In the past, in the history of every community there have been phases of moral and religious confusion. The beliefs and ideas of right conduct that have served hitherto begin, in the presence of new circumstances or new challenges, to lose authority or to fail in meeting current moral problems. An age of relaxation and a sort of experimental wickedness dawns. Scruples vanish. Treachery, cruelty, unrestrained self-indulgence, which have been kept under hatches, emerge conspicuously. Government becomes more adventurous, tyrannous and unjust, and the moral distinction between ruler and brigand fines away to the vanishing-point. There seems no longer any good faith nor any sweetness of soul in human life, except among the sacrificial simple. What will for a better life still manifests itself in the world is for a while quite unable to take hold of the disorder. Italy in the Machiavellian period and Germany after the intricate wars of the Reformation may be cited as typical instances of such “wicked” phases in social history. Yet it was not that the heart of man changed for the worse in those ages, not that there was a sudden generation of vipers, but that intellectual confusion had divided and enfeebled that graver-spirited minority which had, under more assured conditions, sustained the faith of most people and the moral disciplines of everyone. The quality of the ingredients of the human mixture remained the same, but the restraining and directive forces had in their interplay come upon a phase of mutual neutralisation and collective ineffectiveness. There are many signs that to-day over large parts of the world there is a drift towards such another disintegrative and distressful phase. The brigand, the boss and the adventurer become portentously successful and immune. People who, in other times, would have been active and confident in their own lives and vigorously co-operative in the control of human affairs are uncertain in their hearts and unhappy in their interventions. The old faiths have become unconvincing, unsubstantial and insincere, and though there are clear intimations of a new faith in the world, it still awaits embodiment in formulæ and organisations that will bring it into effective reaction upon human affairs as a whole. This present essay is an attempt to assemble these intimations in a form that will be available for the practical direction of the writer’s and the reader’s life. _Chapter II_ SUBORDINATION OF SELF THE ESSENCE OF RELIGION