day with other interests. They have no vital influence upon the life of modern man, and their continued existence only proves that history, like nature, is slow to destroy what it has found useless, and even slower to inter what it has destroyed. Scattered among the living forms of each civilization are the whitened bones of what was once flesh and blood.