The task of making complex group relations ethical belongs primarily to religion and education because statecraft cannot rise above the universal limitations of human imagination and intelligence. A robust ethical idealism, an extraordinary spiritual insight and a high degree of intelligence are equally necessary for such a social task. The difficulties of the problem are enhanced by the fact that the religious imagination and astute intelligence which are equally necessary for its solution are incompatible with each other. Religion is naturally jealous of any partner in a redemptive enterprise; and the same intelligence which is needed to guide moral purpose in a complex situation easily lames the moral will and dulls the spiritual insight. It is possible that this difficulty may permanently destroy every vestige of morality in the group relations of modern society. The necessary partnership and the inevitable conflict between the religio-moral and the rational forces is obvious in both the political and the economic problems of the present age. The unqualified authority and the boundless lusts of a modern state need first of all to be brought under the scrutiny of clear minds who understand the implications and can gauge the consequences of its pretensions. Patriotism is a form of altruism and as such represents the victory of ultra-rational sanctions over the selfish inclinations of individuals which seem quite reasonable to the average man. The emotional attitude and ethical achievement in patriotism endows the patriot with a kind of madness and pride which make him as scornful of more rational types of altruism as of the prudent and cautious selfishness with which he has his primary conflict. It is because patriotism represents a victory of an ethical ideal that religion so easily becomes its uncritical partner. When many hearts are cold anything that warms them will seem religious to the undiscriminating champion of religious values. The defects of patriotic altruism are thus left to the correction of rationalistic idealists who know how to discover the absurdities into which an uncritical devotion to partial values may issue and how to envisage the larger community of mankind of which the nation is a part. During the last war moral idealists of rationalistic persuasion, such as Bertrand Russell, Romain Rolland, Henri Barbusse and Bernard Shaw, were more detached in their perspective and freer of war hysterias than any religious leaders of equal standing. To envisage the larger community of mankind which lacks the physical symbols of the state and to dispel the parochial prejudices which are harbored in mediocre minds and which make hatred of others the inevitable commitant of love for one’s own is clearly a task to which a discriminating intelligence must contribute.