Its highest moral achievements are really determined by a cruel law of survival. Only personalities of great spiritual resource can overcome the general physical conditions of its life which submerge the mass in hopeless poverty. Some credit for the advantages of Western life must be given to the moral superiority of Christianity over Buddhism, which represents the quintessence of the Oriental spirit. Christianity is a life-affirming and Buddhism a life-denying faith. The one does not destroy but refines the energy of life. The other destroys energy in the process of refinement. The Orient is pantheistic; and by deifying all of life, offers no avenue of escape from its imperfections except by annihilation of life itself. There is a difference between fleeing to God from life’s unbearable realities and identifying these with the divine will. At its worst the strategy of the Orient is a fatalistic acceptance of life’s circumstances; at its best it is a stifling of all desires so that the soul may be free of the world. Yet there is a social peril even in the more wholesome strategy of Christianity which affirms life but divorces it from its physical necessities. This limitation is felt particularly when the conditions which invite change are social rather than natural. Nature is inexorable and it is well to learn that only they are able to escape her furies who also know how to renounce her delights. But the world which man has created retains its cruelties only by the sufferance of man. Anything which will incline men to assume an attitude of indifference toward projects of social reform and amelioration is therefore a potential peril to social progress. When Jesus rebuked the young man for his anxiety about an equitable division of his inheritance, he took a high spiritual ground which easily lends itself to abuse in the disillusioning realities of economic and social life. What if a sublime renunciation does not soften the hearts of those who hold more than their just share of the inheritance? And what if the welfare of others besides that of the moral idealist is involved in the renunciation? Shall the Biblical injunction to servants that they be obedient to their masters “not only to the good and gentle but also to the froward” apply to political tyrannies? Obviously an attitude which represents a high spiritual achievement in the individual instance has its limitations when raised to a general social policy. Social radicals who have been confronted with the conservatism of religion have parodied the other-worldly temper at the heart of this characteristic in the words: “Bye and bye, there’ll be pie in the sky.” The sneer in this parody hardly does justice to religious other-worldliness. The emphasis is not so much upon a future life as distinguished from the present existence as upon a type of life which can afford to regard “pie” with disdain whether in this or any other world. Nevertheless, even the highest type