Whatever the limitations of this emphasis, it is evident that religion cannot escape it. Concerned with the soul’s inner peace and perfect virtue it is forced to lift it above the corruptions and irrelevancies of temporal conditions. The whole course of modern history is ample justification for Jesus’ warning: Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. The instruments of personality’s victory over nature have become the chains for a new kind of thraldom. Western civilization is enslaved to its machines and the things which the machines produce. Spiritual forces are emancipated from the forces of nature only to become the victims of a mechanized civilization. It is a Pyrrhic victory. America, which has developed the Western strategy with greater consistency than any other nation, is at once the envy and the scorn of the world. The scorn may be a device for hiding the envy, but there is moral justification for reproach. What the world regards as our vulgarity is more than the awkwardness of youth; it is an undue preoccupation with life’s instrumentality and an obsession of the soul with the concrete world. The Orient may be more cruel than the West, but our superior tenderness is matched by our more expansive avarice. Having determined that life consists in things a man possesses, the West sacrifices both inner peace and social harmony in the mad scramble for the power and privilege which the conquests of nature has supplied. Neither the imperialism of nations nor the monstrous avarice of economic groups is confined to Western life, but covetousness and greed have been manifestly increased by the temper and strategy of the Occident. The Biblical analysis which discovers covetousness as the root of conflict is applicable to our own day: “Ye lust and have not; ye kill and desire to have, and cannot obtain; ye fight and war, yet ye have not because ye ask amiss.... Know ye not that the friendship of this world is enmity with God?”[18] However necessary it may be to make a more equitable distribution of the physical blessings of life, religion’s true function is to develop an attitude of indifference toward the very goods for the possession of which men contend so frantically. When Jesus rebuked the young man who desired his aid in correcting the inequitable division of an inheritance, his unwillingness to assume a judicial function was manifestly dictated by the thought that the whole inheritance ought to have been a matter of indifference to the young man. It is easy to see that such an attitude may lend itself to abuse and be used to perpetuate inequalities. If advocated by religious groups which have profited by economic inequalities, it becomes the tool of hypocrisy. Yet it is an emphasis which religion cannot disavow. It is basic to its whole world view.