The World and the Church
Sands, William Franklin
461 THE WORLD AND THE CHURCH By WILLIAM FRANKLIN SANDS SEVERAL years ago, after the world war, two professors of history at Columbia brought out a "language" map of Europe. All over...
...likely enough the drying up of water supplies in parts of Asia drove herds and flocks westward in search of grass, whole populations with them...
...the amalgamation of the two political ideas in Rome, and the union of all the civilized countries of the world, at the beginning of the Christian era, in the first real world state, the Roman empire, in which absorption, coordination, and redistribution to the ends of civilization of the best in each was accelerated through a central administration, an official language, and a system of excellent laws...
...There is something of the evolutionary theory visible in the preparation for the spread of Christianity throughout the world...
...Then the free Church in a free country can begin to make the contribution to Christianity and to civilization which has been so long held back by the process of Christianizing pagan Europe...
...The idea of a resurgence of the Roman empire, Christian this time, as a universal state in partnership with a universal religion shattered on the feudal system, on class discontent, on the coloring of religion by nationalism, on the ambition of kings to use or to curb the great power of the Church, on the ambition of unscrupulous individuals to seize upon the Papacy for selfish ends, boring from within, passing into the clerical state for power and eventual election to the seat of Peter...
...During all the period when the peoples of which they once formed part surged over the face of what is now Europe, each in turn came into contact with Christianity, the only surviving bearer of the tradition of Roman civilization...
...A free church in a free country has done a marvelous work in taking up Europe's wreckage, in building up once more the victims of those wars in peace and prosperity behind the fighting line, but the Church has not yet been able to build over or transform the transatlantic rancors remaining in us unconsciously from the desolation of Europe...
...No more complete preparation could have been devised for the rapid spread of the new religion to the outside frontiers of the empire...
...the rise of the free cities of Greece...
...Quite probably through the working of purely natural causes, since the plan of the world works that way, nomadic tribes far outside of the Romah influence came into motion...
...It may well be that some accepted Christianity solely as the expression of civilized law and order...
...the rise of the world state idea in ancient history, gripping the imagination of rulers in the centres of population at the eastern end of the Mediterranean...
...In the period of the great trial of Christendom and the religious wars, a new link was formed in the evolutionary chain...
...When it was the turn of outside paganism for the Gospel and civilization, a great unrest set up on the fringes of the earth...
...All civilization and all Christianity lay within the boundaries of the empire...
...After our own revolutionary adjustment there was no spot on earth which offered so fair an opportunity for unhampered religious development...
...It has been painted as the religion of the oppressed, the relief of the despairing and desperate...
...Then came the physical break of Rome...
...Active persecution purifies and strengthens, in spite of losses...
...It is only when we shall be clearly conscious of the causes of Europe's danger, when we shall have channeled our renewed vigor into the spiritual life of America that we shall begin to function truly as a new nation, rather than as a replica under new conditions of the failure which sent us all here...
...Some merged into others, making new groups, and in isolated spots many small remnants of races persisted, clinging to their own ways and their own blood in the midst of populations that were of other origins...
...religion was affected by racial strivings, ancient pagan practices, new political concepts, by economic and social forces...
...they sought to impose it on the world by force...
...In time these struck upon the outer European peoples in what is now Russia and drove them in upon the backs of the Slavs and Germanic tribes nearer the frontiers of 462 Rome...
...an asylum was opened to broken racial remnants and religious minorities, in America...
...That is exactly what this language map is—a wreck chart of ancient races...
...All over southeastern Europe tiny dots of color remind one of a wreck chart of the New England coast in sailing-ship days...
...All these things combined brought about a split in the Church and bitter religious wars...
...It has an appeal to those who see no other way out of their troubles, and who wish to live...
...the new force in Europe is spreading to us also, and we are not yet prepared to meet it...
...Many, however, whose various aspirations were unrealized included Christianity in their general discontent...
...That is the greatest, because the most insidious danger that the Church has survived...
...Christianity, whether assimilated fully or not at all, was the force that moved the world of thought and action from the end of the Roman empire on through the middle-ages and the great religious wars to the French Revolution...
...it has been called the religion of the damned...
...The wrecks it shows may hold for humanity great wealth long lost to the world, or they may prove to be a menace to peaceful navigation...
...Boundaries drawn in 1648 on the basis of politico-religious divergence are now being redrawn on the basis of politics and language, with no more satisfaction to the small groups than before...
...Even religious unity may have been more nearly affected than we know by these disaffected survivals of the human inundations of earlier ages, remaining unsatisfied by attempts at political and doctrinal readjustment...
...Christianity filtered through distinct eyes and minds...
...Wave after wave of peoples swept around the Mediterranean and into Europe from Africa and Asia, driving before them other tribes through the weakened Roman barriers, down to the very centre of the empire...
...Some of these hordes vanished completely, leaving hardly a name...
...Each succeeding wave settled in the fertile spots, breaking or being broken by previous settlers...
...all barbarism and all untouched paganism lay outside...
...And that is the problem of Europe...
...there are still some who cling quite honestly to this obsession...
...Economic reconstruction, delicate and intricate as it is, does not approach in difficulty the problem of how to meet the nationalistic aspirations of racial groups suppressed, some of them for centuries...
...Since the French Revolution and in particular today there is another force working powerfully in the world, not for spiritual peace, but on discontent and for discontent, everywhere...
...Since the reconstruction period in Europe, these and other submerged units have risen above the surface, each moved by a current of longing for what, since the world war, has come to be known as "self-determination...
...They make up one of the most difficult problems of the European continent today...
...It works through human antipathies...
...We have built, but we are not yet a new nation...
...Some attempted to make of Christianity a force for physical conquest...
...Inner ambitions corrode and threaten the whole human part of the fabric...
...Everywhere that Christianity does not meet the desires of men, this anti-thesis of Christianity takes form...
...A peace of compromise saved the continent of Europe from complete ruin, but left a trail of new disabilities, distrust, and rancor extending into all the activities of life down to the world war and our own times...
...Today it manifests itself most strikingly in what we call Bolshevism, without knowing very clearly what we mean...
...They are truly the wreckage of history—derelicts which, not navigable themselves, may be salvaged with profit from the currents which carry them, or which may become a menace by further suppression of natural and very powerful desires...
...With most it was a true spiritual influence...
...Each did not absorb Christianity, however, in equal measure, even among those which accepted the new religion...
...It is not offered, however, in a form utterly repellent...
Vol. 5 • March 1927 • No. 17
