Production and distribution of economic goods at its best--nay, why should we not say at its normal point--is, then, a working together with God in the creation, not so much of plants and fruits and domestic animals and structures of wood, stone, and steel, as man himself. The economic order is a chief sphere, if not the chief one, for the realization of personal selves. This is the only coherent meaning that we can give to it. Therefore, whenever we find it turning out undeveloped, depressed, or distorted personalities, they must not be taken as by-products or incidents; they are the main concern, and therefore the system is here sick and self-defeating. To say that we are engaged in making goods and not men is in any case simply not so. We actually do make men of one sort or another in all our sowing and reaping, mining and smelting, manufacture, commerce, and finance. For better or for worse this is so; there is no escaping it. But our modern world deludes itself on this point by endeavoring to maintain and cultivate a spiritual life _alongside_ the economic. By “spiritual” life I mean the only thing that it can signify to us moderns, namely, regard for personal selves, all selves within our purview. This concept of the spiritual includes a scale of attitudes long enough to reach all the way from comforting a frightened child to worshipping God. We are self-deceived in that we have turned over the making of selves to schools, homes, and churches as their specialty, for the making of selves takes place just as truly and not less effectively in and through the economic order. We have rather lazily assumed, too, that the superior personal relations experienced or talked about in home, school, and church will somehow--rarely does anyone even attempt to say just how--pass over into the field, the factory, the market, and the financial institution. Undoubtedly considerable seepage into economic relations does occur. For, even where the system is most mechanized, it is not quite shameless, and the sporadic cases of concern for human values are neither few nor insignificant in quality. Nevertheless, on the whole, we undertake to base our economic conduct upon economic principles that are supposed (though mistakenly) to be self-sustaining or even self-evident, and our ethical and religious life upon a contrasting set of principles, supposed (though mistakenly) to be likewise self-sustaining. The result in multitudes of instances is a dual life; always it is confusion, blurring, and relative inefficiency in the human concerns that most count.