Many of the moral and religious limitations of modern civilization may be attributed first to the partial victory and then to the self-destruction of puritan religion in modern civilization. In puritanism religion made one of its boldest advances upon the world; and so confident was it of victory that it prepared no one for the moral relativities which were the inevitable issue of its enterprise. In dealing with the stubborn resistance of the material world it is better to expect victory than to assume defeat before the battle is begun. Yet an undue confidence may be as dangerous to the enterprise as a timorous spirit. The medieval ascetics who regarded all human relationships with a critical spirit, and rather expected the old Adam to assert himself in seemingly the most innocent human concerns, possessed spiritual insights which were totally lacking in the typical puritan. He expected to build a society in which the scripture was “really and materially to be fulfilled.” It will have been noted that Calvinism and puritanism have been used in this discussion as interchangeable terms. The fact is that, while the two terms are not synonymous theologically, the moral temper of Calvinism was so potent in the whole non-Lutheran Protestant world that all of the various denominations were indoctrinated with its puritan spirit. The various sects had their own theological peculiarities, but in their puritan spirit they were essentially one. Only the Quakers departed from it; for George Fox had discovered the ethics of Jesus, and the religion of the Friends was ever after to express itself in terms relevant to the spirit of the Sermon on the Mount. Denominations such as the Baptists and Methodists who evangelized Western America gave a rebirth to the puritan spirit when it suffered decay in its more native haunts. Their history is additional evidence for the thesis that puritanism is a religious sublimation of the life of the middle classes. For when the heroic spirit of puritanism declined in those classes which it had lifted to power, it was reborn in the lower middle classes of England and the Western pioneers of America. Methodism is theologically as unrelated to Calvinism as can be imagined. Its theological presuppositions are really more congenial to a dynamic puritanism than those of Calvinism; for the moral vigor of Calvinism was logically incompatible with its deterministic faith. Denominations such as the Baptists and Methodists with their strong emphasis on regeneration as the basis of church membership aggravated one weakness of Protestantism, for all of their spiritual vigor. Their tests of what constituted regeneration were drawn from religious experience rather than from its moral fruits; yet they were bound to assume that a marked moral contrast existed between the saved and the unsaved. Thus they accentuated what Professor A. Whitehead has defined as the Protestant oversimplification of ethics, i.e., a tendency to judge men, in spite