to be
treated, an ethic variously repeated in all the great religions, lends
force to this latter observation in two particular respects: it sums up
the moral attitude, the peace-inducing aspect, extending through these
religions irrespective of their place or time of origin; it also signifies
an aspect of unity which is their essential virtue, a virtue mankind in
its disjointed view of history has failed to appreciate.

Had humanity seen the Educators of its collective childhood in their true
character, as agents of one civilizing process, it would no doubt have
reaped incalculably greater benefits from the cumulative effects of their
successive missions. This, alas, it failed to do.

The resurgence of fanatical religious fervour occurring in many lands
cannot be regarded as more than a dying convulsion. The very nature of the
violent and disruptive phenomena associated with it testifies to the
spiritual bankruptcy it represents. Indeed, one of the strangest and
saddest features of the current outbreak of religious fanaticism is the
extent to which, in each case, it is undermining not only the spiritual
values which are conducive to the unity of mankind but also those unique
moral victories won by the particular religion it purports to serve.

However vital a force religion has been in the history of mankind, and
however dramatic the current resurgence of militant religious fanaticism,
religion and religious institutions have, for many decades, been viewed by
increasing numbers of people as irrelevant to the major concerns of the
modern world. In its place they have turned either to the hedonistic
pursuit of material satisfactions or to the following of man-made
ideologies designed to rescue society from the evident evils under which
it groans. All too many of these ideologies, alas, instead of embracing
the concept of the oneness of mankind and promoting the increase of
concord among different peoples, have tended to deify the state, to
subordinate the rest of mankind to one nation, race or class, to attempt
to suppress all discussion and interchange of ideas, or to callously
abandon starving millions to the operations of a market system that all
too clearly is aggravating the plight of the majority of mankind, while
enabling small sections to live in a condition of affluence scarcely
dreamed of by our forebears.

How tragic is the record of the substitute faiths that the worldly-wise of
our age have created. In th