So much for Islam and the crippling blows its leaders and institutions
have received--and may yet receive--in this, the first century of the Baha'i
Era. If I have dwelt too long on this theme, if I have, to a
disproportionate degree, quoted from the sacred writings in support of my
argument, it is solely because of my firm conviction that these
retributive calamities that have rained down upon the foremost oppressor
of the Faith of Baha'u'llah should rank not only among the stirring
occurrences of this Age of Transition, but as some of the most startling
and significant events of contemporary history.
Both Sunni and _Sh_i'ih Islam had, through the convulsions that had seized
them, contributed to the acceleration of the disruptive process to which I
have previously referred--a process which, by its very nature, is to pave
the way for that complete reorganization and unification which the world,
in every aspect of its life, must achieve. What of Christianity and of the
denominations with which it stands identified? Can it be said that this
process of deterioration that has attacked the fabric of the Religion of
Muhammad has failed to exert its baneful influence on the institutions
associated with the Faith of Jesus Christ? Have these institutions already
experienced the impact of these menacing forces? Are their foundations so
secure and their vitality so great as to enable them to resist this
onslaught? Will they, as the confusion of a chaotic world spreads and
deepens, fall in turn a prey to their violence? Have the more orthodox
among them already arisen, and, if not, will they arise, to repel the
onset of a Cause which, having pulled down the barriers of Muslim
orthodoxy, is now advancing into the heart of Christendom, in both the
European and American continents? Would such a resistance sow the seeds of
further dissension and confusion, and consequently serve indirectly to
hasten the advent of the promised Day?
To these queries we can but partly answer. Time alone can reveal the
nature of the role which the institutions directly associated with the
Christian Faith are destined to assume in this, the Formative Period of
the Baha'i Era, this dark age of transition through which humanity as a
whole is passing. Such events as have already transpired, however, are of
such a nature as can indicate the direction in which these institutions
are moving. We can, in some degree, appraise the probable effect which the
forces operating both within the Baha'i Faith and outside it will exert
upon them.
That the forces of irreligion, of a purely materialistic philosophy, of
unconcealed paganism have been unloosed, are now spreading, and, by
consolidating themselves, are beginning to invade some of the most
powerful Christian institutions of the western world, no unbiased observer
can fail to admit. That these institutions are becoming increasingly
restive, that a few among them are already dimly aware of the pervasive
influence of the Cause of Baha'u'llah, that they will, as their inherent
strength deteriorates and their discipline relaxes, regard with deepening
dismay the rise of His New World Order, and will gradually determine to
assail it, that such an opposition will in turn accelerate their decline,
few, if any, among those who are attentively watching the progress of His
Faith would be inclined to question.
"The vitality of men's belief in God," Baha'u'llah has testified, "is
dying out in every land; nothing short of His wholesome medicine can ever
restore it. The corrosion of ungodliness is eating into the vitals of
human society; what else but the Elixir of His potent Revelation can
cleanse and revive it?" "The world is in travail," He has further written,
"and its agitation waxeth day by day. Its face is turned towards
waywardness and unbelief. Such shall be its plight that to disclose it now
would not be meet and seemly."
This menace of secularism that has attacked Islam and is undermining its
remaining institutions, that has invaded Persia, has penetrated into
India, and raised its triumphant head in Turkey, has already manifested
itself in both Europe and America, and is, in varying degrees, and under
various forms and designations, challenging the basis of every established
religion, and in particular the institutions and communities identified
with the Faith of Jesus Christ. It would be no exaggeration to say that we
are moving into a period which the future historian will regard as one of
the most critical in the history of Christianity.
Already a few among the protagonists of the Christian Religion admit the
gravity of the situation that confronts them. "A wave of materialism is
sweeping round the world"; is the testimony of its missionaries, as
witnessed by the text of their official reports, "the drive and pressure
of modern industrialism, which are penetrating even the forests of Central
Africa and the plains of Central Asia, make men everywhere dependent on,
and preoccupied with, material things. At home the Church has talked,
perhaps too glibly, in pulpit or on platform of the menace of secularism;
though even in England we can catch more than a glimpse of its meaning.
But to the Church overseas these things are grim realities, enemies with
which it is at grips... The Church has a new danger to face in land after
land--determined and hostile attack. From Soviet Russia a definitely
anti-religious Communism is pushing west into Europe and America, East
into Persia, India, China and Japan. It is an economic theory, definitely
harnessed to disbelief in God. It is a religious irreligion... It has a
passionate sense of mission, and is carrying on its anti-God campaign at
the Church's base at home, as well as launching its offensive against its
front-line in non-Christian lands. Such a conscious, avowed, organized
attack against religion in general and Christianity in particular is
something new in history. Equally deliberate in some lands in its
determined hostility to Christianity is another form of social and
political faith--nationalism. But the nationalist attack on Christianity,
unlike Communism, is often bound up with some form of national
religion--with Islam in Persia and Egypt, with Buddhism in Ceylon, while
the struggle for communal rights in India is allied with a revival both of
Hinduism and Islam."
I need not attempt in this connection an exposition of the origin and
character of those economic theories and political philosophies of the
post-war period, that have directly and indirectly exerted, and are still
exerting, their pernicious influence on the institutions and beliefs
connected with one of the most widely-spread and best organized religious
systems of the world. It is with their influence rather than with their
origin that I am chiefly concerned. The excessive growth of industrialism
and its attendant evils--as the aforementioned quotation bears witness--the
aggressive policies initiated and the persistent efforts exerted by the
inspirers and organizers of the Communist movement; the intensification of
a militant nationalism, associated in certain countries with a
systematized work of defamation against all forms of ecclesiastical
influence, have no doubt contributed to the de-Christianization of the
masses, and been responsible for a notable decline in the authority, the
prestige and power of the Church. "The whole conception of God," the
persecutors of the Christian Religion have insistently proclaimed, "is a
conception derived from the ancient oriental despotisms. It is a
conception quite unworthy of free men." "Religion," one of their leaders
has asserted, "is an opiate of the people." "Religion," declares the text
of their official publications, "is a brutalization of the people.
Education must be so directed as to efface from the people's minds 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 now existing
between the Holy See and certain nations in the continent of Europe--these
stand out as the most striking features of the reverses which, in almost
every part of the world, the members and leaders of Christian
ecclesiastical institutions have suffered.
That the solidarity of some of these institutions has been irretrievably
shattered is too apparent for any intelligent observer to mistake or deny.
The cleavage between the fundamentalists and the liberals among their
adherents is continually widening. Their creeds and dogmas have been
watered down, and in certain instances ignored and discarded. Their hold
upon human conduct is loosening, and the personnel of their ministries is
dwindling in number and in influence. The timidity and insincerity of
their preachers are, in several instances, being exposed. Their endowments
have, in some countries, disappeared, and the force of their religious
training has declined. Their temples have been partly deserted and
destroyed, and an oblivion of God, of His teachings and of His Purpose,
has enfeebled and heaped humiliation upon them.
Might not this disintegrating tendency, from which Sunni and _Sh_i'ih
Islam have so conspicuously suffered, unloose, as it reaches its climax,
still further calamities upon the various denominations of the Christian
Church? In what manner and how rapidly this process, which has already set
in, will develop the future alone can reveal. Nor can it, at the present
time, be estimated to what extent will the attacks which a still powerful
clergy may yet launch against the strongholds of the Faith of Baha'u'llah
in the West accentuate this decline and widen the range of inescapable
disasters.
If Christianity wishes and expects to serve the world in the present
crisis, writes a minister of the Presbyterian Church in America, it must
"cut back through Christianity to Christ, back through the centuries-old
religion about Jesus to the original religion of Jesus." Otherwise, he
significantly adds, "the spirit of Christ will live in institutions other
than our own."
So marked a decline in the strength and cohesion of the elements
constituting Christian society has led, in its turn, as we might well
anticipate, to the emergence of an increasing number of obscure cults, of
strange and new worships, of ineffective philosophies, whose sophisticated
doctrines have intensified the confusion of a troubled age. In their
tenets and pursuits they may be said to reflect and bear witness to the
revolt, the discontent, and the confused aspirations of the disillusioned
masses that have deserted the cause of the Christian churches and seceded
from their membership.
A parallel might almost be drawn between these confused and confusing
systems of thought that are the direct outcome of the helplessness and
confusion afflicting the Christian Faith and the great variety of popular
cults, of fashionable and evasive philosophies which flourished in the
opening centuries of the Christian Era, and which attempted to absorb and
pervert the state religion of that Roman people. The pagan worshipers who
constituted, at that time, the bulk of the population of the Western Roman
Empire, found themselves surrounded, and in certain instances menaced, by
the prevailing sect of the Neo-Platonists, by the followers of nature
religions, by Gnostic philosophers, by Philonism, Mithraism, the adherents
of the Alexandrian cult, and a multitude of kindred sects and beliefs, in
much the same way as the defenders of the Christian Faith, the
preponderating religion of the western world, are realizing, in the first
century of the Baha'i Era, how their influence is being undermined by a
flood of conflicting beliefs, practices and tendencies which their own
bankruptcy had helped to create. It was, however, this same Christian
Religion, which has now fallen into such a state of impotence, that
eventually proved itself capable of sweeping away the institutions of
paganism and of swamping and suppressing the cults that had flourished in
that age.
Such institutions as have strayed far from the spirit and teachings of
Jesus Christ must of necessity, as the embryonic World Order of
Baha'u'llah takes shape and unfolds, recede into the background, and make
way for the progress of the divinely-ordained institutions that stand
inextricably interwoven with His teachings. The indwelling Spirit of God
which, in the Apostolic Age of the Church, animated its members, the
pristine purity of its teachings, the primitive brilliancy of its light,
will, no doubt, be reborn and revived as the inevitable consequence of
this redefinition of its fundamental verities, and the clarification of
its original purpose.
For the Faith of Baha'u'llah--if we would faithfully appraise it--can never,
and in no aspect of its teachings, be at variance, much less conflict,
with the purpose animating, or the authority invested in, the Faith of
Jesus Christ. This glowing tribute which Baha'u'llah Himself has been
moved to pay to the Author of the Christian Religion stands as sufficient
testimony to the truth of this central principle of Baha'i belief:--"Know
thou that when the Son of Man yielded up His breath to God, the whole
creation wept with a great weeping. By sacrificing Himself, however, a
fresh capacity was infused into all created things. Its evidences, as
witnessed in all the peoples of the earth, are now manifest before thee.
The deepest wisdom which the sages have uttered, the profoundest learning
which any mind hath unfolded, the arts which the ablest hands have
produced, the influence exerted by the most potent of rulers, are but
manifestations of the quickening power released by His transcendent, His
all-pervasive and resplendent Spirit. We testify that when He came into
the world, He shed the splendor of His glory upon all created things.
Through Him the leper recovered from the leprosy of perversity and
ignorance. Through Him the unchaste and wayward were healed. Through His
power, born of Almighty God, the eyes of the blind were opened, and the
soul of the sinner sanctified... He it is Who purified the world. Blessed
is the man who, with a face beaming with light, hath turned towards Him."