militant nationalism which is
now convulsing the nations, and stimulated by the rising tide of
materialism, irreligion, and paganism, this process is not only tending to
subvert ecclesiastical institutions, but appears to be leading to the
rapid dechristianization of the masses in many Christian countries.

I shall content myself with the enumeration of certain outstanding
manifestations of this force which is increasingly invading the domain,
and assailing the firmest ramparts, of one of the leading religious
systems of mankind. The virtual extinction of the temporal power of the
most preeminent ruler in Christendom immediately after the creation of the
Kingdom of Italy; the wave of anticlericalism that swept over France after
the collapse of the Napoleonic empire, and which culminated in the
complete separation of the Catholic Church from the state, in the
laicization of the Third Republic, in the secularization of education, and
in the suppression and dispersal of religious orders; the swift and sudden
rise of that "religious irreligion," that bold, conscious, and organized
assault launched in Soviet Russia against the Greek Orthodox Church, that
precipitated the disestablishment of the state religion, that massacred a
vast number of its members originally numbering above a hundred million
souls, that pulled down, closed, or converted into museums, theatres and
warehouses, thousands upon thousands of churches, monasteries, synagogues
and mosques, that stripped the church of its six and a half million acres
of property, and sought, through its League of Militant Atheists and the
promulgation of a "five-year plan of godlessness," to loosen from its
foundations the religious life of the masses; the dismemberment of the
Austro-Hungarian Monarchy that dissolved, by one stroke, the most powerful
unit which owed its allegiance to, and supported through its resources the
administration of, the Church of Rome; the divorce of the Spanish state
from that same Church, and the overthrow of the monarchy, the champion of
Catholic Christendom; the nationalistic philosophy, the parent of an
unbridled and obsolete nationalism, which, having dethroned Islam, has
indirectly assaulted the front line of the Christian church in
non-Christian lands, and is dealing such heavy blows to Catholic,
Anglican, and Presbyterian Missions in Persia, Turkey, and the Far East;
the revolutionary movement that brought in its wake the persecution of the
C