It is obvious that the ethical potency of religion depends largely upon its ability to make its ideals effective in the world and yet preserve a measure of detachment from those natural forces which express themselves in human society and offer such stubborn resistance to every spiritual and ethical ideal that no victory has yet been gained over them in which the heel of the victor has not been bruised. Ideal religion makes reverence for personality the end of human action. Society has its various secular ends the attainment of which necessitates the debasement of personality. Religion seeks to persuade men to sacrifice immediate advantages for ultimate values; the average man whose influence is dominant in all large social groups is not easily persuaded to forego immediate and concrete advantages for values which are too remote and too ephemeral to captivate his imagination. There must therefore be a tension between the spiritual ideal and all historic societies. The significance of Jesus for the religious life of the Western world is due to his attainment and incarnation of a spiritual and moral ideal of such absolute and transcendent nature that none of his followers have been able to compromise it by their practical adjustments to the social necessities of their day. There is therefore a resource in the avowed loyalty of Western civilization to his ideal which may yet become the basis of its redemption. It is the peculiar characteristic of men and societies, and an evidence of both their moral and immoral nature, that they reserve their most unqualified devotion for those ideals and personalities which they find difficult to realize or emulate. They pay tribute to the ideal even while they are corrupting it and they reward those who have accommodated it to their indifferent capacities with a more qualified respect. It was probably inevitable that the church should adjust the spiritual ideal, which to propagate it ostensibly regards as its very raison d’être, to the practical needs of the various ages and social orders with which it came in contact. But it is necessary that it should be shrewd enough to see the compromise involved in every adjustment and be stubborn enough to make a new bid for victory after every partial defeat. On the whole the Catholic church, which Protestants easily assume to have been more amenable to the practical demands of an unregenerate society than the churches of the Reformation, has really been much shrewder than these in gauging the hazards to virtue in the most natural social relationships. Some of the moral weaknesses in the modern church may be traced directly to the naïvete of Protestantism in dealing with the vagaries of human nature, and in failing to estimate the overt and covert peril to its values in the ordinary ways of men.