Meantime, religion conducts a largely futile struggle against the bondage of sin. The churches pray, exhort, instruct, but all this is effective, for the most part, only with sins that already lack social standing. Current religion knows not how to deal with the deep depravity of our respectable faults, and indeed it scarcely recognizes them as faults. On the other hand, it magnifies petty virtues and a-dynamic goodness. It offers emotional elevation and a sense of selfhood through worship, but since God is rarely worshipped as a creative power here and now at work within the moral order, the worshipper’s self remains complacent and accommodating, an arrived and secure soul; it does not become a chrysalis breaking from its shell. Any adequate religion will call for a different way of paying respect to the Creator, and a different way of receiving him into our lives. Worship must come to include within itself a technic for continually transcending the religious self and the religious organization of yesterday and of today, a technic for free reconstruction within the whole realm of our deepest hopes, our highest ideals, our ultimate convictions, and our profoundest fellowships and loyalties. Considerable liberty in the sense of toleration of dissent already exists, it is true, in large areas of Protestantism, but this is not the same as a technic for freedom. When we merely tolerate dissent, we the tolerators do not dissolve the special privilege claimed by our past and present selves; our own souls remain indoors, and we decline the responsibility for exploration and the changing of our maps. What of the schools, then? Surely they are emancipators of personality? Yes and no. Education, as we moderns of the West practise it, contains the most remarkable ambiguity. For it sincerely intends to develop the specifically human capacity for intelligent self-control, but with equal sincerity it intends to keep the teacher (that is, the generation that is passing away) in control of the pupil (the generation that is arriving). We justify this dualism, or at least keep it alive and respectable-looking, by the violent assumption that we who are about to die already possess wisdom, already know how to live, already incarnate pure intelligence to such a degree that the next generation cannot do better than walk in our footsteps. “Acquire self-control,” we say to the young, but we mean, “Form a habit of doing what we oldsters want you to do.” This reminds one of the old skit on the doctrine of predestination: You can and you can’t; you will, and you won’t; You’ll be damned if you do, you’ll be damned if you don’t. Or, still better, it illustrates Paul’s famous confession: “There is war in my members.... The good that I would do, I do not, and the evil that I would not do, that I do.” What we should do is to make our educational system a systematic warning against walking in our footsteps.