is closely associated with the secularization of its ethical idealism. The difference between the pride of secular idealism and the humility implicit in genuine religion may be gauged, as Professor Irving Babbitt suggests, by comparing Confucius with Buddha and Marcus Aurelius with Jesus. Pascal thought the stoics were guilty of “diabolical pride.” The judgment may be too severe, but it must be confessed that a purely secular idealism has difficulty in escaping a morally destructive arrogance from which true religion is saved because it subjects all values and achievements to measurement, with its absolutes as the criteria. “Why callest thou me good?” said Jesus: “no one is good save God.” In the religion of Jesus the perfection of God is consistently defined as an absolute love by comparison with which all altruistic achievements fall short. “I say unto you, love your enemies; bless them that curse you; do good to them that despitefully use you and persecute you; that ye may be children of your Father in heaven; for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and the good and sendeth rain upon the just and on the unjust. For if ye love them which love you, what reward have ye? Do not even the publicans the same?... Be ye therefore perfect even as your Father in heaven is perfect.”[3] Here the value of an absolute standard to save from undue pride in partial ethical achievements is particularly apparent. Prudential morality can hardly go beyond the encouragement of altruism within the social group, i.e. loving those “which love you.” That is precisely what Stoicism did. It is just this pride in partial achievement which complicates the moral problem of modern life; for our ethical difficulties are created by the very tendency of reasonable ethics to make life within groups moral and never to aspire to the moral redemption of inter-group relations. Humility is therefore a spiritual grace which has value not only for its own sake but for its influence upon social problems. Traditional religions, which live off of original inspirations and experiences without recreating them, easily fall into a pride of their own, the pride which comes from identifying the absolute standards of their inspired source with their partial achievements and inevitable compromises. But religion in its purest and most unspoiled form is always productive of a spirit of humility which regards every moral achievement as but a vantage point from which new ventures of faith and life are to be initiated toward the alluring perfection which is in God.