It is obvious that the ethical potency of religion depends largely upon its ability to make its ideals effective in the world and yet preserve a measure of detachment from those natural forces which express themselves in human society and offer such stubborn resistance to every spiritual and ethical ideal that no victory has yet been gained over them in which the heel of the victor has not been bruised. Ideal religion makes reverence for personality the end of human action. Society has its various secular ends the attainment of which necessitates the debasement of personality. Religion seeks to persuade men to sacrifice immediate advantages for ultimate values; the average man whose influence is dominant in all large social groups is not easily persuaded to forego immediate and concrete advantages for values which are too remote and too ephemeral to captivate his imagination. There must therefore be a tension between the spiritual ideal and all historic societies. The significance of Jesus for the religious life of the Western world is due to his attainment and incarnation of a spiritual and moral ideal of such absolute and transcendent nature that none of his followers have been able to compromise it by their practical adjustments to the social necessities of their day. There is therefore a resource in the avowed loyalty of Western civilization to his ideal which may yet become the basis of its redemption. It is the peculiar characteristic of men and societies, and an evidence of both their moral and immoral nature, that they reserve their most unqualified devotion for those ideals and personalities which they find difficult to realize or emulate. They pay tribute to the ideal even while they are corrupting it and they reward those who have accommodated it to their indifferent capacities with a more qualified respect.

It was probably inevitable that the church should adjust the spiritual ideal, which to propagate it ostensibly regards as its very raison d’être, to the practical needs of the various ages and social orders with which it came in contact. But it is necessary that it should be shrewd enough to see the compromise involved in every adjustment and be stubborn enough to make a new bid for victory after every partial defeat. On the whole the Catholic church, which Protestants easily assume to have been more amenable to the practical demands of an unregenerate society than the churches of the Reformation, has really been much shrewder than these in gauging the hazards to virtue in the most natural social relationships. Some of the moral weaknesses in the modern church may be traced directly to the naïvete of Protestantism in dealing with the vagaries of human nature, and in failing to estimate the overt and covert peril to its values in the ordinary ways of men.

Medieval Catholicism had various strategies in preserving and relaxing the tension between the ideal of religion and the practical needs of men and society. It made fewest demands upon the individual. He was permitted to indulge almost all the natural appetites and ambitions which characterize the life of the average man. For him the religion of the church was a magic which guaranteed divine intervention in critical moments and which offered a rather easy short-cut to the prizes of the spirit which ought to be won only by virtuous achievement. Yet this same church had an uncompromising attitude toward the various social institutions which Protestantism has never equaled. It insisted on the sacramental nature of the family union with such intransigeance that it may fairly be accused of failing to make necessary accommodations of its spiritual ideal to the imperfections of human nature. It dealt with economic relations with less severity but enforced ethical ideals upon them which must seem unusually exacting to an age which has become accustomed to the connivance of Protestantism with laissez-faire economics. The master of the medieval church, Thomas Aquinas, had elaborated a theory of the just price for all commercial transactions, which the church made every effort to apply and which it enforced through the canonical law. The church did not organize the guilds but it blessed them; and their efforts to regulate wages, fix fair profits, insure high quality of merchandise and organize mutual aid among their members were prompted by a religiously inspired moral idealism. While it dealt less successfully with the ethical implications of the relations between landowners and peasants, it impressed the owners with a sense of their obligation toward those who were economically dependent upon them which to this day gives the landed aristocracy of European nations a certain moral superiority over the industrial overlords who have been trained in more modern schools of thought. The ambition of the medieval church to dominate the life of the nations is well known but frequently misinterpreted. The contest between the papacy and the empire was indeed in some of its aspects no more than a conflict between two great political organizations lusting for the power which easily becomes the sole end of the life of social and political organisms. Yet there was a measure of ethical idealism in the political aspirations of the popes to which Protestant thought has given scant justice. In the two greatest exponents of the papacy as an international political force, Gregory VII and Innocence III, particularly in Gregory, the ethical ideal of a unified Christian society which knows how to hold the capricious self-will of nations in check and how to set bounds to their natural lust for power is of no small moment in the development of papal policy. The very autocracy of the papacy, which the modern world finds so little to its liking, was elaborated by Gregory in order to save the church from international anarchy and make it an instrument of international unification. Incidentally Gregory was neither the first nor the last great statesman who preferred autocracy to anarchy, and the preference is supported by more than one lesson of history. Free coöperation between individuals and groups is a high and rare political and moral achievement, and where men’s capacities are unequal to it there are occasions when it may be better to sacrifice freedom than to destroy social cohesion. At any rate the medieval church revealed both political shrewdness and spiritual idealism in its attempt to dominate the life of nations. Naturally its efforts did not result in any ideal society. The ambition of the Cæsar haunted the life of the popes and in many respects the work of their hands approximated the dominion of an Augustus more nearly than the kingdom of God of Christian dreams. The Christian ideal of an ethical international society was thus corrupted by imperial ambition in its very inception, and the historical realities which sprang from it diverged even farther from any conceivable ideal. Yet the whole political policy of the medieval church is in marked contrast to the easy capitulation of historic Protestantism before the force of economic and political groups. If Catholicism’s treatment of the moral problems of the individual represents the relaxation of the tension between religion and life, and its social and political policy represents the compromise which follows inevitably upon the conflict of the ideal with the moral inertia of life, its monasticism represents the strategy of religion when it seeks to maintain an absolute tension between its ideal and historic reality.

The various ascetic movements which prospered under the general ægis of the medieval church represent so many different types of religious idealism that no generalization about them will be accurate. Protestantism reacted violently from the monastic ideal and therefore has been able to see nothing in monasticism but a selfish flight from life’s realities. Monasticism may be a retreat from life, but at its best it was not a selfish retreat. Its development of the arts, its emphasis on learning, its vast philanthropies and its religious zeal for those outside of the monastic walls are not selfish characteristics. It did sometimes degenerate into a very odious type of spiritual selfishness and pride; but if we judge it by its typical exemplars, we cannot accuse it of a lack of social passion. The religious fervor of Catholic ascetics has been matched by Protestant mystics, but their ethical insights have never been excelled. Their superior moral shrewdness was revealed in their ability to detect the perils to the ethical ideal which are covert in the natural and, from any obvious perspective, virtuous social relationships. They saw that the family, in itself the most virtuous of human groups, could easily become the occasion for disloyalty to high fealties of the soul. “Whoso loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me,” Jesus had said, and no one in the history of the church seems to have understood the problem with which he dealt in those words as well as Catholic ascetics. It must be said that the celibacy of the monasteries was not prompted solely by the desire to avoid conflicting loyalties; it sprang partly from a morbid evaluation of the sexual relation. That was probably the weakest and least worthy characteristic of medieval asceticism. Its understanding of the perils to the spirit in the possessive instinct was perhaps its finest bit of insight. It understood how easily the privilege and power which spring from the possession of property may corrupt the soul with pride and destroy a loving relationship between individuals. It therefore insisted upon the vow of poverty. In all these problems the insight of asceticism was superior to its strategy. It saw peril in ordinary human relationships where most modern Christians are unable to detect them; but it knew of no way to overcome the peril except by destroying the relationships and building its unique fellowship of the spirit upon the basis of celibacy, poverty and absolute obedience. In asceticism the flowers of the spirit are cut from the roots by which they are supported and life is destroyed in the process of its purification. Asceticism creates a high type of ethical spirituality which cannot be universalized without completely destroying society; and the virtue which it develops can be maintained only in its own artificial media and therefore lacks redemptive force. The great medieval ascetics have always claimed Jesus as their authority though he was not an ascetic in their sense. He disassociated himself from the asceticism of John the Baptist, who had come “neither eating nor drinking,” and unlike the ascetics he had no morbid fears of natural enjoyments. Protestantism has therefore regarded asceticism as the result of a foolish literalism which failed to allow for poetic latitude in the words of Jesus. Nevertheless it must be admitted that both his words and his practice have a closer affinity to medieval asceticism at its best than to any modern spiritualized worldliness which tries vainly to unite the largest number of spiritual graces with the greatest possible temporal advantages. Francis of Assisi was surely more like the real Jesus than Bruce Barton’s modernized caricature of the original. The strategy of Jesus might be described as a leaning in the direction of asceticism, as a hovering upon its brink. He is saved from its morbid temper by the wholesome common sense which leavens all his attitudes. The virtue of asceticism lies in its ability to detect the perils to a virtuous life in the necessary and inevitable social relationships in which all individual personality must develop; its limitation is its inclination to destroy the relationships in order to overcome the peril. Religious idealism, nurtured in the individualism of Protestantism, fails to appreciate the virtue of asceticism, while it condemns its limitations because it fails to realize how fundamentally all individual ethical achievements are qualified by the society in which men live. Wherever that fact is fully understood, every honest effort to maintain the purity of the religious ideal will result in strategies which will approximate asceticism at many points and which may excel it only in the ability to avoid its depreciation, occasionally morbid depreciation, of the ordinary functions of life.

Protestantism’s reactions to the problems of preserving a sense of tension between religion and life have been a little more varied than those of the medieval church because of the multifarious nature of its historic forms. But varied as may be the strategies of the various churches, they do not finally differ from the three which Catholicism employed, i.e., capitulation without a struggle, compromise after a struggle, and victory gained through the device of avoiding some of the issues. The marked differences between the medieval and the modern church lie in the areas of life where the struggle between religion and human inertia was attempted, where the compromises were made and where the victories were won. If Catholicism left the individual to his own devices, the churches of the Reformation followed a similar course in dealing with the moral problems of all human groups. The state was completely secularized under Protestant influence. The Reformation was in some of its aspects simply a simultaneous revolt of the various new nations of Europe against the restraints of the international papacy. In Germany, Scotland and finally in England, the nationalistic motive was a decided force in destroying the prestige of the old religion. Lutheranism capitulated much more easily to the secular state than Calvinism, which tried in fact to maintain the ancient controls upon political life. But once the Reformation had destroyed the old unity of Western society and the prestige of the organization which maintained it, secular nationalism became the universal characteristic of Western civilization. Even Calvinism, which was ambitious to dominate the policy of political states, hardly had the opportunity of affecting international relations. Its influence barely went beyond domestic policy, and there it was less interested in the morality of the state than in the legal enforcement of individual moral ideals. The greed and lust for power of national groups is not a unique characteristic of the modern world; but our own era takes the moral autonomy of the nation for granted more generally than did the Middle Ages. The Protestant church did not create Machiavellian politics but it was more impotent before unscrupulous nationalism than any other institution of the religious ideal, and its impotence was partly due to its lack of interest in social problems.

The emancipation of economic relations from all ethical restraint was more or less concomitant with the Reformation movements, but it is a question how much it was causally and how much coincidentally related. Tawney⁠[7] thinks that the growing complexity of commercial transactions invalidated the old canonical laws designed to enforce ethical standards in business, and thus made the secularization of economics inevitable even before the Reformation. Luther and Calvin were as anxious as the fathers of the medieval church to preserve moral standards in business. But they were no more ingenious than these in devising new and more flexible methods of control when the prohibition of usury and the fixation of a just price were swept away by a growing commerce which made money-lending an incident of commercial enterprise rather than a philanthropic device, and which engulfed the standards by which a just price was determined in a sea of economic relativities. Luther was completely baffled by the intricacies of the new world and could do little more than try vehemently but futilely to maintain the old prohibition against usury and insinuate meanwhile that the recently developed system of international banking was in some mysterious way related to the evil conspiracies of the papacy. Calvinism, true to its genius, was more ambitious in dealing with the problems of commerce; so much so in fact that Beza’s thunderous denunciations of covetousness prompted the Geneva Council to declare that he stirred up class hatred against the wealthy. Yet it was Calvin who finally destroyed the last vestige of medievalism in economics by justifying interest. Though his action prompted the charge that “usury was the brat of heresy,” he probably did no more than to recognize the logic inherent in the facts of a new economic development. There was no more conscious desire to emancipate commercial life from the sanctions of morality and religion in Protestantism than in the ancient church; but the preoccupation of the leaders of the Reformation with the problem of the inner life and the general temper of individualism which characterized the Protestant churches undeniably accelerated the processes of secularization. In time Adam Smith rather than Thomas Aquinas became the moral authority of the commercial world, and, whatever may have been the futile fury of the early reformers, Protestantism did finally accept the economics of laissez faire and habituated itself to a world in which vast areas or life were withdrawn not only from the influence of religiously inspired ethical ideals, but from every ethical sanction whatsoever. Thus was the present world created in which “business is business” and “politics is politics,” i.e., in which the non-moral character of two of the most important social relationships of mankind is taken for granted.

If Protestantism made its easy capitulation before the larger social groups of mankind and its premature peace with them, it developed its most stubborn resistance to the natural appetites of men in its influence upon the individual life. It was precisely in that area of life in which the medieval church was least effective that Protestantism displayed its highest ambition. At this point it becomes impossible to speak in general terms of Protestantism, for the strategies of Calvinism and Lutheranism in dealing with the problems of the inner life differ widely, even more widely than their social policies. The unique characteristics of either are frequently the common characteristics of Protestantism when viewed from some external perspective; but an intimate view may reveal them in the light of very different religions. Calvinism is religion’s most energetic effort to master the ethical life of the individual. In some of its historic forms, in Geneva and Scotland and the American colonies for instance, its social policy was ambitious enough to compare with that of Pope Gregory, but its chief interest was not in the social institution as such. It merely used the political power to reinforce an uncompromising ethical rigor in the life of the individual. In Calvinism the religion of the modern world makes its boldest bid for the ethical mastery of life. Calvinism believed that life could be dominated by the spiritual and ethical ideal if the individual could be persuaded to control his appetites and to overcome his natural indolence. A temperate, industrious, thrifty and honest individual was, in its esteem, the perfect exemplar of the religious ideal and the stuff out of which a new society could be built. It never faced the problem of the conflict between the ideal in the soul of the individual and the intractable forces in human society because its moral ideals were socially and economically very useful and it could therefore indulge the illusion that economic success, social well-being and obvious happiness are the natural and inevitable fruits of the religious life. Hence it was a religion admirably suited for the middle classes who rose to power in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth century, for it endowed them with virtues which would insure their success and it doubled their zeal by giving religious sanction to their secular enterprises. The ancient and medieval world had given moral precedence to a life of leisure and meditation, whether of aristocrat or philosopher, of monk or priest. Calvinism was as contemptuous of luxury and leisure as of the arts and amenities which flourished in them. Its sanctification of the common task, of manual toil and of commercial enterprise was in itself a valuable contribution to social progress. It was in a way the spiritual foundation upon which the whole structure of modern civilization has been built. It developed a high type of honesty without which the intricate credit relationships of modern commerce would have been impossible. It encouraged a diligence which was the driving force in establishing the commercial classes in power over a moribund aristocracy. Its religiously inspired habits of continence and temperance gave the lower classes a sense of moral dignity and a natural self-respect which they needed in challenging the pride and complacency of the aristocratic world. These puritan virtues have moreover given the whole north European world and America (which is more puritan than any nation, because here the puritan life flourished on virgin soil and remained unqualified by the vestiges of medievalism which remain firmly imbedded in the culture of even the most modern European nations) a robust vitality and moral urge which have had no small part in developing their political hegemony in the modern world.

The conflict of puritan religion with the world has however resulted in the inevitable compromise between the religious ideal and the world’s primitive urges and desires. Its moral weakness lies in its naïve confidence of victory over the world and its inability to discover the relativities and qualifications which history has wrought upon its absolute. If the spiritual idealism of Jesus is the norm for Christians, the Calvinists and puritans diverged from it more seriously than they knew in the very conception of their ideal. The love and reverence for personality which is the basis of the ethics of Jesus is totally lacking in Calvinism. It knows how to create self-respect but lacks the imagination to inculcate a religious respect for others, except possibly for the respectable. Its confidence in the obvious rewards of virtue tempted it to abhor poverty and hold the poor in contempt, though they might become the helpful occasion for the exercise of that philanthropy without which the idea of Christian stewardship could not be realized. While early Calvinism had an heroic mood which would have scorned to make a concession to the selfishness of man through the sanctification of prudential ethics, its ethical theories did nevertheless lend themselves to easy appropriation by moralists who were intent upon identifying the social good with a decent selfishness. The uncompromising spirituality of the ethics of Jesus is totally lacking in Calvinism. Its moral theories were in fact derived from the Old rather than the New Testament; and there is hardly a scintilla of evidence in Calvinistic thought that the Sermon on the Mount is recorded in the scripture which it accepted as revealed finality. Its very bibliolatry was partly responsible for its non-Christian type of ethics, for through it the casual moral theories of the early Hebrews achieved the dignity of absolute truth. Lack of historical perspective in the use of the Old Testament further aggravated this error, for the real worth of the prophets was never appreciated and their high type of moral idealism could not serve to qualify the less heroic morality of the law and the superficial moralizing of the Wisdom literature. Incidentally it may be observed that bibliolatry is one of the handicaps to moral progress in almost all religions. Through it primitive cultures and moral customs which happen to be enshrined in the canon become absolutely authoritative, and the weight of their influence is set against new ventures in moral life.

If Calvinistic and puritan idealism departed from its assumed norm in its very conception, the moral realities which issued from it bore even less resemblance to the absolute idealism of the ethics of Jesus. Its unqualified confidence in the power of individual virtue to overcome the world and change society contributed to the relaxation of moral restraints upon social institutions and the secularization of society to which reference has been made. Its sanctification of secular tasks led inevitably to a sanctification of secular motives which it did not desire but could not prevent. Men were to serve God by diligence in their daily toil. But what was the end of industry which endowed it with virtue? The puritan answer was to regard work as an end in itself, an emphasis which it learned to make in its reaction to monastic and aristocratic idleness. But that answer alone could not suffice. Inevitably the material gains which were the rewards of industry were given a special religious sanction. “If God show you a way in which you may lawfully get more than in another way, without wrong to your soul or to any other, if you refuse this and choose the less gainful, you cross one of the ends of your Calling and refuse to be God’s steward,” said Governor Bradford.⁠[8] The ancient and medieval world had been more or less scornful of the pursuit of wealth and abounded in characters among both the nobility and the peasantry who thought it beneath their dignity to increase their patrimony. The religious sanction of material gain was a new thing in history and undoubtedly helped to fashion the moral temper of modern society in which diligence is the great virtue and greed the besetting vice.⁠[9] It is the puritan heritage of America which gives a clew to the paradox of our national life. It explains how we can be at the same time the most religious and the most materialistic of all modern nations.

If puritanism failed to see how easily the virtue of thrift might be transmuted into the vice of avarice, it was even less careful to guard the righteous soul against the perils to virtue which inhere in the power which wealth supplies. There are few men who can wield extraordinary power without making it the tool of their own desires and without magnifying their limitations which might pass unnoticed in less puissant individuals. Puritanism did indeed have a doctrine of stewardship, but it was applied to the privilege which flowed from economic power and not to the possession of power itself. There was never enough imagination in puritanic religion to detect how nature in the soul of man, frustrated by a discipline of the senses, comes into its own through the sins of the mind. It knew how to redeem human life from its vagrant passions, but it did not know how to deal with those dominant desires, the lust for power and the greed for gain, which express themselves more frequently in a disciplined personality than in a chaotic one and which may be more detrimental to the welfare of others than the consequences of undisciplined and momentary passions. It was a spiritual discipline admirably suited to lift the middle classes to a dominant position in society but hardly designed to guide them in the use of the power once they had achieved it. Even its abhorrence of luxury and prohibition of extravagance is finally softened in a civilization which has profited all too well by its virtues and is tempted to destroy them by the very advantages which the virtues supplied. John Wesley, who revived puritan morality after it had declined in its original form, saw this problem more clearly than his predecessors, but he had no answer for it except to advocate philanthropic generosity. He writes in his Journal: “Religion must necessarily produce both industry and frugality, and these cannot but produce riches. But as riches increase so will pride, anger and love of the world in all its branches.... So although the form of religion remains, the spirit is swiftly vanishing away. Is there no way to prevent this—this continual decay of pure religion? We ought not prevent people from being diligent and frugal; we must exhort all Christians to gain all they can and save all they can; that is, in effect, to grow rich. What way then can we take that our money may not sink us in the nethermost hell? There is one way and there is no other under heaven. If those who gain all they can and save all they can will likewise give all they can, then the more they give the more will they grow in grace and the more treasure will they lay in heaven.”⁠[10] Wesley, of course, could hardly be expected to appreciate that money represents power even more than privilege in modern society, and that philanthropy may become a method of satisfying the ego and displaying power.

Many of the moral and religious limitations of modern civilization may be attributed first to the partial victory and then to the self-destruction of puritan religion in modern civilization. In puritanism religion made one of its boldest advances upon the world; and so confident was it of victory that it prepared no one for the moral relativities which were the inevitable issue of its enterprise. In dealing with the stubborn resistance of the material world it is better to expect victory than to assume defeat before the battle is begun. Yet an undue confidence may be as dangerous to the enterprise as a timorous spirit. The medieval ascetics who regarded all human relationships with a critical spirit, and rather expected the old Adam to assert himself in seemingly the most innocent human concerns, possessed spiritual insights which were totally lacking in the typical puritan. He expected to build a society in which the scripture was “really and materially to be fulfilled.”

It will have been noted that Calvinism and puritanism have been used in this discussion as interchangeable terms. The fact is that, while the two terms are not synonymous theologically, the moral temper of Calvinism was so potent in the whole non-Lutheran Protestant world that all of the various denominations were indoctrinated with its puritan spirit. The various sects had their own theological peculiarities, but in their puritan spirit they were essentially one. Only the Quakers departed from it; for George Fox had discovered the ethics of Jesus, and the religion of the Friends was ever after to express itself in terms relevant to the spirit of the Sermon on the Mount. Denominations such as the Baptists and Methodists who evangelized Western America gave a rebirth to the puritan spirit when it suffered decay in its more native haunts. Their history is additional evidence for the thesis that puritanism is a religious sublimation of the life of the middle classes. For when the heroic spirit of puritanism declined in those classes which it had lifted to power, it was reborn in the lower middle classes of England and the Western pioneers of America. Methodism is theologically as unrelated to Calvinism as can be imagined. Its theological presuppositions are really more congenial to a dynamic puritanism than those of Calvinism; for the moral vigor of Calvinism was logically incompatible with its deterministic faith. Denominations such as the Baptists and Methodists with their strong emphasis on regeneration as the basis of church membership aggravated one weakness of Protestantism, for all of their spiritual vigor. Their tests of what constituted regeneration were drawn from religious experience rather than from its moral fruits; yet they were bound to assume that a marked moral contrast existed between the saved and the unsaved. Thus they accentuated what Professor A. Whitehead has defined as the Protestant oversimplification of ethics, i.e., a tendency to judge men, in spite of the intricacy of their inner life and the complexity of their social relations, as being either good or bad. This is simply another aspect of Protestant individualism, but it is an aspect which emerges more clearly in the free churches which have renounced all ambition to have a membership coextensive with the citizenship of the state than in those churches in which some vestige of the state-church idea still remains. The superior spiritual vigor of churches which make a religious experience the prerequisite of fellowship in the church may well be conceded; but that does not change the fact that ethical values in a complex civilization are frequently imperiled by the oversimplification of moral issues, which is the inevitable by-product of simple religious tests. Men are neither totally good nor totally bad when they live in a society which may corrupt the virtuous intention of the most robust idealist, or when their own inner life is so complex that moral purpose may express itself in one of its areas and be betrayed in another. There is a moral simplicity in Protestantism which is closely related to its individualism and which is particularly unfortunate, since it is the characteristic of a religion which orients the ethical life of peoples who have tremendous responsibilities in the complex life of Western civilization.

Calvinism has frequently been referred to as Protestant asceticism.⁠[11] Its robust moral energies are indeed commensurate with the strict ethical discipline of medieval monasticism, but with this difference: that one is developed within the world and the other outside of the world of ordinary human relations. But it is precisely this difference which makes Lutheranism more closely related to asceticism than Calvinism; for Lutheranism is the Protestant way of despairing of the world and of claiming victory for the religious ideal without engaging the world in combat. Both are founded upon an ethical dualism. The medieval ascetic flees from the world into the monastery and there attempts realization of his religious ideal; the Lutheran quietist flees from the world into the asylum of his inner life where he comes into the emotional possession of the ideal without risking its refinements in the world of cruel realities. The one has a dualism which divides the monastic from ordinary men; the other draws the line within the soul of each individual and expects him to realize in his religious experience what he cannot reveal in ordinary human relations. If Calvinism is Weltfreundlich, Lutheranism like asceticism is Weltfeindlich. It has little hope that a kingdom of God will be established upon earth, except perhaps through supernatural intervention. It places all its emphasis upon the sentiment of Jesus: “The kingdom of God is within you.” It must be admitted that Jesus’ conception of the kingdom of God is probably as much related to quietistic religion as to puritan morality, though ascetic religion seems closer to him than either. The modern church has dismissed the eschatological element in Jesus’ teachings as the Semitic shell in which Jesus developed his conception of the kingdom of God as a social ideal; but it was more probably his way of expressing doubt that his ideal could ever be realized in history except by a miracle of God. Yet the apocalyptic element in the gospel was qualified by the idea of the kingdom to be realized by evolutionary process. The kingdom of God was also “like unto a mustard seed.” Jesus in short was both pessimistic and optimistic in regard to the spiritual potentialities of human society, and in his paradoxical rather than consistent position he was able to maintain the tension between religion and life in a way which has escaped both parties in the churches of the Reformation. Of this more will be said later. The attitude of Lutheran piety toward the world has the merit and the limitation characteristic of all pessimism. It sharpens the ideal but despairs of its realization. Lutheran doctrine was fashioned out of the religious experiences of a tumultuous soul seeking peace and failing to find it in any of the institutions which were meant to incarnate the religious ideal or in any of the observance which were intended to express it. The institution shocked him by their imperfections, and the observances and rituals had undergone the inevitable process which reduces a necessary symbolism to a kind of magic in which the symbol achieves potencies originally ascribed only to the ineffable truth or reality for which it stands. From all historic relativities of the institutions and superficialities of religious rites Luther reacted and discovered his absolute in the religious experience in which the soul appropriates the grace of God. In that mystic communion all natural imperfections of the human spirit are transcended and the soul is lifted out of the relativities of time and circumstance. It is easy to see how inevitable is this emphasis in the history of religion but also how perilous it may become to moral values. It is inevitable because every sensitive conscience suffers at times from a realization that “our reach is beyond our grasp,” that moral capacities are not equal to the goals set by imagination and hope. The apostle Paul, whose religious experience closely paralleled those of Luther and whose theology therefore became authoritative for him, complained: “... the good that I would, I do not; but the evil which I would not, that I do.... For I delight in the law of God after the inward man. But I see another law in my members, warring against the law in my mind and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin that is in my members. O wretched man that I am. Who shall deliver me from the body of this death? I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord.”⁠[12] That is a classic statement of the dualism in life which every religion is tempted to overcome by transcending it. Lutheranism was in fact but a revival of Pauline Christianity and it was Pauline Christianity which had built the Christian church. In it the tension between religion and life which is maintained in the religious idealism of Jesus is relaxed and the sensitive soul is given the assurance that a merciful God will know how to complete what is so incomplete and how to perfect our manifest imperfections. Thus the same Jesus who in the gospels is a bold adventurer of the spirit who challenges his disciples to be perfect as their Father in heaven is perfect becomes in the epistles the symbol of the divine grace which knows how to accept our intentions for our achievements. It may be unfair to speak of a conflict between the religion of Jesus and the religion of Paul; for it was a heavenly Father and not a jealous judge who was central in the thought of Jesus, and his emphasis upon forgiveness shocked the strict moralists of his day. But if there is no conflict at this point, there is a marked change in emphasis. In the one the appropriation of divine grace is a necessary part of the moral adventure; in the other it is separated from the moral enterprise and easily becomes a substitute for it. Paul had indeed disavowed all antinomian tendencies in his doctrine of grace. “What shall we then say? Shall we continue to sin that grace may abound? God forbid. How shall we that are dead to sin, live any longer therein?” Obviously the mystical experience in both the Pauline and the Lutheran religion was not unrelated to the life of moral purpose and was not consciously used to obviate the necessity for moral enterprise. But what is to prevent men from making a premature appropriation of the peace it guarantees, before and without deserving it? In that lies a peril to morality in almost all religion which Pauline and Lutheran theology did not create but which it may accentuate. It is well to remember that some of the greatest perils to morality in the life of religion arise out of its most cherished and necessary characteristics. Religion is at once the necessary partner and the potential foe of moral life.

The quietistic tendencies of religion, particularly as elaborated by Pauline and Lutheran theology, are less dangerous in a simple society than in a complex one. Ethical attitudes in simple social relations flow almost automatically out of a religious experience, even though the conscious interpretation of the experience is scornful of the “righteousness of works.” But in the secondary and more complex social relationships the moral urge which issues out of the religious experience is easily frustrated by the intricacies and relativities of historic realities and institutions. How shall the soul preserve the sense of the absolute which it has gained in the religious experience from contamination by the sins which are covert in all social relations? It is in the varying answers of quietistic religion to that question that its ethical limitations are vividly revealed. One answer is to avoid conflict with political and social institutions on the score that they are divinely ordained. “Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God; the powers that be are ordained of God,” said the apostle Paul. When it is remembered that the reference is to the government of the Roman empire, the social conservatism implicit in this logic is obvious. It was this attitude of Paul which made it easy for Luther to bring his church into such intimate union with the various governments of Germany and to maintain an attitude bordering on subservience toward the German princes. The political conservatism of Lutheranism has since been its unvarying characteristic and has had its marked effects upon history, in no period more so than in that of the World War. State churches of any kind easily become the tools of the secular state, but Lutheran state churches have usually been more compliant tools than the Anglican church, for instance, which has never quite renounced the old Catholic ambitions of partnership with the state.

Another method of which quietistic religion avails itself in dealing with the world is to assume that its ideal will somehow achieve automatic realization in the intricacies of economic and social life. This method is hardly consistent with its pessimism, but it satisfies the desire for practical results which is bound to assert itself in even the most supra-moral religion. Thus Luther declares:⁠[13] “There can be no better instructions in ... all transactions in temporal goods than that every man who is to deal with his neighbor present to himself these commandments: ‘What you would that others should do unto you, do ye also to them,’ and ‘Love thy neighbor as thyself.’ If these were followed out, then everything would arrange and instruct itself; all things would quietly and simply be set to rights, for everyone’s heart and conscience would guide him.” It is a conceit of religious people, by no means confined to Lutherans, that a vigorous statement of the ideal ought to result in its realization. No one can estimate how often the pulpit has insisted in these latter days that war could be abolished if only the nations “would live according to the law of Christ.” This characteristic frequently gives the church’s pronouncements a curious air of futility; for ideals are neither challenged nor applied if they are not finally embodied in concrete proposals for specific situations. It is in such situations that the ideal meets its real test and runs the peril of corruption. Frequently the tendency of religion to be content with the statement of abstract principles is due to a want of intellectual vigor which results easily from religion’s mistrust of reason.

A method of dealing with the world which is more consistent with the essential dualism of quietistic religion is its effort to give some realization to the ideal by means of subjective religious emotion which transcends the imperfections of society without attempting to change them. Thus the ideal of brotherhood is to be realized by a religious appreciation of all men as brothers, however much economic and social facts may give the lie to the ideal. This was the apostle Paul’s method of dealing with slavery and Luther emulated it in his attitude toward the peasant’s revolt. Nothing gives a more illuminating clue to the conservative implications of this type of religion than this incident in the Reformation. The peasants, suffering in a state of semi-slavery, saw in Luther’s statement of the gospel principles of freedom, and in the religious ideal of the equal worth of all souls, implicit in Christian teaching, a justification for their revolt against the intolerable conditions of serfdom. They declared: “It has been custom hitherto for men to hold us as their own property, which is pitiable enough considering that Christ has delivered and redeemed us all, the lowly as well as the great, by the shedding of his precious blood. Accordingly it is consistent with scripture that we should be free and should wish to be so. We therefore take it for granted that you will release us from serfdom as true Christians, unless it should be shown from the gospels that we are serfs.”⁠[14] Luther violently disavowed this practical application of his gospel. “This article would make all men equal and so change the spiritual kingdom of Christ into an external worldly one. Impossible. An earthly kingdom cannot exist without inequality of persons. Some must be free, others serfs, some rulers, others subjects. As St. Paul says, ‘In Christ there is neither bond nor free.’” The violence of Luther’s reaction in this instance was partly due to considerations of expediency; for he feared to lose caste with the princes by having the Reformation identified with radical political movements; yet it is fairly faithful to his general conceptions of the nature and function of religion. Obviously the dualism of Protestantism which separates the religious experience of the individual from the social realities in which alone personality can achieve significance has defects which are more perilous to social values than the ethical dualism of medieval monasticism. If the ideal is to be withdrawn from life to save it from corruption, it is better that it be realized in some social medium, however artificial, than that it be suspended in the thin air of religious sentiment and be realized only in subjective experience.

An analysis of the various strategies of religion in establishing contact with the historic situations and social realities in which it must function reveals, in short, that it can pursue no course which is altogether free of peril to its moral values. Capitulation without conflict reduces religion to magic and secularizes life. A stubborn conflict with the intractable forces of nature and history results in some kind of compromise. Neither papal internationalism nor puritan plutocracy are what the idealists who were responsible for them really desired. And what they really desired fell short of their pretended goals. Withdrawal from the world is equally dangerous. For it may lead either to the morbid artificialities of asceticism or to the sentimental subjectivism of quietistic religion. There are values in each of the various strategies as well as perils. Perhaps those who are too critical of their limitations can never create their values. Religion must create its values in naïve faith and subject their limitations to a critical intelligence. Of the various strategies asceticism is probably nearest to the real genius of religion and most adequate for the moral needs of our day. If a world is completely astray the higher perspective from which it may be convicted of sin and the greater dynamic which may function redemptively in its life both depend upon some kind of detachment of religion from life.