war experiences, possible genetic
impairment, nihilistic literature--or various combinations of the
foregoing--in seeking to understand the obsessions fuelling an apparently
bottomless hatred of humankind. Conspicuously missing from such
contemporary speculation is what experienced commentators, even as
recently as a century ago, would have recognized as spiritual disease,
whatever its accompanying features.

If unity is indeed the litmus test of human progress, neither history nor
Heaven will readily forgive those who choose deliberately to raise their
hands against it. In trusting, people lower their defences and open
themselves to others. Without doing so, there is no way in which they can
commit themselves wholeheartedly to shared goals. Nothing is so
devastating as suddenly to discover that, for the other party, commitments
made in good faith have represented no more than an advantage gained, a
means of achieving concealed objectives different from, or even inimical
to, what had ostensibly been undertaken together. Such betrayal is a
persistent thread in human history that found one of its earliest recorded
expressions in the ancient tale of Cain's jealousy of the brother whose
faith God had chosen to confirm. If the appalling suffering endured by the
earth's peoples during the twentieth century has left a lesson, it lies in
the fact that the systemic disunity, inherited from a dark past and
poisoning relations in every sphere of life, could throw open the door in
this age to demonic behaviour more bestial than anything the mind had
dreamed possible.

If evil has a name, it is surely the deliberate violation of the hard-won
covenants of peace and reconciliation by which people of goodwill seek to
escape the past and to build together a new future. By its very nature,
unity requires self-sacrifice. "...self-love", the Master states, "is
kneaded into the very clay of man."(59) The ego, termed by Him the
"insistent self",(60) resists instinctively constraints imposed on what it
conceives to be its freedom. To willingly forgo the satisfactions that
licence affords, the individual must come to believe that fulfilment lies
elsewhere. Ultimately, it lies, as it has always done, in the soul's
submission to God.

Failure to meet the challenge of such submission has manifested itself
with especially devastating consequences throughout the centuries in
betrayal of the Messengers of God and of the ideals they taught. This
d