better therefore to seek no other basis for utilitarian ethics than the social experience from which it is really derived. Honesty will prove itself the best policy without the authority of religion. The function of religion is to nerve men for an ethical achievement when it promises no immediate returns. From the perspective of an impartial observer there is an element of hypocrisy in all prudential morality. The cool intelligence which computes selfish advantage which may flow from moral action is not imaginative enough to include all persons who are affected by an action and not dynamic enough to balance the drive of self-interest which influences it. In modern industrial society those who are in position of power and privilege are most inclined to espouse an ethical ideal because it tends to stabilize social life and thus insures the perpetuation of privilege. They are also most easily tempted to restrict ethical action so that it will prompt to no sacrifices which are not consistent with a wise self-interest. Since they are also the classes which have, for reasons previously discussed, maintained their loyalty to religion, the church can avoid connivance with their prudential morality only by a continual regeneration of its religious life. Failing to maintain a distinction between utilitarian ethics and a religiously inspired moral life, the church cannot escape the fate of becoming a useful adjunct of the forces of privilege in the social and economic conflict in which modern society is engaged. It may be good business to pay high wages, but social good may demand an increase in the wages of workers beyond the point where economic advantage is derived from an enlightened wage policy. It may be wise to share some privileges so that all of them will not be lost, but sensitive ethical insight will detect the selfishness and insincerity in such a course. A religion which sanctifies such social prudence is ultimately a hindrance to the ethical reconstruction of modern society. A religion which discovers and amends the limitations of prudential morality by the elements of its reverence for personality and its quest for the absolute is a necessary factor in social reconstruction.