In a civilization in which the dominant motives and basic relationships are unethical, religion is therefore doubly affected. The immoralities which bring the reproach of impotence upon it are also the reason for the impotence. Thus modern civilization creates a temper of scorn for a religion which fails to challenge recognized social iniquities, and at the same time it destroys the vitality which religion needs to issue such a challenge. The defection of the industrial workers from religious life and institutions, one of the most significant phenomena of our time, has this double significance. The industrial worker is indifferent to religion, partly because he is enmeshed in relations which are so impersonal and fundamentally so unethical that his religious sense atrophies in him. On the other hand he is hostile to religion because he observes the ethical impotence of the religion of the privileged classes, particularly in its failure to effect improvement in economic and social attitudes. The industrial worker raises a general characteristic of modern urban man to a unique degree. His own experiences help him to see the moral limitations of modern civilization more clearly than do the more privileged classes; but what is true of him is generally true of all members of a complex society in which human relations are impersonal and complicated. If religion is senescent in modern civilization, its social impotence is as responsible for its decline as is its metaphysical maladjustment. The restoration of its vitality must wait upon the adjustment of its tenets and the reorganization of its life to meet the problems which both the pure and the applied sciences, which both the depersonalization of the universe and the depersonalization of civilization, have created. The metaphysical problem of religion cannot be depreciated. In the long run religion must be able to impress the mind of modern man with the essential plausibility and scientific respectability of its fundamental affirmations. But the scientific respectability of religious affirmations will not avail if the life which issues from them will not help to solve man’s urgent social problems. If modern churches continue to prefer their intellectual to their ethical problems, they will merely succeed in maintaining a vestige of religion in those classes which are not sensitive enough to feel and not unfortunate enough to suffer from the moral limitations of modern society. An unethical civilization will inevitably destroy the vitality of the religion of the victims and the sincerity and moral prestige of the religion of the beneficiaries of its unethical inequalities.