In fact, the seepage from our spiritual life into the economic is large or fully offset by a reverse penetration of depersonalized economic principles and practices into the very citadels of spirituality. Consider, for example, the prerogatives assumed by and commonly granted to “the man who pays the bill.” Does the entirely unspiritual fact of carrying the purse give one a preferred position with respect to spiritual relations within the family? Yes or no? Does economic power, or does it not, either intentionally or by mere drift, determine what shall be soft-pedaled in schools, colleges, and theological seminaries? No one takes the trouble to deny that laymen of means have influence in the churches altogether out of proportion both to their number and to their religious intelligence, and no one questions that this influence colors the teachings called religious. The spiritual does not succeed in maintaining itself alongside the economic. In the nature of the case, it cannot do so; the economic experience is bound, for good or for ill, to be the area in which some of the chief character-forming forces are generated. The present partition of ourselves into secular and religious, industrial and cultural, practical and idealistic is deceptive and ruinous. It results in half-conscious gropings, tangled purposes, self-defeating self-assertions, fallacious self-justifications, and diluted standards of spirituality. In consequence of it the economic order lacks definite meaning. It should mean production for use and for the enlargement of life all along the line, but instead it is not unambiguously directed towards any human good whatsoever. It feeds the hungry (some of them), but it also exploits their hunger. It indirectly supports education, science, art, philanthropies, and religion; but at the same time it promotes senseless luxury, conspicuous spending, a commercialized amusement fever, political corruption, and the kind of national economy that makes for war. If it has sharpened the wits of many, and opened to them wider vistas, it has likewise made multitudes of minds hard, materialistic, mechanical. It has produced class consciousness and class conflict so general and so acute that sober observers are wondering whether the system is not bound to destroy itself by its internal friction.