A PHILOSOPHICAL BASIS FOR AN ETHICAL RELIGION The ethical problem of religion may be more important than the metaphysical one, as previously observed, but it cannot be solved without a reorientation of the present philosophical basis of religious conviction. The Western world has had a slight advantage over the East in the tentative dualism of Christianity, but this advantage has been lost by the inevitable drift toward pantheism in Western thought. Pantheistic tendencies are potential perils to moral values in practically all religions. By identifying God and the natural world they either persuade men to resign themselves to the inadequacies of nature, under the illusion that divine sanctity has rendered them immutable, or they blind the eye to the imperfections of nature and thus destroy the moral sensitiveness of religion. The Orient has usually derived a morally enervating pessimism from its pantheism, while the Occident has chosen the other horn of the monistic dilemma and fallen into a sentimental optimism. Both alternatives are as untrue to the facts as they are inadequate to men’s moral needs. In the Western world religious optimism has been gradually destroyed by the advance of science which discredited the moral overestimate of the cosmic order, implicit as one of two tendencies in pantheism. The practical and tragic realities of its international and industrial life have added to the disillusionment and made men as sceptical of human as of cosmic virtue. Thus the cynicism of disillusioned intelligence is added to the despair of an outraged conscience to unite in a pessimism which questions both the rationality of the universe and the morality of man. The despair of the West is even more devastating to moral values than the pessimism of the East, for the Orient is prompted by its religion to a serene resignation while the West spends itself in blind fury or sensual excess. When all confidence in moral values is destroyed, the strong express themselves by asserting their power or resenting their seeming impotence, while the weak sink into an easy indulgence of natural appetites. The real history of Western society is being written by Nietzschian and Marxian cynics who have subdued every scruple which might qualify their contest for power. Meanwhile their conflict is lazily witnessed by vast hordes whose main purpose in life is to gratify their senses and who give their sympathy to one or the other side according as it offers least hindrance to their enjoyments. In such a situation religion is easily relegated to the position of restraining the petty and obscuring the major vices of the small minority which still profess it. This is particularly true when optimism and sentimentality, such as characterize modern religion, make it incapable of a realistic evaluation of the forces which reveal themselves in human society.