The old challenge “be ye not conformed to this world” must be accepted anew in a more heroic fashion than is customary in enlightened religious circles. The policy of building a Kingdom of God by regenerating individual lives has become discredited, not because moral character is dispensable to a wholesome social life, but because the criteria of moral character have been too individualistic to serve the needs of modern society. It is important enough that men gain some control over their immediate desires and discipline their momentary passions. Society is always in need of integrated personalities. But the validity of the religious ideal must finally be judged by its capacity to create not only unified personalities but personalities which know how to restrain their expansive desires for the sake of social peace. Religion intensifies selfishness when it adds sanctity to a respectable selfish life and creates a self-respect which is impervious to emotions of contrition. If the religious ideal is to gain any potency in modern life it must be able to convict men of sin and inspire them to a conversion. But the sins of which they need most to be convicted are those which are covert in the social and economic relations which custom has hallowed; and the conversion of life which is most needed is that which will express itself in terms of the economic and political relationships in which men live. Not to be conformed to this world, if it is to have any real meaning in modern life, will mean that the religiously inspired soul knows how to defeat the avarice and to overcome the indifference to the worth of human personality which inheres in the whole economic and industrial structure of modern society. Practically and individually such a detachment from the world will express itself in the sacrifice of material advantages for the sake of realizing a more intimate fellowship with the underprivileged, in the careful analysis of industrial policies from the standpoint of their effect upon personality, in an unwillingness to profit by social and economic practices and policies which are fundamentally unethical and in a willingness to bear some pain for the sake of expressing loyalty to the community of mankind as against all lesser and conflicting loyalties.