The future of religion and the future of civilization are thus hung in the same balance. Both as a means to a moral end and as an end in itself, for which the moral life is the means, the future of religion is involved in the ethical reconstruction of modern society. Social and economic problems are not the only problems which fret the mind and engage the interest of modern men. But they are proportionately more important in an advanced than in a primitive society. Modern men face no problem that is greater than that of their aggregate existence. How can they live in some kind of decent harmony with their fellow men when the size and intricacy of their social machinery tends continually to aggravate the vices which make human life inhuman? How shall they gain mastery over the instruments by which they have mastered nature so that these will not become the means of projecting nature’s vices into human history? How shall they bring the life of great social and political groups under the dominion of conscience and moral law? These are the problems upon which hangs the future of civilization. Such social problems are fundamentally ethical and the intimate relation between religion and morality bring them inevitably into the province of religion. Can it help to solve them? Will their solution give religious idealism new vitality? Is the present social impotence of religion due to innate defects? Or is it due to specific and historical limitations which the years may change at least as quickly as they produced them? To such questions we must address ourselves. CHAPTER II NATURE AND CIVILIZATION AS FOES OF PERSONALITY It would be extravagant to claim that the possibility of making the resources of religion available for the solution of social problems of modern civilization is absolutely determining for its future. Religion would continue to maintain itself in modern society even if it produced only the scarcest socio-ethical fruits. The problem of living together is not the only problem which men face, and civilization is not the only foe with which personality contends. At least two other fundamental problems engage the interest of every normal individual, that of developing the multifarious forces of his personality into some kind of harmony and unity and that of asserting the dignity and worth of human personality in defiance of nature’s indifference and contempt. If religion can render the human spirit a tolerably effective service in the solution of these two problems, its aid will not be scorned though it fail him in his social problem. It will not maintain itself with equal vitality in all strata of society, but it will continue some kind of existence in all of them, and a fairly vigorous life in those classes in which social problems are least urgent.