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By Rev. A. Powell Davies D.D.
Reprinted from Freedom
& Union, February, 1950, pp. 11-13
The 20th Century began as the century of confidence. Nothing--so it
was believed--could halt its progress, or disturb its peace, or
diminish its assurance. Ignorance was retreating, tyranny and
barbarity belonged to yesterday, brutality was all but banished,
poverty was declining, evil of every sort was on the wane, and
mankind was going "onward and upward forever."
But today, at the half-way mark, the 20th Century has become the
century of uncertainty. Not that there have been no advances. In
some respects advance has been spectacular. The mind of man commands
more knowledge--and through knowledge, power--than ever before since
the dawn of history. But this knowledge has not accomplished what
was expected of it. It has made men cleverer, but it has not made
them wiser. And it has not made them good.
Instead of ignorance retreating, as was predicted, we have seen it
imposed by force upon entire populations; instead of tyranny and
brutality being things of the past, they have disfigured this
century more terribly than any other in the Christian era; instead
of poverty declining, some of the richest nations on earth have
become dependent upon the bounty of the one remaining nation that is
still prosperous; and instead of evil being on the wane, we are
engaged in a desperate struggle to push it back even to where it was
when the century began.
No longer can we doubt it! The new knowledge, and the immense power
that goes with it, can be used for ends just as brutish, just as
degenerate, just as infamous, as anything that is attributed to the
darkest ages of the past.
We know, today, that we were thoroughly deceived by our earlier
optimism. We know that it was never true that we had set our feet in
the path of inevitable progress. It seems to us, in dismal
retrospect, an almost representative fact that at the very moment
when the Kaiser, Wilhelm II, was holding the dying queen, victoria,
in his arms, he was already plotting the events which led to the
first World War. That was in 1901.
Instead of the turn of the century signalizing an era of progress
and security, it was ending one. It was the 19th Century which had
been secure, as it was also that century, together with the one
before it, which had marked the real advance in human values. The
French and American Revolutions--these truly had meant progress. And
on the whole, the 19th Century had built upon them. But the 20th
Century, with the resurgence of tyranny and the counter-revolutions
which poured contempt on human values--this was retrogression. The
French and American Revolutions had made men free. The Russian and
German Revolutions made men slaves.
And so these two--the world advanced by the French and American
Revolutions and the world forced back by the German and Russian
Revolutions--confront each other in a struggle from which one or the
other must sooner or later emerge victorious. In the world of
events, this is the one commanding fact, the one all-dominating
issue of the middle years of the 20th Century. But it is not only an
external fact: it is also the dominating fact in the world of
thought, the world of belief and ideas.
In the West, the 20th Century down to now has demonstrated more and
more plainly the weakness--the moral and spiritual weakness--of our
culture. Our typical ideals have been negative ideals, and this is
largely true even of the prevailing ideal of peace. We have produced
pacifists not of faith, but of fear. Instead of forging the
foundations of peace, we fell back upon isolationism and
appeasement. We refused to face realities, including moral
realities. We ceased to care deeply for the freedom our fathers
bequeathed to us. We did not believe that eternal vigilance is the
price of liberty. We did not care whether freedom was extended or
diminished in other places, so long as our own privileges were not
too much interfered with. We thought that peace could be bought by
condoning injustice and by closing our eyes to tyranny. We said, "We
are our own keepers; we are not our brother's keepers. Concentration
camps and death camps--we are shocked to know of them, but they are
not our business. Subjugation and enslavement--these are
unfortunate, too, but also not our business."
We called escapism, morality; and cowardice, idealism; and we asked
the blessing of a God who wasn't listening on the most contemptible
hodge-podge of pusillanimity and hypocrisy that the world has ever
seen; then, not waiting to find out whether God had blessed it or
not, we gave it the blessing of our churches and called it religion.
But God got along as best he could in spite of the opposition of the
majority of those who claimed to believe in him, and somehow managed
to find enough roughnecks and philistines of one sort and another to
save the situation in the nick of time, and so the flag of hope is
still flying. It cannot be said, however, that the souls of Western
men have been filled with new life, or that our faith and purpose
are renewed, or that the heart of our civilization is beating
vigorously.
And so, in the inner would, just as in the outer, we are confronted
with a challenge; and it is the same challenge: the challenge of
communism demanding that the Western world acknowledge itself
bankrupt: bankrupt of ideas and aims, bankrupt of faith and
purpose--and being thus bankrupt, that it make way for communism.
The world of Jefferson and Lincoln has grown tired and must
surrender to the world of Marx and Lenin--that is the demand. As to
the world of Jesus and the prophets of religion--it is a world of
dreams and has no meaning: it, too, will capitulate. This is the
prediction.
Whose, then, is the future? Can it belong to the West if the West
remains irresolute? Can free men claim it if free men have no faith,
no zeal, no burning love for freedom? Can they make good their claim
and not make good their promises? Promises of justice, of equal
rights, of brotherhood?
The truth is -- and this much we can say, no matter how little we
are able to foresee the pattern of events before us -- that we of
the West shall only win, shall only survive, shall only claim the
future and the chance to establish peace, if in the first place we
are resolute enough and match our resolution with our strength; and
in the second place, if we are good enough and bring our promise
closer to fulfillment. For what we have to win are two struggles at
the same time -- two struggles which, in the last analysis, are one
struggle -- the struggle of events and the struggle of faith and
morals.
Now, at this point, there are those who think that religion should
restrict itself and select the inner struggle as its only proper
province. I profoundly dissent. This notion belongs to an outmoded
system of ideas. Religion has no right -- none whatever -- to
separate itself from harsh realities and retreat into a protected
world. Today, there is no protected world! That is the fact which
all of us must brand deeply into mind and memory. There is no
protected world. If there ever was one, it exists no longer.
The world in which we are now living is stark, gaunt and terrible
with threats and menaces fantastic in their reality but far too real
to leave the slightest room for fantasy. In the events of this
rigorous world, those who profess religious convictions must go out,
not with gloved hands and veiled faces lest they soil their fingers
or suffer the sight of iniquity, but with naked hand and wide-open
eyes -- boldly grasping the stuff of reality with intent to shape
it, and calmly looking upon its ugliness with the faith that expects
to change it.
I agree entirely with the words of John Morley, said to have been
much quoted at one time by Winston Churchill, that "those who would
treat politics and morality apart will never understand the one or
the other." It is true. And it is true that the morality inspired by
religion must be brave enough to do the thing it shrinks from doing;
brave enough to say, no matter with how much grief, that we must be
strong. For peace comes not through pacifism; peace comes where
those who love peace have the will to enforce it.
This and no other is the verdict of history. Not once in the history
of the human race has weakness ever ensured peace. Not even Gandhi
would have succeeded if he had had to deal with Hitler or Stalin.
Either would have made short work of him; and after that would have
massacred as many millions as seemed expedient until the population
was subdued.
If, therefore, we are realists, we shall admire Gandhi as a saint,
and also perhaps as a strategist. But we shall admit that his
success was not so much due to his pacifism as to the conscience of
the people of Britain, backed, no doubt, by the conscience of the
peoples of other Western lands. For this conscience would not permit
the drastic action which would have seemed suitable to a Stalin or a
Hitler.
These, I know, are not pleasing words to those who wish to keep
their sweetness and light and the harsh facts of life in separate
compartments. But I say boldly, and with full conviction, that
unless we face the harshness of the facts, and face them candidly,
it will not be long before sweetness and light will be very rare
things in the world.
Whose is the future? The future -- let us understand it plainly --
will belong to those who have the strength to seize it, the
fortitude to hold it, and the courage to possess it. If the people
who love peace do not have this strength, this hardihood, this
courage, they will have no part in the future. Except as remnants,
degraded and enslaved, they will not even survive. Not even their
one merit -- the love of peace -- will be credited to them. On the
contrary, the future will impugn them. For history is not written by
the annihilated; history is written by the survivors.
Nevertheless, strength alone will not ensure us the future. For even
strength is not an external thing--not that alone. Strength is of
the heart, of the conscience, as well as of arms and armor. The
words placed by Tennyson in the mouth of Sir Galahad are not an idle
boast--not altogether so. "My strength is as the strength of ten,
because my heart is pure." Is it not true that honest conviction and
the righteousness of a just cause increase the might of those who
hold such convictions and are dedicated to such a cause?
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