Already a few among the protagonists of the Christian Religion admit the
gravity of the situation that confronts them. “A wave of materialism is
sweeping round the world”; is the testimony of its missionaries, as
witnessed by the text of their official reports, “the drive and pressure
of modern industrialism, which are penetrating even the forests of Central
Africa and the plains of Central Asia, make men everywhere dependent on,
and preoccupied with, material things. At home the Church has talked,
perhaps too glibly, in pulpit or on platform of the menace of secularism;
though even in England we can catch more than a glimpse of its meaning.
But to the Church overseas these things are grim realities, enemies with
which it is at grips... The Church has a new danger to face in land after
land—determined and hostile attack. From Soviet Russia a definitely
anti-religious Communism is pushing west into Europe and America, East
into Persia, India, China and Japan. It is an economic theory, definitely
harnessed to disbelief in God. It is a religious irreligion... It has a
passionate sense of mission, and is carrying on its anti-God campaign at
the Church’s base at home, as well as launching its offensive against its
front-line in non-Christian lands. Such a conscious, avowed, organized
attack against religion in general and Christianity in particular is
something new in history. Equally deliberate in some lands in its
determined hostility to Christianity is another form of social and
political faith—nationalism. But the nationalist attack on Christianity,
unlike Communism, is often bound up with some form of national
religion—with Islám in Persia and Egypt, with Buddhism in Ceylon, while
the struggle for communal rights in India is allied with a revival both of
Hinduism and Islám.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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