Howard Brinton, the Dean of Pendle Hill, defined the most significant social problem of his day as one of "excessive individualism." The remedy he seeks is one which counters that syndrome and, at the same time, "respects the hard-won rights of the individual... The paradoxical character of this statement suggests that, if there be a solution, it may turn out to be a religious one, for religion feeds on paradox."

From his vantage as a historian of Christianity, Brinton reviews the 'primitive Christian' solution as well as the early Quaker solution to this quandry. He gives his own views of the dissolution of social mores in describing the history of the problem of excessive individualism, and then presents the traditional reactions and untraditional responses of different societies: Autocracy, World Renunciation, and The Religiously Integrated Group.

No surprise that this final analysis leads him to discuss Quakerism as the Ideal Community: "Quakerism combines in religious worship two elements which are usually considered incompatible, a mystical approach to God and a social relation to our fellows. The lonely mystic knows only the vertical relation to God, the "social gospeler" too often only the horizontal relation to man, but group mysticism takes account of both God and man."

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