dication of the real responsibilities of organized religion. The only way in which the Church can help the world out of its mess; the only way in which the Church can (say) help to prevent the extermination of the Armenians, or the next war, (to be waged with poisons and germs), is by wrenching herself corporately apart from the world, much as a live-saving guard must wrench himself free from the clutches of a drowning man. As things are today, the world is dragging down the Church in a deathclutch that is strangling the life out of her. If the Church can buffet herself free, she may be able to use her powers, natural and supernatural, to rescue some part at least of a world that is now rapidly destroying itself.

This language is not too strong for the facts. There are biologists optimistic enough to look through unprecedented carnage, colossal cruelties and tyrannies, to a problematic super-race. Christians cannot. The realism of the Catholic religion sees no guarantees of happy futures built on rampant cowardice and cruelty, hatred and selfishness, in a civilization that once recognized and knew Jesus Christ. The best thing that can be said for the English-speaking part of our modern world was said in a pregnant phrase used by the late Secretary Lane in one of the early warspeeches, when the fervor of that first consecration of America's sword swept over the country. "Thank God, we have not rejected Jesus Christ; but we have neglected Him." So far, we have not as a nation, definitely rejected Him; but to what diabolic suggestions may we not listen some day, if we continue the policy of the hard heart and the scornful eye? The real-politik of these post-war times is making heavier drafts on race-optimism than the future is likely to honor.

Lord Acton and Fr. Figgis, in their writings, have been helping to clarify our minds about liberty; liberty is not only certain rights which the state guarantees to the in

dividual, but certain rights of free association which alone can protect against possible tyranny by society as a whole. The Church exists today in modern society as a quasifree organization; but the Church is not free, nor selfgoverning. She is ruled very largely from without, not from within. And parochial isolation is one of the direct obstacles to autonomy in the Church; men who are combining in business, in education, in charities, in social and fraternal groups, are fiercely keeping parishes apart from each other and from the whole Church.

The Nation-Wide Campaign, and the Bishop and Council system, national and diocesan, was a necessary inevitable move toward self-government in the Church. Its ecclesiastical genius is characteristically American, as the genius of the Patriarchates of the conciliar period of the Church was Mediterranean and Imperial. It is based, first, on the need for information, a need which the very Gospel itself was proclaimed to meet; next, upon a belief in human responsibility, and in the right of every responsible member of the Church to be given a fair chance to acknowledge his individual responsibility, having been given the facts about the task before the Church, roughly classified as "missionary, educational, and social." It contemplates, not only a central President and council, but a Bishop and council in every Diocese, a Priest and council in every parish and mission. It displaces no constitutional part of Church organization as it exists, but supplements them with these interrelated executive agencies. The parish priest is not turned into a puppet, nor is he necessarily over-burdened with fiscal details. His responsibility for the system ceases when he has helped his parish to understand the plan, and has given his people a chance to organize and do the work. If it takes time and patience, and yearly campaign, does not the result justify it? Has the Church, or has it not, the task which the

Council system was created to meet? Do we, or do we not, need guidance from men specially commissioned to consider the implications of Christian education, and what the Church has to say or do about this social system under which we live? Are there not conditions which ordinarily parish methods are utterly failing to meet-people lost by moving from town to town; college conditions and atmospheres; anti-Christian propaganda of various kinds and degrees; bitterness and hostility and estrangement arising out of industrial conflicts; insidious influences to lower moral standards, in press, movie, social customs and fashions?

How many parish priests can face candidly the handicaps that hinder the free course of the incarnate life of Christ in the hearts, the homes, the occupations, the associations of their people, and confidently assert that they, and their parishes, are fully equipped to overcome all those handicaps, without any help from special departments created to study these needs, and the general causes and conditions underlying them, from the standpoint of historic Christianity? There are, doubtless, priests in the Church who feel fairly satisfied with a certain degree and kind of success they have attained, in meeting local problems, and who resent as an impertinence any suggestion that they or their cures need any closer bond of intercommunication or mutual consultation with the Diocese and the National Church. But they must be singularly fortunate in the isolated simplicity of their local environment, or else their standard of the transformation of life which the Church hopes to accomplish must be very modest indeed; and in either case they can scarcely be aware that general conditions are bound to complicate their problems, or those of their successors.

Our Lord's counsel to give up all and leave the world, was not because He despaired of the world, but because

the world can be saved only by those who assert and carry out their right to forsake it. Neither can the world be helped by the Church, so long as the Church does not control her own resources, but is spiritually mortgaged to the world, up to her eyes. The world cannot be preserved by a salt that is so diluted that it has lost its savor. The net of the kingdom will not catch many fish if it is constantly dragged over the shallows.

We have too long been fishing in the shallows, and the meshes have been torn so wide that it is no wonder fish, big or little, are escaping.

But the Church is not listening to the scornful hecklers. She is at work mending her net, and will do it thoroughly if we will lend a hand. And then, pray God, in obedience to the Lord, we will help her launch out into the deep, and cast on the right side.

Russian Literature and the Orthodox Church

CLARENCE AUGUSTUS MANNING, Ph.D.

T IS hardly to be denied that modern literature does

tian communities in any of the advanced countries of the world. As Bishop Nicholai of Serbia pointed out repeatedly in his visit to America, the intelligentsia of Europe has definitely rejected Christ and world literature has changed materially since the mediaeval period when the chief works of the age were in some relation to the Christian Church and the Christian point of view. Literature as such rather looks askance on the Church and the chief works which frankly deal sympathetically with religion are seen to be attacks on bigotry, dogma, or the favorite religious aversion of the author.

Modern Russian literature is by no means an exception to the above tendency. Although certain of its leading figures were actively and sincerely interested in Christianity, the Orthodox Church does not play that striking part in it that we would be led to expect. This is because the intelligentsia were largely interested in schemes for revolutionary agitation and immediate social amelioration and despised the Church as one of the organs used by the government of the Tsar, to maintain its power.

Before the days of Peter the Great and the beginning of the eighteenth century, Russian literature with all its manifold defects was essentially a religious literature similar to the mediaeval literatures of Western Europe. Lives of the saints, apocryphal legends and other religious writings formed the chief subjects of what was in the main a monastic pursuit favored only by such secular rulers as Ivan the Terrible, who endeavored to be a religious leader and an ascetic as well as a most merciless punisher of "treason."

The great reforms of Peter and his successors who aimed to bring Russia within the sphere of Western influence led to the creation of a new literature modelled on French patterns and heavily influenced by Voltaire. The Church, crushed into silence by the arbitrary power of Peter, naturally was not the favorite of the new art. The formalism and excessive literalism which had developed as a prominent characteristic of the Russian Church rendered religion liable to ridicule, and Catherine the Great herself was not averse to a scathing attack upon the great separation of religion and morals that existed in Russia provided only the externals of religion were minutely followed.

The patriotic outburst against Napoleon and the wave of mysticism which followed it left little effect upon the literature, and the first prominent author who fearlessly