any superficial intellectualism. If institutions of religion gave preference to the ethical rather than the intellectual problem of religious faith, it might be possible to create a religious spirit sufficiently vigorous to permit the free play of the critical faculties without a loss of moral or spiritual dynamic. Obviously civilization cannot afford to dispense with either the irrational moral will or the critical intelligence by which it is made effective in complex situations. Men need to subject all partial moral achievements to comparison with the absolute standards of truth, beauty and goodness of their religious faith, and yet be able to see and willing to concede the relativities in the absolute values of their devotion. They can be saved from a morality of mere utilitarianism only by the religious quest for an absolute moral standard; yet they need to be discerning enough to see that every ethical achievement, even when inspired by religious motives, is tinged with prudential self-interest. They must continue to strive after freedom and yet realize that human life and character is largely determined by environment. If they seek happiness, divorced from fortune, they nevertheless cannot escape the duty of making the material world serve human welfare. Their ability to discover the transcendent values in human personality has value only if they maintain faith in human nature after they have discovered its imperfections. They must search after the perfect goodness in God and yet be prepared to face the cruelties of life without either denying their reality or being driven to despair by them. If it is true that moral sincerity is even more necessary to a vital religion in modern life than intellectual modernity, a strategy must be developed to sever religious idealism from the unethical tendencies in modern civilization. Any strategy which will succeed in such an enterprise will savor of asceticism. The limitations of historic asceticism may teach the present how to avoid inevitable pitfalls in the task of detaching religious idealism from the corruptions of society. An asceticism which flees the world and develops its saints at the price of abandoning industrial civilization even more completely to the natural and anarchic forces which operate in its life, is obviously of no use to modern civilization. Yet a type of asceticism is needed, if for no other reason, because greed is the dominant motive of Western civilization and nothing less than an ascetic discipline will free religious idealism from its entanglement with the covetousness of modern life. Since Western life is intent upon material advantages, no religious idealism can maintain any degree of purity if it does not enter into a conscious conflict with the civilization in which it functions and succeed in setting some bounds to the expansive desires of men and of nations.