contrast to the This-World Ethic of the Natural Law, Aristotle, the Decalogue and Natural Prosperity; but then this cannot fail to be the case, given the entire fundamental character of the Christian Ethic'.[50] Thus the widest and most primitive contrasts here are, not Sin and Redemption (though these, of course, remain) but Nature (however good in its kind) and Supernature. The State becomes the complex of that essentially good thing, Nature; the Church the complex of that different, higher good, Supernature; roughly speaking, where the State leaves off, the Church begins. It lasted not long, before the Canonists and certain ruling Churchmen helped to break up, in the consciousness of men at large, this noble perception of the two-step ladder from God to man and from man to God. And the Protestant Reformers, as a whole, went even beyond Saints Paul and Augustine in exclusive preoccupation with Sin and Redemption. Henceforth the single-step character of man's call now more than ever predominates. The Protestant Reformation, like the French Revolution, marks the existence of grave abuses, the need of large reforms, and, especially on this point, the all but inevitable excessiveness of man once he is aroused to such 'reforming' action. Certainly, to this hour, Protestantism as such has produced, within and for religion specifically, nothing that can seriously compare, in massive, balanced completeness, with the work of the short-lived golden Middle Ages of Aquinas and Dante. Hence, for our precise present purpose, we can conclude our Jewish and Christian survey here. 3. Only a few words about Confucianism, Buddhism, Mohammedanism, as these, in some of their main outlines, illustrate the points especially brought out by the Jewish Christian development. Confucianism admittedly consists, at least as we have it, in a greatly complicated system of the direct worship of Nature (Sun, Moon, Stars especially) and of Ancestors, and of a finely simple system of ethical rules for man's ordinary social intercourse. That Nature-worship closely resembles what the Deuteronomic reform fought so fiercely in Israel; and the immemorial antiquity and still vigorous life of such a worship in China indicates impressively how little such Nature-worship tends, of itself, to its own supersession by a definite Theism. And the Ethical Rules, and their very large observance, illustrate well how real can be the existence, and the goodness in its own kind, of Natural, This-World morality, even where it stands all but entirely unpenetrated or supplemented by any clear and strong supernatural attraction or conviction.