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THE TREND OF THE TIMES
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When in the early part of the last century technology and modern science strode forth in power the problems of wealth were multiplied a thousandfold. Jesus Christ never saw with his physical eyes the infinite good and the infinite damage that could come from great inventions in the hands of great corporations. As a human being here on earth he saw only the hideous selfishness of the greedy individual; he never saw the heartlessness sometimes manifested in the operations of a great corporation. Two generations ago human beings suddenly found that they had to make nearly all their purchases from corporations and nearly all their sales of goods and services to corporations. Free enterprise in the old-fashioned sense of the word was almost gone. Most people had to find their place in some corporate scheme of values. Great economic power was obtained in this way but human nature was restive because the power of the great corporations continually grew faster than technological progress and mod' ern invention.
Karl Marx and Freidrich Engels, seeing the trend of modern civilization, knowing that the genie was out of the bottle and that it could not be put back, proclaimed a revolution on their own account. They fought the church as the foundation of economic injustice and denounced the idea of God as a lie. This was where the early Socialists were strangely blind. They failed to see that the doctrine of Christ and the prophets was even more revolutionary than that which they were proclaiming. They were
deahng solely with the materialistic dialectic as the ultimate reality. But beyond the materialistic dialectic is the psyche, the soul of man. Even though we grant that many church members and some ministers are reactionary, I still say the churches are worth while because they have preserved through the centuries in the Bible the revolutionary social message of the prophets and Jesus Christ. It is a message which those of us who want to be true realists cannot ignore. Those who try to center all attention on a future life while they ignore social injustices of a type which would have stabbed the heart of Jesus, have no claim to the word "Christian."
It would be a sad commentary on modern Christianity if the Russians, denying God, should more nearly attain to social justice than we, invoking the name of God.
One of my Latin American friends wrote me a year or so ago that the Russians do in Russia every day what the people in the United States talk about on Sunday.
Since 1918 in Russia there has been unfolding a revolution in terms of the material welfare of the people which has been challenging the progress of Western Europe and the United States as based on Christianity, the American revolution and the French revolution. The people of the United States should have been taught the full truth about the Russian revolution from the very start. But we were not told the truth and as a result we nearly lost our national life. The pubHshers didn't read the signs of the times correctly. They didn't try hard