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 b