Since it is difficult to fight on two fronts at the same time, the forces of religion have been forced to choose one of the two fronts for their major defensive effort. Perhaps it was inevitable that they should choose the easier task. It is easier to challenge the idea of an impersonal universe than to change the fact of an impersonal civilization. That is what the modern church has done and is doing. It is spending all its energy in discounting the excessive claims of a deterministic science. It has exhausted its ingenuity in retreating from the untenable positions of an orthodoxy which overstated the freedom and the virtue in the physical universe and therefore aggravated the very determinism by which it was defeated. Outraged truth has a way of avenging itself. The idea of a capricious God working his will in the universe without the restraint of law or the hindrance of any circumstance helped to create the concept of a mechanistic world in which all freedom is an illusion and therefore all morality a sham. Thus the strategic retreats of religion in the field of metaphysics have been the necessary prelude to any new religious advance. Religion may in fact be forced to make some concessions which even modern liberalism seems still unwilling to make. Modern religionists, particularly popular apologists are inclined to add the word creative to the word evolution, and assume that their problem is solved. The modern church has very generally borrowed its apologetic strategy from John Fiske and Henry Drummond, and has tried to visualize a God who differed from older conception only in this—that he took more time to gain his ends than had once been assumed. The important fact which has escaped many modern defenders of the faith is that the patience of the creative will is a necessary characteristic rather than a self-imposed restraint. There is a stubborn inertia in every type of reality which offers resistance to each new step in creation, so that an emerging type of reality is always in some sense a compromise between the creative will and the established facts of the concrete world. Whether we view the inorganic world, organic life or the world of personal and moral values, each new type of reality represents in some sense a defeat of God as well as a revelation of him. Religious apologetics will probably be forced to concede this fact more generously than has been its wont before it can bring religious affirmations into harmony with scientific facts. Modern liberalism is steeped in a religious optimism which is true to the facts of neither the world of nature nor the world of history. The ultimate worth of human personality in the universe may not be guaranteed as immediately nor as obviously as liberal religion seems inclined to assume. Liberal religion may be forced to discard its metaphysical and theological monisms, which have been its support even more than orthodoxy’s, and