When religious apologists found it necessary to readjust the age-old affirmations of faith to the evolutionary facts revealed by science they usually sank even more deeply into the morass of pantheistic and monistic philosophy. The old and naïve conceptions of a capricious omnipotence working its will upon natural phenomena became manifestly untenable and a way had to be found to relate divine purpose to and discover the area of creativity in the natural and cosmic processes. It was practically inevitable that such a task would be accomplished only by an overemphasis on divine immanence and a consequent betrayal of religion into a sentimental optimism. When defenders of religious faith were borrowing from the quiver of their opponents they would have done well to consult Thomas Huxley more and Herbert Spencer less; for Huxley was morally much more realistic than Spencer. Spencerian doctrines lent themselves more easily to the strategy of linking religious theism with the faith of science in the dependability of the universe; but there was something lacking in Spencerian optimism which is very vital to religion, a sense of the tragic in life and an awareness of the frustration which moral purpose and creative will must meet in nature and in man. The sentimentality of modern religion is of course older than the optimism which it derived from Spencer. Part of it is derived from Rousseau and the romanticism of the eighteenth century. Here again religion suffered the fate of snatching error while it was borrowing truth from its opponents. Renouncing the idea of total depravity which was central in medieval religion, and in orthodox Protestantism for that matter, it evolved a sentimental overestimate of human virtue which is no nearer the truth than the medieval conceptions of original sin. It is a strange irony in history that to-day irreligion, in the form of deterministic psychology, should elaborate doctrines strangely akin to the derogatory estimates of human resources made by medieval theologians. So modern churches are involved in an optimistic overestimate of the virtue of both man and nature at the very time when science tempts men to despair of discovering moral integrity in the one and moral meaning in the other. Modern religion is, in short, not sufficiently modern. In it eighteenth-century sentimentality and nineteenth-century individualism are still claiming victory over the ethical and religious prejudices of the Middle Ages. Meanwhile life has moved on and the practical needs of modern society demand an ethic which is not individualistic and a religion which is not unqualifiedly optimistic.