The tendency of modern religion to make itself at home in the world and to enter into intimate relations with civilization is not due solely to the puritan confidence of victory over life. It is partly due to the influences of a sentimental and optimistic evaluation of human nature which came to the modern church through Rousseau and romanticism. It is also a product of the evolutionary optimism which has characterized religious thought since ethicists and religionists have learnt to overcome the melancholy conclusions implicit in the Darwinian theory and to see the bright side of evolution. Traditional religion is other-worldly. The modern church prides itself on its bright and happy worldliness. It is more interested in transforming the natural and social environment of personality than in persuading the soul to transcend all circumstances and find its happiness in inner peace. The modern church regards this mundane interest as its social passion. But it is also the mark of its slavery to society. Whenever religion feels completely at home in the world, it is the salt which has lost its savor. If it sacrifices the strategy of renouncing the world, it has no strategy by which it may convict the world of sin. A movement which detaches religion from life to give it perspective and power over life must on the other hand run the risk of centering the interests of men on other than social problems. Religion thus faces a dilemma which is not easily solved. A religion of social amelioration easily becomes a beautiful romance which obscures the unlovely realities of life. A religion of detachment from the world may persuade the soul to find both happiness and virtue in defiance of physical and social circumstances and thus to regard all social problems as irrelevant to its main purpose. This dilemma is not due to any specific or historic weaknesses in types of religion but arises out of the nature and constitution of religion as such.

Religion in its unspoiled form is always other-worldly and disenchanted. Puritanism, romanticism and evolutionary optimism are really but reflections and refractions of the general temper of Western life, which has slowly gained the ascendancy over the religious spirit. It is a temper of friendliness to, or at least fearlessness before the world. In puritanism the tension between religion and life is maintained, but the soul is persuaded that it can bring the whole of life under the dominion of conscience. In romanticism there is a frank identification of human virtue with a sentimentally idealized natural world. Religious and ethical thought which has come under the influence of evolutionary optimism maintains a sense of tension between the soul and the natural world in rare instances; more frequently it regards human history as but the last chapter in the beautiful story of progress which all life has unfolded and which time and patience will inevitably bring to a happy issue. The foundation for the Western strategy of life was laid by the Greeks who, overcoming the awe and reverence with which the Oriental brooded over nature’s mysteries, thrust impious hands into her secrets and made shrewd guesses about her varied phenomena. The Greeks learned to make only slight practical application of their knowledge, and the rise of Christianity eclipsed their scientific temper. It came into its own again at the close of the Middle Ages and at the dawn of the modern era. The fact that science developed in the West rather than the East is due to this attitude toward the natural world. The Orient is not less curious than the Occident, but it directs its mind to other problems. While it cradles philosophies and religions the West gives birth to science.

Since the dawn of the industrial era scientific knowledge is used increasingly for the purpose of transforming the natural circumstance of human life. Nature is not transcended but transformed in the interest of human happiness. Comforts are multiplied; power is increased; time and distance are destroyed; hours of toil are reduced; natural environment is changed; disease is eliminated and death postponed; the hostilities of nature are overcome and her benevolence multiplied for the sake of human welfare. Our birth may be “but a sleep and a forgetting” but our life is undeniably lived in natural conditions which profoundly affect not only physical well-being but cultural and spiritual character. It is evident therefore that there is profound wisdom in the scientific strategy which transforms the natural world in the interest of the human spirit. Not only is the Western world firmly committed to it, but there are indications that the Orient will adopt it in spite of the opposition of religious leaders such as Gandhi. Whatever perils to the spiritual life may lurk in the preoccupation of the soul with its physical circumstances, it is clear that human personality may be served by improving the natural environment which conditions it. Wealth may lead to sensual excess but it is also the basis of culture. Leisure may be secured by reducing physical wants to a minimum, but there are cultural advantages in a leisure which does not preclude the satisfaction of all reasonable desires. Comforts may lead men to become obsessed with their external circumstances, but they also reduce irrelevant distractions to life’s main purpose. Physical health is not a necessary but a convenient condition for moral and spiritual enterprise.

In spite of these advantages religion, except in a few contemporary forms, has always been either hostile or indifferent to the business of transforming nature in the interest of personal values. It has counseled the soul to seek its happiness not in changing but in becoming independent of circumstances. In Buddhism the highest happiness is sought by throttling all desires. Jesus was more careful to distinguish between the will to live and its physical expressions. But he was critical of all physical desires and satisfactions. He had the Orient’s profound indifference to the “business of earth.” If our ears were not so habituated to his words that they fail to catch their real significance, a modern congregation would be shocked by the admonition: “Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on. Is not life more than meat and the body more than raiment?” “Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth where moth and rust doth corrupt and where thieves break through and steal, for where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” “Fear not them which kill the body but are not able to kill the soul; but rather fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell.” The modern Christian is inclined to destroy the force of the profound other-worldliness of such sentiments by reflecting that they represent an Oriental cast which is incidental and not essential to the gospel of Jesus. They are Oriental no doubt, but precisely because they are religious; and to regard them as incidental is to miss the whole meaning of the gospel. Though the West is unable to accept them, it pays an unconscious tribute to the truth involved in them. For the absolute moral values incarnated in the personality of Jesus, which the West still reveres, are organically related to this other-worldliness.

Whatever the limitations of this emphasis, it is evident that religion cannot escape it. Concerned with the soul’s inner peace and perfect virtue it is forced to lift it above the corruptions and irrelevancies of temporal conditions. The whole course of modern history is ample justification for Jesus’ warning: Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. The instruments of personality’s victory over nature have become the chains for a new kind of thraldom. Western civilization is enslaved to its machines and the things which the machines produce. Spiritual forces are emancipated from the forces of nature only to become the victims of a mechanized civilization. It is a Pyrrhic victory. America, which has developed the Western strategy with greater consistency than any other nation, is at once the envy and the scorn of the world. The scorn may be a device for hiding the envy, but there is moral justification for reproach. What the world regards as our vulgarity is more than the awkwardness of youth; it is an undue preoccupation with life’s instrumentality and an obsession of the soul with the concrete world.

The Orient may be more cruel than the West, but our superior tenderness is matched by our more expansive avarice. Having determined that life consists in things a man possesses, the West sacrifices both inner peace and social harmony in the mad scramble for the power and privilege which the conquests of nature has supplied. Neither the imperialism of nations nor the monstrous avarice of economic groups is confined to Western life, but covetousness and greed have been manifestly increased by the temper and strategy of the Occident. The Biblical analysis which discovers covetousness as the root of conflict is applicable to our own day: “Ye lust and have not; ye kill and desire to have, and cannot obtain; ye fight and war, yet ye have not because ye ask amiss.... Know ye not that the friendship of this world is enmity with God?”⁠[18] However necessary it may be to make a more equitable distribution of the physical blessings of life, religion’s true function is to develop an attitude of indifference toward the very goods for the possession of which men contend so frantically. When Jesus rebuked the young man who desired his aid in correcting the inequitable division of an inheritance, his unwillingness to assume a judicial function was manifestly dictated by the thought that the whole inheritance ought to have been a matter of indifference to the young man. It is easy to see that such an attitude may lend itself to abuse and be used to perpetuate inequalities. If advocated by religious groups which have profited by economic inequalities, it becomes the tool of hypocrisy. Yet it is an emphasis which religion cannot disavow. It is basic to its whole world view.

The peril to happiness as well as to virtue in reliance upon the external fortunes of life justifies the counsel of religion that happiness must be founded on internal rather than external resources. The conquest of nature is really but a relative victory of personality over circumstance. Though the caprice of nature’s forces has been checked, fortune remains fickle. If men cannot learn “how to be abased and how to abound,” there is no guarantee of happiness for them. Poverty may be a curse, but voluntarily chosen or consented to without sullenness it may become the way of the soul’s emancipation. The elimination of disease is a boon to mankind, but there is little likelihood that science will be able to overcome all ills to which the human flesh is heir. No scientific advance will obviate the necessity for the discovery of faith that “God’s strength is made perfect in weakness,” that the infirmities of the flesh may become the occasion for the cultivation of spiritual graces. Even at best science cannot destroy nature’s final irrelevancy—death. There can therefore be no real victory over nature except by the strategy of transcending her fortunes. The more hostages taken from her the greater will be the disappointment in the hour of her final victory. It is man’s sublime and tragic fate that he must find happiness in the search for infinitude amidst the flux of time and he can therefore never accept the portion of mortality for himself with equanimity. Hence his final comfort must come from the counsel of religion which teaches him how he may identify himself with the eternal values of his devotion, so that “though the outward man perish yet the inward man is renewed day by day.”⁠[19]

The temper of Western civilization has made the modern church quite ashamed of the other-worldly character of traditional religion, and intent upon discarding it as much as possible. Everything is done to impress the generation with the mundane interests of religious idealism and to secularize religion itself so that it may survive in a secular age as a kind of harmless adornment of the moral life. Yet its service to both human happiness and virtue are involved in its other-worldliness. It is through that element that it gains the power to raise morality above the utilitarian plane and to give human happiness a firmer foundation than fickle fortune. If men can find no basis for happiness except in their adjustment to external realities, they will not suffer pain to realize a kingdom of righteousness. If they are taught to identify physical well-being with their cherished peace, they will not venture farther than such actions as a cool prudence prompts. The cross was inspired by devotion to a “kingdom which is not of this world”; but the cross was also the method by which that kingdom was changed from an ethereal to a concrete reality. It is the absolute ideal which has no basis in concrete reality which moves men to defy the limitations of the concrete and overcome them. A religion which is perfectly at home in the world has no counsel for it which the world could not gain by an easier method.

Yet the reaction of modern religion to traditional other-worldliness is natural enough and, in a way, necessary. While religion cannot afford to discard its other-worldliness, the moral and social limitations which issue from it are obvious enough. We have previously observed the tendency of types of religion to withdraw the ideal from life and to imagine that it has magic potencies over life’s realities, or that subjective devotion to it may absolve them of the duty of realizing it in history. All these defects are due to vagaries which are not inevitable characteristics of religious life. But the social limitations which result from the religious strategy of transcending the fortunes of life are constitutional and central. They therefore offer a very serious problem. If the soul is lifted above circumstances, it easily loses interest in changing them to better advantage. If its happiness is made independent of fortune, there is less purpose in making fortune secure. If personality discovers its highest satisfactions in defying environmental factors, it may become indifferent to the necessary projects of creating a more favorable environment for personal values. Human personality is an historic product, determined by specific forces of natural and social environment, and though it may attain its highest glory by transcending all circumstances, it will fall short if it adopts that strategy at the beginning and not at the end of its efforts. The Orient, which produces more saints than the Occident, pays for them by the abject misery of its multitudes. Its highest moral achievements are really determined by a cruel law of survival. Only personalities of great spiritual resource can overcome the general physical conditions of its life which submerge the mass in hopeless poverty.

Some credit for the advantages of Western life must be given to the moral superiority of Christianity over Buddhism, which represents the quintessence of the Oriental spirit. Christianity is a life-affirming and Buddhism a life-denying faith. The one does not destroy but refines the energy of life. The other destroys energy in the process of refinement. The Orient is pantheistic; and by deifying all of life, offers no avenue of escape from its imperfections except by annihilation of life itself. There is a difference between fleeing to God from life’s unbearable realities and identifying these with the divine will. At its worst the strategy of the Orient is a fatalistic acceptance of life’s circumstances; at its best it is a stifling of all desires so that the soul may be free of the world. Yet there is a social peril even in the more wholesome strategy of Christianity which affirms life but divorces it from its physical necessities. This limitation is felt particularly when the conditions which invite change are social rather than natural. Nature is inexorable and it is well to learn that only they are able to escape her furies who also know how to renounce her delights. But the world which man has created retains its cruelties only by the sufferance of man. Anything which will incline men to assume an attitude of indifference toward projects of social reform and amelioration is therefore a potential peril to social progress. When Jesus rebuked the young man for his anxiety about an equitable division of his inheritance, he took a high spiritual ground which easily lends itself to abuse in the disillusioning realities of economic and social life. What if a sublime renunciation does not soften the hearts of those who hold more than their just share of the inheritance? And what if the welfare of others besides that of the moral idealist is involved in the renunciation? Shall the Biblical injunction to servants that they be obedient to their masters “not only to the good and gentle but also to the froward” apply to political tyrannies? Obviously an attitude which represents a high spiritual achievement in the individual instance has its limitations when raised to a general social policy. Social radicals who have been confronted with the conservatism of religion have parodied the other-worldly temper at the heart of this characteristic in the words: “Bye and bye, there’ll be pie in the sky.” The sneer in this parody hardly does justice to religious other-worldliness. The emphasis is not so much upon a future life as distinguished from the present existence as upon a type of life which can afford to regard “pie” with disdain whether in this or any other world. Nevertheless, even the highest type of other-worldliness may become the cause of indifference to social conditions. The very sensitiveness of religion which persuades it to regard human society in the same category with the world of nature as “the world” may result in the completer secularization of society and its abandonment to the unchecked forces of nature.

There is no easy formula for avoiding this social peril in the strategy of religion. The elimination of pantheism is a material aid in its solution. The superior energy of the West may be due to a tentative dualism in its religion which has been qualified from time to time by pantheistic and monistic thought but never completely destroyed. Yet even the dualism of Christianity does not save it altogether from positions which offer peril to social and moral values. Even an observer who is entirely sympathetic to religion must come to the conclusion that the West owes many of its advantages to the fact that religion has had no easy time in Western life, and that in the past centuries not only scientific thought but scientific life-strategy has challenged religion at every turn. Some of the excellencies of Western life are clearly the fruits of our science rather than our religion. Of course, these advantages have been bought at a price. The empirical instincts of science drive it to deny the continuities in reality and to see everything only in its momentary and immediate situation. The modern behavioristic destruction of the concept of personality is therefore one of the natural results of scientific thought betrayed into absurdity by its own consistency. But a consistent religion is generally equally absurd. Regarding all reality, and personality in particular, sub specie æternitatis, it fails to see how truly personality is the product of specific social and natural forces and neglects to change the material environment in the interest of human welfare. Human personality can be understood neither in terms of its environment alone nor in absolute terms which leave the material world in which it develops out of account. The final victory of personality must be gained by transcending concrete situations and material circumstances; but it is a hollow victory if circumstances are not previously used and amended to improve personal values. The soul is at once the victim and the master of the material world. It gains its highest triumph by renouncing the world, but the renunciation is premature if a futile and yet not futile effort is not made to make the natural world conform to the needs of human character.

While the Western world has much to learn from the East in its strategy of life, there is no gain in substituting one strategy for the other; for they are both defective. The plight of the West is due to the complete bankruptcy of religious forces and the unchallenged dominion of science; just as the plight of the East is due to the unchallenged sway of religion. Applied science has created a civilization which may be as destructive of personality for the meagerly endowed multitudes as the natural poverty of Asia. But Western civilization may at least boast of developing a middle class which enjoys physical and spiritual advantages which no considerable class of the Orient possesses. Neither the West nor the East has arrived at a perfect basis for happiness. The Oriental soul is like a bird, freed of its cage, but with no wings to fly. The Occidental soul has wings but is so fascinated by its gilded cage that it does not care to fly.

The conclusion which emerges from such reflections will shock orthodox religionists. It is that the values of religion are conditioned and not absolute and that they attain their highest usefulness not when they subdue all other values but when they are in perpetual conflict with them, or it may be truer to say when they are coördinated with them. Western life gained an advantage over the East by centuries of conflict between the religious and scientific strategy of life. It is losing the advantage by an excessive devotion to concrete interests and by the capitulation of religion. The supreme tragedy of history would be the not improbable armed conflict between West and East, with the Orient in a frenzy of resentment against the greed of the Occident and the Occident in a natural fear of the low living standards of Asia. Part of the truth would be on either side and the conflict could result only in exaggerating the limitations of the partial truth which each side holds.

Meanwhile there is the possibility of coördinating the values of East and West, of science and religion. Let the East learn to live in time and the West to view its temporalities with indifference. The coördination is not easy because men are not inclined to be at once critical and appreciative of the values with which they must deal. They always tend to increase the limitations of certain values by an uncritical devotion, or to destroy the values in mad resentment against their limitations. Since man is a citizen of two worlds, he cannot afford to renounce his citizenship in either. He must work out his destiny both as a child of nature and as a servant of the absolute.

The prospects for an exchange of values between the East and the West are not particularly bright. The Orient is indeed being “Americanized,” but partly through the policy of Western imperialism exploiting the low living standards of Asia to the advantage of Western industry. There is no powerful movement in the West to dissuade it from its complete trust in physical power as the method of self-realization, and in physical comfort as the way to happiness. Modern religion has not been totally ineffective in qualifying racial arrogance and parochial prejudices. But it has had practically no effect upon the instincts of avarice which dominate Western life. The religious groups which are still ambitious to defy civilization in the name of their faith have a theology which cannot gain the respect of the thoughtful leaders of modern life; and the sins of which they convict modern society are not its real sins. The intellectually emancipated religious groups are too thoroughly acclimatized to the atmosphere of Western life to have any sensitiveness for its imperfections.

The greatest hope lies in the missionary enterprise, which through its very effort toward the universalization of the Christian faith has a tendency to strip it of its Occidental accretions, so that it may become intrinsically worthy of its world expansion. The missionary enterprise may thereby contribute as much toward the spiritualization of Western life as toward the regeneration of the East. Its very contact with the East gives it a perspective on the limitations of Western life which churches at home do not possess. There is, of course, the possibility that Western imperialism will so thoroughly discredit the missionary enterprise before it can function in this way that it will lose its whole prestige in the Eastern world. In that case Japan will probably continue to unify and occidentalize Asia in the hope of fighting fire with fire. A small minority of thoughtful missionaries are making a desperate effort to disassociate the missionary enterprise from the politics of Western imperialism in the Orient. Considering the difficulty of their task, they have made commendable progress. Yet if Christianity at home does not become disassociated from and does not qualify the greed of which the Oriental politics of Western nations is but one expression, the heroic efforts of the missionaries may be vain. Men of prudence in the Orient may be willing to concede that ideals have validity even if they are outraged by those who ostensibly accept them. But the final test of ideals must include their ability to qualify human action. If Christian idealism is to be a force which will help to create a unified world culture, capable of destroying the moral limitations of both the Oriental and the Occidental strategy of life, it must detach itself more completely from the temper of Western life even while it seeks to influence the thought of the East.