Where Is He?

(See Cover)

And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed. . . . And all went to be taxed, every one into his own city. And Joseph also went up from Galilee, out of the city of Nazareth, into Judaea, unto the city of David, which is called Bethlehem . . . to be taxed with Mary his espoused wife, being great with child. And so it was, that, while they were there, the days were accomplished that she should be delivered. And she brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there was no room for them at the inn. And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night. And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and . . . said . . . Unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord. . . . The shepherds said one to another, let us go now even unto Bethlehem, and see this thing which is come to pass. . . .

When Jesus was born . . . behold, there came wise men from the East to Jerusalem, saying, Where is he that is born King of the Jews? for we have seen his star in the East, and are come to worship him. . . . They departed, and, lo, the star, which they saw in the East, went before them, till it came and stood over where the young child was. . . . They presented unto him gifts; gold, frankincense, and myrrh. . . .

Thus St. Luke and St. Matthew reported the most important event of their time--to Christians, the most important event in the world since its creation. This week Christendom marks the anniversary of Christ's Nativity. Sober Christians, celebrating the feast in a world of fears, troubles and confusions, could well wonder whether, in the 1,943 years* since their Saviour's birth, Christendom had ever been so sorely beset.

On Christmas Day of 1938, the world which Christ's coming had been meant to save, the age which had vainly taken his name for nearly 2,000 years, were a world and an age in which Christ's Gospel was met, nearly everywhere and nearly always, with lip service, pagan indifference, subtle hostility or outright persecution. Symptomatic was a Nazi decree that in Germany Christmas was to be celebrated in "Germanic" rather than Christian fashion, that religion was to be kept out of public Yule exercises.

In the nominally Christianized western world, Christianity might sometimes seem an old, unhappy, far-off thing; but in the East, the bright star still went before, was still followed by eager seekers asking "Where is He?" Christ's mission on earth was a missionary enterprise: Go ye therefore, and teach all nations. . . . Conscious of this command, and its full implications in an increasingly un-Christian world, on Christmas Day many a Western--Christian looked toward India, where, at Madras Christian College, 450 Christian men and women from 65 nations were gathered last week.

Under the presidency of one of the world's great Christians, Dr. John R. Mott, they were delegates to the second meeting of the International Missionary Council. Among them were representatives of every Protestant and Orthodox Church. The 45 delegates from North America included the famed woman theologian, Dr. Georgia Harkness; two Bishops, Methodist James Chamberlain Baker of San Francisco and Episcopalian Henry Wise Hobson of Southern Ohio; and World's No. 1 Missionary Dr. Eli Stanley Jones, lofty-minded Methodist emissary to high-caste Hindus, who had just come from a tour of U. S. colleges (TIME, Dec. 12).

Christendom has grown from a compact 500,000 souls in the 1st Century to a sprawling 682,400,000 today, of whom almost half (331,500,000) are Roman Catholics. In the world's population (nearly two billion) Christians are far outnumbered by non-Christians: Confucianists and Taoists (350,600,000), Hindus (230,000,000), Mohammedans (209,000,000), Buddhists (150,180,000). In teeming China, Christians are less than 1% of the population, in India about 2%, in Japan less than 1/2%.

Yet in the East, Christianity exercises an influence out of all proportion to its numbers. Of three men who are rated by many as Asia's most influential leaders-- China's Philosopher-poet Dr. Hu Shih (now Ambassador to the U. S.), India's Mahatma Gandhi, Japan's Dr. Toyohiko Kagawa--only the last is a Christian. Dr. Kagawa, soft-faced, almost blind "Greatest Christian" of Japan, preaches economic and moralistic doctrines which today are completely at variance with those of Japan's rulers. Like other Japanese Christians, he has been largely silenced during the war in China. But his presence in Japan is louder than his silence. Christian Kagawa was expected to join the conference in Madras last week as a delegate.

War-torn China sent 60 delegates to Madras. Far from being dismayed at the physical damage done to mission buildings during the war, Chinese Christians rejoice in the new respect which Chinese soldiers and people have come to feel toward Christian missionaries. A decade ago, missionaries bore the brunt of China's hatred of foreigners, but are now welcomed wherever there are Chinese masses in need.

Many a missionary last week, and many a Christian with the full meaning of the Nativity in his heart, understood the Christmas message which Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek and his wife sent their Christian friends in the U. S. Wrote these pre-eminent products of Christian missions: "There lies upon us and, we presume, upon you also, a great weight of care which religion alone can teach us to bear worthily. . . . Our religion teaches us that sin is immeasurably a greater evil than suffering. . . . Our people ... are being purified and uplifted by their present trials. . . . War is brutal, but it will ever be powerless to rob any of us of the transcendent peace of men who are at peace with themselves."

The Madras meeting is the first international missionary gathering in a missionary land. Last week its delegates could learn at first hand of the great opportunity which now confronts the Church in India--the "mass movement" of 70,000,000 Untouchables out of Hinduism and in the general direction of any other religion which will accept them. The delegates could also see and hear a churchman who knows more than any other man about the Untouchable movement--Dr. Vedanaykam Samuel Azariah, Anglican Bishop of Dornakal, first native of India to be raised to the episcopate. Recently Untouchables have been professing Christianity as fast as the clergy could instruct them--at an average rate of 10,000 a month through out India--and in Bishop Azariah's diocese alone 40,000 are awaiting instruction which he has not the means to provide them.

The delegates at Madras were not only to ponder ways & means of extending the work of Christ's churches in the East.

They were also, as members of the Church's "Third International" (the first and second were the 1937 conferences at Oxford and Edinburgh), to weigh well the Church's position in a world that in many places was changing from part-Christian to totalitarian heathen. There were, at Christmas 1938, places where almost literally there was no room in the inn for a Christian.

Germany has 40,000,000 nominal Protestants, 27,000,000 Roman Catholics. In its six years in power, Naziism's program has been on the one hand to mold Protestantism into a subservient State church, on the other to deny Catholicism the minimum freedom which it demands in any State. Alfred Rosenberg, Hitler's pagan ideologist, would like to extirpate Christianity entirely in its present form. Other Nazis, in less of a hurry, would be content to make the churches "societies of old people." Last week, in a lull in Germany's war of attrition upon Catholicism, there were signs that a new series of decrees against the Church was about to be promulgated.

It appeared that Adolf Hitler, well up to schedule in his process of obliterating the Jews, was planning a protracted Kulturkampf against the Church, such as Bis marck tried and lost. Hitler had. of course, long since forcibly detached Catholic youth from the Church's control, and in other ways Catholicism was less well equipped for battle than in Bismarck's time. In Ostmark, for example, Nazis were saying that they had accomplished in six months what it had taken six years to do in Germany. In Rome it was rumored that the Pope contemplated excommunication of the Catholic-born Reichsfuehrer.

German Protestantism's most outspoken leader is Pastor Martin Niemoeller, member of the "Confessional Synod" which is a nonconformist organization within the framework of the German State Evangelical Church. Pastor Niemঝler last week was still in Sachsenhausen concentration camp, from which he has been offered release (which he refused) on condition that he cease preaching. A handful of other German pastors and. lay churchworkers spent their Christmases in camps or in prison.

Spain. U. S. partisans of General Franco are accustomed, with considerable heat, to call the Spanish Loyalists "Godless Reds," to blame the Loyalist Government for all anti-Catholic outbreaks, to minimize the fact that anticlericalism has for a century been endemic in Spain. According to U. S. Catholics, 7,500 priests have been killed, 15,000 schools and churches burned, 150,000 Catholic faithful slaughtered by Loyalists. The Barcelona Government, silent upon religious matters during the early part of the war, has lately declared its willingness "to assure the free exercises of religious belief and practice."

There is today a certain amount of private and semi-public worship in Loyalist Spain, and the Government professes to regard a recent Catholic officer's funeral in Barcelona, in which Foreign Minister Julio Alvarez del Vayo walked in the religious procession, as evidence that religion is returning to public life. The Vicar General of Barcelona, however, has declined to permit religious rites in a re-opened Barcelona church.

Cardinal Vidal y Barraquer, Archbishop of Tarragona, has attempted not to take sides in the war, and in Rome and elsewhere, consulting with Spanish priests, he directs what religious life remains in Catalonia. Cardinal Vidal is in a minority of one, however; the rest of the Spanish hierarchy, in Rightist Spain, are identified with Franco's cause. It is undoubtedly true that in a Republican Spain in peacetime, the Church, for all its "freedom of exercise," would enjoy as few minimum rights (no schools, no property) as Hitler contemplates for it in Germany.

Mexico during the past decade had its martyrdoms, its persecutions. Under the leadership of its able Archbishop Luis Maria Martinez, a friend of President Cardenas, the Mexican Church today pursues a policy of peaceful acquiescence to Mexican law, as Pope Pius XI, nearly two years ago, recommended it should. Worship now is nowhere suppressed, although still technically against the law in some States. By law, church buildings still belong to the Government. Education of youth (except in a few private schools) remains a State affair, and there are no seminaries in the land (priests are trained in the U. S. Southwest, across the border). Although the Church avoided an entangling alliance with San Luis Potosi's Saturnino Cedillo, the Church's position today would be better had his revolt last spring succeeded.

Contemporary Mexico, which prides itself on such irreligious left-wing painters as Jose Orozco and Diego Rivera, has also furnished inspiration to one of the few genuinely religious artists of today. Frenchman Jean Chariot, who has some Mexican blood, painted the Nativity especially for TIME'S cover.

Russia, in popular estimation, remained during 1938 the world's No. 1 Godless State. Russia's policy has long been to tolerate religion, and even to maintain, for propaganda purposes, certain puppet churchmen, so long as it appeared that there were people who wished the church's ministrations. To many Christians there has been some encouragement in the fact that Russia's League of Militant Godless, whose work the Government approves, has continued to fare not very well. Last spring the Government jailed a good many Orthodox prelates in what was heralded as a new drive against the churches, then apparently lost interest in them.

Democracies. In the Democratic States--France, the Low Countries, England and the U. S.--the churches in 1938 pursued their mission unmolested. In France, there was evidence that the intense anticlericalism of a generation ago had all but disappeared. One sign: the self-dissolution last fortnight of an organization for the defense of priests and laymen in legal difficulties. U. S. Catholicism, regarded by Catholics in Europe as a model or a horrible example (depending upon the point of view) of a militant laity working under the supervision of its priesthood, fought the Church's battle on many fronts against what it regards as "Communistic" enemies.

In the English-speaking nations, Protestant churches displayed a zeal for the now-forming World Council of Churches, and for individual church unity projects, which led many Protestant spokesmen to declare that a religious revival was under way.

"Moral Rearmament" became the 1938 slogan of Dr. Frank Buchman's Oxford Groups, who worked betimes for a religious revival, and betimes announced that it had already happened. A revival of sorts likewise continued outside the churches, in the cults of California, in the "Heavens" of Father Divine.

Time of Waiting. Wise men at Christmas 1938, seeking Him that was born King of the Jews, could not have found Him in the chancelleries of Europe, nor on the battlefields that scarred the map of Christendom, nor in the hearts of the masters of the world--even of those who called themselves men of good will.

Christ's teachings, in their pure essence or applied as "practical" Christianity, were still above and beyond the moral sense, or senselessness, of the world.

In Christian thinking much realistic pessimism had made itself felt. Christian Century, a thoughtful and influential organ of Protestantism, had lately declared that the churches today are in a "time of waiting," a time in which "the church does not know how to act; yet has not learned to wait"; a time in which the social action which was once the Church's great concern had been stalled. To the Catholic view, the Church was, as always, the Church militant--though, to many of its rank & file, the Church seemed to be fighting, on some fronts, a rearguard action.

Thus in a world much burdened with unreligious and anti-religious deeds, the Church--the myriad churches and sects which believe they follow Christ--had become immeasurably greater for what it was than for what it might attempt to do. In spite of its apparent disunity, the Church, alone among human institutions, stood for the universal brotherhood of man, the unity of the human race. To that far ideal the Church still kept its faith; on Christmas 1938 took courage once again from the oldest and dearest story it knew: "Lo, the star, which they saw in the East, went before them, till it came and stood over where the young child was. . . ."

* By most calculations, Christ was born in 5 B. C. There is no evidence that the date was December 25. As Christmas evolved in early Christian times, it was strongly influenced by the more ancient Roman winter feast of Saturnalia.

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