The question which faces the modern church is whether it will help to hide or to discover the limitations in the ethical orientation of modern life. Its devotion to the gospel of Jesus may serve either purpose. The contempt for ethical opportunism implied in the whole idealism of Jesus and its scorn for immediate advantages are the very ethical values which the generation needs, but they are also the values which have given the Christian religion its great moral authority and prestige which the church can so easily misuse. If the authority of Jesus prompts men to a courage and imagination which escapes the defects of contemporary morality, its influence will be redemptive; if it is used merely to hide the defects, the critics of the church will be justified in regarding it as detriment to social progress. The religion which is socially most useful is one which can maintain a stubborn indifference to immediate ends and thus give the ethical life of man that touch of the absolute without which all morality is finally reduced to a decorous but essentially unqualified self-assertiveness. The paradox of religion is that it serves the world best when it maintains its high disdain for the world’s values. Its social usefulness is dependent upon its ability to maintain devotion to absolute moral and spiritual values without too much concern for their practical, even for their social usefulness. The church is in a very favorable position to make a necessary contribution to social life, for it reveres as Lord one whose life incarnates the strategy which saves morality from insincerity. But its assets easily became moral liabilities when it compounds the pure idealism of Jesus with the calculated practicalities of the age and attempts to give the resultant compromise the prestige of absolute authority. CHAPTER V RELIGION AND LIFE: CONFLICT AND COMPROMISE