Hence austere industriousness (without regard to one’s place in the economic scale) has been valued above play; above the enjoyment of nature, literature, or the fine arts; above even the joys of human fellowship. The habit of saving so as to accumulate a surplus has been almost identified with strength of character. A serious life has been evidenced by intense devotion to business, and winning a competence by working the system hard has been one of the surest guarantees of general respect even within the religious circle. As to the relation of God to the system, consider the tone and contents of Thanksgiving Day proclamations and of prayers and sermons upon this festival day. For what do people give thanks? And does it not appear that God himself is contented with the system? In short, here are clear tendencies towards making Christianity into a bourgeois religion--the sanctification of the struggles of the middle class within a _given_ industrial order. Such a religion has difficulty in understanding either the discontent of the laborer, or the necessarily disintegrating effect of private wealth upon personality (yes, the necessarily disintegrating effect, as Jesus unqualifiedly declared), or the spiritual significance of freedom in thinking and in the development of ethical principles. This is not intended to be a statement of the whole situation in Protestantism, but of a drift within it. If a debit and credit judgment were in order, one would have to study carefully the upspringing within both Protestantism and Catholicism (and Judaism, too) of a social movement that to some extent opposes this drift. But our concern here is simply to discover the relation between Christianity and the disillusionment with respect to himself that is creeping upon twentieth-century man. This is what we find: Both Catholicism and Protestantism are entangled with industrialism, both its practice and its philosophy--entangled, that is to say, with the force that has most to do with lowering us in our own eyes. Christianity in the western world is therefore in a dilemma of the most vital kind. If it affirms the greatness and nobility of the human person (whether innate or achievable by a special infusion of divine grace), it must demand fundamental reconstruction of the industrial order because in theory this order denies and in practice it thwarts every such affirmation. On the other hand, if Christianity continues to compromise as it is now doing, it cannot maintain even such spiritual values as it now hugs to its breast. Its faith in God will decline--it is now declining--with its inability to see or produce the Christlike in the common man engaged in the common occupations of the day. Its continuity with Jesus will grow thinner and thinner because of growing inability to speak or understand the plainest of his language. The Protestant churches will more and more become clubs for the enjoyment of conventional and