Great philosophers in dealing with a topic sometimes fasten on a single aspect and show their greatness by the thoroughness with which they carry out the interpretation in terms of this aspect of everything which falls within their topic. This is the case of Kant when dealing with the topic of religion. Kant in considering religion fastened on its ethical side and carried his absorption in this to a point at which religion was conceived as of value solely as a means to ethics. He admitted as valid no religious concepts or doctrines that did not either express symbolically truths about morality or help us to the attainment of a morally good life. Religious practices which had any purpose other than ethical he considered as a futile and immoral attempt to bribe or coax God into giving men what they are not prepared to earn in the only possible way, namely, by moral action.1 The dogmas of Christianity are systematically reinterpreted by Kant in a sense which the ordinary believer would certainly regard as Pickwickian and which made them pictures of the moral struggle in man rather than an account of the intervention of supernatural powers beyond us. In the Critique of Pure Reason he denied the possibility of any metaphysical proof of God or immortality and said that the only valid kind of argument must be ethical. Indeed it may not look as if he were placing himself in a very favourable position to have even an ethical argument for God.