treating persons as mere means rather than ends--will not be mentioned. You may possibly receive from some church member a Scripture verse, “Love your neighbor as yourself”; but what do you think he will mean by it? Will he mean governing the main aims and processes of the economic life by this principle? Do you really think he will? VIII THE DILEMMA OF CHRISTIANITY The relation of the dominant religion of the West--the garden-plot of industrialism--to these depressed views of the motives of men is as odd as it is complicated. The tradition of official Christianity has run to the effect that the heart of man is desperately wicked; that it is selfish, sensual, and self-deceived; and that it is incapable of improving itself until an infusion of divine power has made possible, first repentance, then a new life. Like the melancholy tolling of a bell, our War experience, our popular psychologies, our popular literature, and our everyday economic occupations repeat after religion that, under the surface, we are a madhouse of clamant impulses, and that we have no power to become anything else. How, we may ask, does theology like this confirmation of itself? Not too well! And for interesting reasons. Within the memory of men now living the evangelical churches were strenuously combating the notion that man is naturally good; today, when popular thought is inclined to classify human nature with that of the beasts, the same churches are exerting themselves to assert the natural nobility and dignity of the human race, and its unique significance in the order of nature. Just what has brought about this change of front? And how deep down does it go? Secondary reasons for this change need not here be enumerated, as, for example, the modification of theological thought from within by its own re-examination of its historical bases. For a great about-face of popular religious consciousness never takes place at the command of historical scholarship but only at the command of a pervasive experience. In this instance, the pervasive experience that dominates religious thought lies precisely in the area that we already have had under consideration. The doctrine that man’s nature is evil had as its counterpart and counterweight (partly relieving it of its gruesomeness) the dogma that divine grace, acting through the Scriptures and the church, is able (and some said, is ever ready,) to take away the evil desires and fill their place with good. Now, it would be intolerable to the churches to think so ill of man’s original nature unless the actuality of regeneration also could be believed in. But--here is the rub--living belief in regeneration could not be maintained upon biblical grounds or upon authority alone; it had to be made manifest in the common life to common men.