Religious ideas in the past have derived from the most diverse emotional and intellectual origins in the integrating mind of man. Speculative explanations, metaphors hardened by usage into quasi-factual statements, fantasies arising out of germinating and suppressed impulses, false analogies, parables begotten and lit by flashes of spiritual insight, traditions misconceived and distorted, dogmatic excesses in explicitness evoked by the irritation of contradictory criticism, the odd compromises of theological diplomatists, the craving for supernatural sanctions and vindications and the nightmare creations of fear, that haunting shadow of all conscious life, have mingled inextricably in every religious fabric. But the survival value of a religion to a community has lain always in the practical assistance it afforded in the subordination of self and the achievement of co-operative loyalties not otherwise obtainable. No community seems ever to have been held together in wholesome and vigorous collective life by “enlightened self-interest” alone. Enlightened self-interest in exceptional cases and under slight or moderate stresses may produce enough simulated disinterestedness to be practically undistinguishable from public virtue, and the great mass of lives in every community is no doubt kept at this or that moral level, and in this or that form of behaviour according to the quality and intensity of the beliefs that hold that community together with little or no co-operating force in the lives themselves. But somewhere and effectively in that community the sustaining beliefs of the community must be passionately and sincerely held and maintained. A community where binding beliefs have decayed altogether is like a building whose mortar has been changed to sand. It may stand for a time, but it stands precariously. Now in the communities in which we are living to-day there has been a far-reaching weakening and change in religious beliefs. This has been due to an enormous growth of knowledge, to an enhanced vigour of criticism, to a relative enfeeblement of government and authority which released unprecedented freedom of speech and permitted the crystallisation of doubts into coherent and militant denials. At the same time there have been developments of the mechanical conditions of life that have enlarged the scale of possible human operations, made economical life increasingly international and brought once autonomous states and regions into a mutually disintegrative intimacy of reaction. The stresses upon our communities are greater than they have ever been and the blinding forces less. The outlook before our race seems therefore to be wider, more uncertain and much more dangerous than has ever appeared before.