Religion as a perspective intensifies life and enhances it from within more efficaciously than any other (objectively speaking; subjectively and in practice there may be any number of gradations possible in this). But is it to the exclusion of every other perspective? Does the religious perspective, once adopted or taken up, or, to allow for a more passive process, slid into, impose the renunciation of every other? This is the much discussed question of Christian humanism, the eschatological question that claims to dominate every other, the question of the precise significance of asceticism in the Christian life. Christian tradition in all this has been complicated by the fact that at different epochs there has appeared an extremism which has made it difficult to focus the question with a calm judgment. There seems to be a contradiction between the Gospel and History. Christ speaks of the Cross and of abnegation, even of total abnegation, but he leaves no room for doubt that he proposes to all men the specifically new relationship with the Father which he came to implant in humanity, nor that he reserves for the stronger souls a more intense religious cultivation: this means that ordinary human life is to be taken up into that new relationship and that the intenser cultivation of religion is neither the norm nor intended to supplant ordinary human living. The evangelical teaching gathered up and handed on by St Paul, in the same way, leaves no room for any out-and-out rejection of the ‘world’.