The basis of that pyramid is religious. No doubt the superstructure owes much to our triumphantly swift results in science, industry, and humanitarian reform. But the pride of practical achievement, thoroughly wholesome in its proper _locale_, would not have formed a modern Babel unless assembled and underpinned by modern religion. And modern religion, while denouncing more and more the various arrogancies of our material civilisation, has not unearthed the deep foundation which it itself has provided for them. As religion is properly the founder and guardian of human humility, so religious pride is the prime evil. We see this very easily in the past. We know that the most blinding and hateful pride that grew among the ancient Greeks and Romans was not the pride of city-state, of empire, of symmetric culture. It was the arrogance of the religious philosophy of the Stoics, their assumption of a pseudo-divine impassivity of spirit. Likewise the mediæval glorification of chivalry, and even of ecclesiastic and theological edifice, is as nothing to modern eyes in comparison with the spiritual presumption that grew in mediæval asceticism. We see how vicious it was for the Stoic to be proud of his pride, and for the monk to be proud of his humility. We have not yet seen how vicious it is for the modern citizen to be proud of being neither proud nor humble. He is spiritually proud of having escaped from spiritual pride. He believes he has left that historic vice far and forever behind. In his leisure hours he has learned all about it, he thinks, from interesting books, periodicals, preachers, lecturers, travels, historical moving-pictures, and maybe survey courses in college. He is amused and in better moments saddened at the tremendous dramatic display of religious pride in old times,--unaware that this evil never _displayed_ itself to the hearts it mastered, nor does to-day. What, then, can he know of real humility? “Why,” I was recently asked by a sincerely puzzled undergraduate whose psychological interests had led him to scrutinise certain ancient documents, “why were the old Christians always jawing about humility?” The modern man is conscious, explicitly or implicitly, of possessing a new form of humility much superior to the old. He is proud of his freedom from the fearful self-abasement of his benighted ancestors. He is certain that his own brand of humility, his kindly modesty in relation to nature and to other men, is far more reasonable and real. Reality, indeed, is his keynote. He believes he sees the facts of human nature with a plain and full reality, or immediacy, that was impossible to men of old, distracted as their vision was by the extremes of pride and humility. He has done away with those two “mighty opposites.” His realism, his direct contact with life, has antiquated their histrionic conflict. He is superior to that primitive battle in the human breast. He has emerged from that cave warfare into the light of immediate reality.