While it is true that religion does not issue automatically in an attitude of reverence and goodwill toward all human personalities, it nevertheless remains a fact that a religious world view does incline men to regard their fellow men from a perspective which obscures differences and imperfections and reveals affinities and potential virtue. Even if intelligence became imaginative enough to discover the affinities, it could not be courageous enough to challenge the evil in men in the name of their better selves. The art of forgiveness can be learned only in the school of religion. And it is an art which men must learn increasingly as a complex society makes human associations more and more intimate. Whatever improvement a growing social science may establish in the technique of social intercourse, men will never escape the necessity of overcoming the evil, which they inflict upon each other, by creative patience and courageous trust. A higher intelligence may mitigate our fears and an exacter justice may restrain the inclination to wreak vengeance upon the wrongdoer; but only the stubborn forces of religion will turn fear into trust and hatred into love. Sometimes mutual fear and hatred reduce themselves to such an absurdity (as in the late World War) that even a superficial intelligence can recognize it; but their absurdity does not become patent until they have issued in mutual annihilation. Even then the person with an ordinary commonsense view of life can do no better than to substitute partial trust for fear and partial understanding for hatred. So one war breeds the next. All men are potentially at once our foes and our friends. An unreflective social life assumes that they are enemies and helps to make them so. A higher social intelligence establishes a nicely balanced compromise between trust and mistrust so that the one cannot be very creative and the other not too destructive. Only the foolishness of faith knows how to assume the brotherhood of man and to create it by the help of the assumption. A religious ideal is always a little absurd because it insists on the truth of what ought to be true but is only partly true; it is however the ultimate wisdom, because reality slowly approaches the ideals which are implicit in its life. A merely realistic analysis of any given set of facts is therefore as dangerous as it is helpful. The creative and redemptive force is a faith which defies the real in the name of the ideal, and subdues it.