Day of Prayer

Throughout the world last Sunday the holy men of Christendom and of Jewry stood before their believing flocks, raised high their prayers for brooding, savage, militantly godless Russia. In Manhattan a host of 3,500 Protestants gathered in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine to hear Bishop William Thomas Manning, guarded by three detectives, conduct a solemn service of supplication. The proceedings were similar to those which took place throughout the western world and in far-away missionary lands--a multitudinous echoing of the cry of Christ: "Father forgive them, for they know not what they do." Also typical of what was happening elsewhere was a meeting, held in The Bronx soon after Bishop Manning's service, at which 12,000 Atheists and their sympathizers paid 25-c- to cheer and stamp for speakers deriding all religions.

Events of the week in Moscow were both comforting and disheartening to believers in God. Comforting was the issuance by the Communist central committee of a ukase which: 1) Expressly forbade the closing of churches except by majority demand of the local population involved; 2) Insisted that the collectivization of farms be voluntary and not prosecuted by force; 3) Threatened punishment for zealots who broke these rules. But in face of these symptoms of new leniency on the part of Soviet authorities, plans were being made by the Society of Militant Atheists (alleged membership: 3,000,000) to make great mock of religion at Eastertime with bonfires of ikons, satiric drama, lectures, processions, the construction of planetariums to express the materialistic conception of the world.

Among the most interesting utterances on the Day of Prayer was that of Dr. Robert Russell Wicks, Dean of Princeton University Chapel, who addressed the students at Hamilton College, Clinton, N. Y. Said he: "Not because we want Communism, but rather because we do not want it, we Americans must change completely our economic system. It is amazing how many people blindly assume that this capitalistic commercialism of ours is as ancient and abiding as the very order of nature. . . .* Sanctioned by industrial practice, justified by philosophy, obsessed by so-called religion, this world-wide selfishness is cataclysmic. . . . Our absorption in this process of acquiring more things is as silly as the preoccupation of the middle ages with theological argument. . . . We must learn the secret of doing things not for people, but with people. ... If such an appreciation cannot be built up in the world, the nations will succumb to the Russian idea. There is something moving in Russia, and we have got to get ahead of it."

*Princeton University Chapel cost $2,000,000, donated chiefly by capitalist alumni.

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