The quietistic tendencies of religion, particularly as elaborated by Pauline and Lutheran theology, are less dangerous in a simple society than in a complex one. Ethical attitudes in simple social relations flow almost automatically out of a religious experience, even though the conscious interpretation of the experience is scornful of the “righteousness of works.” But in the secondary and more complex social relationships the moral urge which issues out of the religious experience is easily frustrated by the intricacies and relativities of historic realities and institutions. How shall the soul preserve the sense of the absolute which it has gained in the religious experience from contamination by the sins which are covert in all social relations? It is in the varying answers of quietistic religion to that question that its ethical limitations are vividly revealed. One answer is to avoid conflict with political and social institutions on the score that they are divinely ordained. “Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God; the powers that be are ordained of God,” said the apostle Paul. When it is remembered that the reference is to the government of the Roman empire, the social conservatism implicit in this logic is obvious. It was this attitude of Paul which made it easy for Luther to bring his church into such intimate union with the various governments of Germany and to maintain an attitude bordering on subservience toward the German princes. The political conservatism of Lutheranism has since been its unvarying characteristic and has had its marked effects upon history, in no period more so than in that of the World War. State churches of any kind easily become the tools of the secular state, but Lutheran state churches have usually been more compliant tools than the Anglican church, for instance, which has never quite renounced the old Catholic ambitions of partnership with the state.