A significant body of historical study is bringing to light an amazing array of evidence that Christianity has, in fact, adopted the ethical fundamentals of the industrial consciousness. The anti-spiritual presuppositions of an acquisitive system have actually been baptized into the name of Christ, and taught as virtues. Even Catholicism, in spite of its reverence for tradition, shies at--more than shies, objurgates--social aspirations that reflect an early Christian attitude towards property and towards the organization of society. Moreover, the dominant Catholic conception of loyalty to the State obligates the laity to follow industrialism, whenever it so commands, onto the field of carnage. Rome has the grit to teach her children when to disobey the powers of this world, but she has not had the spiritual clarity to see that the kind of docility and contentedness that she inculcates plays into the hands of Mammon, the chief enemy of the Christ. Protestants often marvel at the adaptability that this ancient, stiffly authoritarian church has shown in its adjustments to the modern secular State and to popular government. What makes this adaptability possible is the restricted limits of the sphere within which Catholicism actually exercises authority. This sphere is not coextensive with the forces that make or mar personality, bestowing dignity or throwing contempt upon it. According to the decree of the Vatican Council, the Pope may speak with infallible authority upon any and all questions of both faith and morals; but he does not speak upon all of them. If he did speak, in specific and understandable terms, of the meaning of Jesus’ teachings as applied to present spiritual conditions, the position of Catholicism in industrial society would be far less comfortable than it now is. The historical studies just referred to maintain that Protestantism, particularly Puritanism, has to a significant extent assimilated its conception of both the sphere and the method of the spiritual life to the economic process. That is, instead of insisting that this process be brought up to the standards implied in the teachings of Jesus, Protestantism has _first_, acquiesced in the doctrine that the economic order somehow secretes from within itself its own rules, standards of value, and grounds of self-justification; _second_, assumed that what the economic system counts as virtues really are virtues, and that here the spiritual life gets its discipline, and character its solidity; _finally_, persuaded itself that the function of the anti-Mammon teachings of Jesus is to prevent excesses such as sacrificing integrity to cupidity, taking undue advantage of the weak, pride of wealth, forgetting the poor, and losing the sense of dependence upon God. Nay, prosperity in the sense of mere accumulation (not in the sense of wants of personality actually met) becomes a sign of God’s kindness or even approval.