seems closer to him than either. The modern church has dismissed the eschatological element in Jesus’ teachings as the Semitic shell in which Jesus developed his conception of the kingdom of God as a social ideal; but it was more probably his way of expressing doubt that his ideal could ever be realized in history except by a miracle of God. Yet the apocalyptic element in the gospel was qualified by the idea of the kingdom to be realized by evolutionary process. The kingdom of God was also “like unto a mustard seed.” Jesus in short was both pessimistic and optimistic in regard to the spiritual potentialities of human society, and in his paradoxical rather than consistent position he was able to maintain the tension between religion and life in a way which has escaped both parties in the churches of the Reformation. Of this more will be said later. The attitude of Lutheran piety toward the world has the merit and the limitation characteristic of all pessimism. It sharpens the ideal but despairs of its realization. Lutheran doctrine was fashioned out of the religious experiences of a tumultuous soul seeking peace and failing to find it in any of the institutions which were meant to incarnate the religious ideal or in any of the observance which were intended to express it. The institution shocked him by their imperfections, and the observances and rituals had undergone the inevitable process which reduces a necessary symbolism to a kind of magic in which the symbol achieves potencies originally ascribed only to the ineffable truth or reality for which it stands. From all historic relativities of the institutions and superficialities of religious rites Luther reacted and discovered his absolute in the religious experience in which the soul appropriates the grace of God. In that mystic communion all natural imperfections of the human spirit are transcended and the soul is lifted out of the relativities of time and circumstance. It is easy to see how inevitable is this emphasis in the history of religion but also how perilous it may become to moral values. It is inevitable because every sensitive conscience suffers at times from a realization that “our reach is beyond our grasp,” that moral capacities are not equal to the goals set by imagination and hope. The apostle Paul, whose religious experience closely paralleled those of Luther and whose theology therefore became authoritative for him, complained: “... the good that I would, I do not; but the evil which I would not, that I do.... For I delight in the law of God after the inward man. But I see another law in my members, warring against the law in my mind and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin that is in my members. O wretched man that I am. Who shall deliver me from the body of this death? I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord.”[12] That is a classic statement of the dualism in life which every religion is tempted to overcome by transcending it. Lutheranism