nds this
humiliation and this idiocy."

The Hegelian philosophy which, in other countries, has, in the form of an
intolerant and militant nationalism, insisted on deifying the state, has
inculcated the war-spirit, and incited to racial animosity, has, likewise,
led to a marked weakening of the Church and to a grave diminution of its
spiritual influence. Unlike the bold offensive which an avowedly atheistic
movement had chosen to launch against it, both within the Soviet union and
beyond its confines, this nationalistic philosophy, which Christian rulers
and governments have upheld, is an attack directed against the Church by
those who were previously its professed adherents, a betrayal of its cause
by its own kith and kin. It was being stabbed by an alien and militant
atheism from without, and by the preachers of a heretical doctrine from
within. Both of these forces, each operating in its own sphere and using
its own weapons and methods, have moreover been greatly assisted and
encouraged by the prevailing spirit of modernism, with its emphasis on a
purely materialistic philosophy, which, as it diffuses itself, tends
increasingly to divorce religion from man's daily life.

The combined effect of these strange and corrupt doctrines, these
dangerous and treacherous philosophies, has, as was natural, been severely
felt by those whose tenets inculcated an opposite and wholly
irreconcilable spirit and principle. The consequences of the clash that
inevitably ensued between these contending interests, were, in some cases,
disastrous, and the damage that has been wrought irreparable. The
disestablishment and dismemberment of the Greek Orthodox Church in Russia,
following upon the blow which the Church of Rome had sustained as a result
of the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy; the commotion that
subsequently seized the Catholic Church and culminated in its separation
from the State in Spain; the persecution of the same Church in Mexico; the
perquisitions, arrests, intimidation and terrorization to which Catholics
and Lutherans alike are being subjected in the heart of Europe; the
turmoil into which another branch of the Church has been thrown as a
result of the military campaign in Africa; the decline that has set in the
fortunes of Christian Missions, both Anglican and Presbyterian, in Persia,
Turkey, and the Far East; the ominous signs that foreshadow serious
complications in the equivocal and precarious relationships