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The World Order of Bahá'u'lláh
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Pages 179-186
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Deterioration of Christian Institutions
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So much for Islám and the crippling blows its leaders and institutions
have received--and may yet receive--in this, the first century
of the Bahá'í 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 Bahá'u'lláh 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.
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Both Sunní and Shí'ih Islám 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?
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To these queries we can but partly answer. Time alone can
reveal the nature of the rôle which the institutions directly associated
with the Christian Faith are destined to assume in this, the
Formative Period of the Bahá'í 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 Bahá'í Faith and outside it will exert upon them.
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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 Bahá'u'lláh,
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.
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"The vitality of men's belief in God," Bahá'u'lláh 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."
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This menace of secularism that has attacked Islám 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.
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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 Islám
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 Islám."
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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."
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Might not this disintegrating tendency, from which Sunní and
Shí'ih Islám 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 Bahá'u'lláh in the West accentuate
this decline and widen the range of inescapable disasters.
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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."
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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.
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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 Bahá'í 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.
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Such institutions as have strayed far from the spirit and teachings
of Jesus Christ must of necessity, as the embryonic World
Order of Bahá'u'lláh 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.
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For the Faith of Bahá'u'lláh--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
Bahá'u'lláh 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 Bahá'í 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."
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