Jesus as their authority though he was not an ascetic in their sense. He disassociated himself from the asceticism of John the Baptist, who had come “neither eating nor drinking,” and unlike the ascetics he had no morbid fears of natural enjoyments. Protestantism has therefore regarded asceticism as the result of a foolish literalism which failed to allow for poetic latitude in the words of Jesus. Nevertheless it must be admitted that both his words and his practice have a closer affinity to medieval asceticism at its best than to any modern spiritualized worldliness which tries vainly to unite the largest number of spiritual graces with the greatest possible temporal advantages. Francis of Assisi was surely more like the real Jesus than Bruce Barton’s modernized caricature of the original. The strategy of Jesus might be described as a leaning in the direction of asceticism, as a hovering upon its brink. He is saved from its morbid temper by the wholesome common sense which leavens all his attitudes. The virtue of asceticism lies in its ability to detect the perils to a virtuous life in the necessary and inevitable social relationships in which all individual personality must develop; its limitation is its inclination to destroy the relationships in order to overcome the peril. Religious idealism, nurtured in the individualism of Protestantism, fails to appreciate the virtue of asceticism, while it condemns its limitations because it fails to realize how fundamentally all individual ethical achievements are qualified by the society in which men live. Wherever that fact is fully understood, every honest effort to maintain the purity of the religious ideal will result in strategies which will approximate asceticism at many points and which may excel it only in the ability to avoid its depreciation, occasionally morbid depreciation, of the ordinary functions of life.