Visible Doom

In the sickening, inhuman record of Germany's prison camps, many Americans saw only one answer: the Nazis have put themselves beyond the pale of humanity. This week the Christian Century looked at Buchenwald and saw more than that:

"No, the horror of the Nazi concentration camps is the horror of humanity itself when it has surrendered to its capacity for evil. ... In the Nazis and beyond them we are looking into the very pit of hell which men disclose yawning within themselves when they . . . deny the sacredness of human personality. . . .

"Buchenwald and the other memorials of Nazi infamy reveal the depths to which humanity can sink, and has sunk, in these frightful years.

"The conventional ministry ... is no ministry for these days when mankind totters on the brink of damnation. . . . The gospel cannot be preached dispassionately, tentatively or listlessly. . . .

"We are dying men--dying, all of us and our institutions and our civilization, in the sins which have reached their appalling climax in the torture chambers of Europe's prison camps. [These] camps spell doom. But it is not simply the doom of the Nazis; it is the doom of man unless he can be brought to worship at the feet of the living God."

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