The moral enthusiasts whose religion has been transformed into ethical idealism are safe from ridicule. Religious persecution, slavery, the tyranny of disease and ignorance, they have already reformed out of the brighter parts of the world, and perhaps alcoholism and poverty are to follow. We can well afford to risk their mistakes and their excesses, their blind trust in works, so long as they are propelled by a sincere energy of will to make the world better. But what lies behind this will? What keeps it from decaying? For these men are seldom religious in the sense that their reforming zeal springs from a deep spiritual need. A part of their energy is moral habit; a part is exactly identical with the energy that builds up a great industrial plant in order to satisfy a craving for laudable action. If the certainty that the community must be bettered, can be bettered, should slacken, where would it find revival? In faith, hope, and charity? But can hope endure and charity be permanent without faith? And what is their faith? The faith of our moral idealists is as strong, I suppose, as that which supported the Stoics or the clear-sighted reformers of the eighteenth century. They believe in the perfectability of man and the pragmatic value of right-doing. This, for a strong man, may be enough; but it is not a religion. It is questionable whether it would stand adversity. It was not shaken in the war, but it is shaking now. If the enthusiasm of the reformers should be spent or exhausted, they would have little to fall back upon. Their idealism has already shown signs of hysteria, spots of sentimentalism, evidences of a basis in habit and impulse as much as in deep spiritual conviction. It has become almost a commonplace to say that the spiritual seekers, the second of our observable classes--more numerous, I believe, in America than elsewhere in the white world since the seventeenth century--are products of reaction against the dry moral will that seeks its satisfaction in works, not faith. Yet their importance has not always been grasped. Commercial America has not only been the home of the greatest of modern philanthropies, but also the source of the only powerful religious sect created in the nineteenth century, as well as one of the few new strains in idealistic philosophy. They are not happy in our commercialism or content with ethical reform, those more sensitive spirits whose numbers and weight in bourgeois America are evident whenever an emotional crisis arrives. And the freedom from ecclesiastical restraint which was won for them by their ancestors has left them free to construct new religions.