In spite of these advantages religion, except in a few contemporary forms, has always been either hostile or indifferent to the business of transforming nature in the interest of personal values. It has counseled the soul to seek its happiness not in changing but in becoming independent of circumstances. In Buddhism the highest happiness is sought by throttling all desires. Jesus was more careful to distinguish between the will to live and its physical expressions. But he was critical of all physical desires and satisfactions. He had the Orient’s profound indifference to the “business of earth.” If our ears were not so habituated to his words that they fail to catch their real significance, a modern congregation would be shocked by the admonition: “Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on. Is not life more than meat and the body more than raiment?” “Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth where moth and rust doth corrupt and where thieves break through and steal, for where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” “Fear not them which kill the body but are not able to kill the soul; but rather fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell.” The modern Christian is inclined to destroy the force of the profound other-worldliness of such sentiments by reflecting that they represent an Oriental cast which is incidental and not essential to the gospel of Jesus. They are Oriental no doubt, but precisely because they are religious; and to regard them as incidental is to miss the whole meaning of the gospel. Though the West is unable to accept them, it pays an unconscious tribute to the truth involved in them. For the absolute moral values incarnated in the personality of Jesus, which the West still reveres, are organically related to this other-worldliness.