of other-worldliness may become the cause of indifference to social conditions. The very sensitiveness of religion which persuades it to regard human society in the same category with the world of nature as “the world” may result in the completer secularization of society and its abandonment to the unchecked forces of nature. There is no easy formula for avoiding this social peril in the strategy of religion. The elimination of pantheism is a material aid in its solution. The superior energy of the West may be due to a tentative dualism in its religion which has been qualified from time to time by pantheistic and monistic thought but never completely destroyed. Yet even the dualism of Christianity does not save it altogether from positions which offer peril to social and moral values. Even an observer who is entirely sympathetic to religion must come to the conclusion that the West owes many of its advantages to the fact that religion has had no easy time in Western life, and that in the past centuries not only scientific thought but scientific life-strategy has challenged religion at every turn. Some of the excellencies of Western life are clearly the fruits of our science rather than our religion. Of course, these advantages have been bought at a price. The empirical instincts of science drive it to deny the continuities in reality and to see everything only in its momentary and immediate situation. The modern behavioristic destruction of the concept of personality is therefore one of the natural results of scientific thought betrayed into absurdity by its own consistency. But a consistent religion is generally equally absurd. Regarding all reality, and personality in particular, _sub specie æternitatis_, it fails to see how truly personality is the product of specific social and natural forces and neglects to change the material environment in the interest of human welfare. Human personality can be understood neither in terms of its environment alone nor in absolute terms which leave the material world in which it develops out of account. The final victory of personality must be gained by transcending concrete situations and material circumstances; but it is a hollow victory if circumstances are not previously used and amended to improve personal values. The soul is at once the victim and the master of the material world. It gains its highest triumph by renouncing the world, but the renunciation is premature if a futile and yet not futile effort is not made to make the natural world conform to the needs of human character.