Transcript
I may disappoint you in the way I'm going to speak on nonviolence. I will not speak on nonviolence as a technique to stop an enemy invading your territory. Neither will I speak of nonviolence as a way to prevent war or even as a method to overcome your enemy and turn him into friend. I shall speak of nonviolence in a much more Christian way and describe it as the typical obedience of the entire church, a church that
relies upon God's power, a church that because she believes in this divine power does not think that to resort to war is the best way to defend values that are menaced by wrong doctrines. I would also add that the power of God, in my opinion, is essentially the power which is in Jesus Christ's cross, that we cannot separate the notion of a divine power and rule over the world from the redemptive action of God through Jesus
Christ. Now let us speak about dictators. A few of you here may have lived under dictators and know perfectly well what it is. I have had the sad privilege to live under a dictatorship, and I cannot be hard enough against their methods and I cannot express strongly enough my dislike, my, I would say, my physical repulsion for dictatorships. Dictatorship is a method of oppressing the souls more than the bodies by exploiting the natural cowardice of man
to reduce him to the state of a man who is scared and who accepts all sorts of renegation of his convictions for the sake of saving his physical life. A dictator is also quite often exploiting the mass of the people for the interest of the few. Yet there are several types of dictators, and tonight I am going to make a distinction between three different types of dictators, and along the road that we are going to go
this evening, I hope that you will agree with me that the Christian nonviolent answer to a dictator may be somewhat different accordingly to the circumstances in which the resistance has to be applied. One last consideration before we go further. Is it absolutely certain that our Western democratic ways are always the best to solve some of the fundamental problems in our world? This last question I will simply pose at this moment because it will come back during
my discussion in a more precise way. Now first of all we are going to examine the case of what I call the pre-democratic dictators. Democracy is a very delicate machinery which has been set up in the West. It has functioned also we remember in some years in Athens and Rome in the far away past, but the prerequisites for setting up a democracy are extremely complicated. For example, my conviction is as a French Protestant that sectarian
approach, the great variety of denominations in Great Britain and in America, is a very happy and constructive background for a harmonious functioning of democracy. Whereas in Roman Catholic countries where the church is a bloc that has tried in the past and is still trying many times to control the political regime, the opposition, the anti-clericalism of the non-church going people tends to become what I would like to call an anti-church. And the eternal struggle
between the clericals and the anti-clerical is jeopardizing the good functioning of democracy. Well let us speak about the pre-democratic dictators. The world is full of nations that have not yet reached the point when they can possess a well-functioning democracy. Short experiments that have been done here and there since the Second World War are probably not going to last very long. We know all the crisis of Indonesia. It was very easy to foresee Indonesia
did not realize the conditions for a good functioning of democratic institutions. Democracy will never be harmonious in countries, for example, where you still have a property regime which is unjust to speak about North Africa. I'm very often this morning, this evening, going to tell you about North Africa because I know the subject rather well and it is typical of what will be exist in other countries. In North Africa you still have huge latifundia, huge estates that
have devoured in the very remote past most of the land. Sometimes, as in Morocco, they belong to the government, to the king. Sometimes they belong to religious congregations as they did a few years ago in Tunisia. In and around these latifundia, not speaking of the latifundia which have been created by the European settlers, live a population which is almost at the edge of slavery. They cannot possess and they are used as hands on the farms and
that sort of a regime cannot easily be combated by democratic methods. In North Africa, again, and in many parts of the world, the condition of women is such that they do not enjoy civil rights, that they are entirely submitted to their husbands who are usually ironic and this inequality makes a real democracy impossible. The exploitation of the poor, let us take a very classical example now, the example of Saudi Arabia where 95% of the population
lives in tragic poverty while the king, even Saud of Arabia, receiving the royalties of the Aramco and other royal companies, lives in lavish luxury as Cadillacs and is enjoying all privileges, including also the privileges enjoyed by the American workers in the Aramco. I have in my pocket a very amusing document that I'm used to read some evenings. I won't have time this evening to read except perhaps in the question period. It's an American housewife describing the
wonderful Arabian nights they have enjoyed with her husband in Arabia and how everything is wonderful, the supermarkets and the cinema and the golf courses and even the nightclubs and that she sees absolutely no reason for attention between the Arabs and the Americans in Arabia. Evidently that good woman had been living inside the American colony just as closely as many French have lived inside Algiers or inside Tunis or inside Casablanca in the wonderful modern world that they
have created, not realizing that this prosperity was partly made with the of the poor. I should add also that the native aristocracy shares in this luxury, sometimes even exaggerates over the Europeans who have perhaps more sense of limitation and that the contrast between the wealthy Moroccans or the wealthy Tunisians and the desperately poor crowds is tragic. In many of these countries illiteracy is as high as 85 percent in Arabia, 95 percent of the population and this
illiteracy instead of decreasing is proportionately increasing because the school system is absolutely inadequate to solve the problem and the increase, I would say the explosion of the population due to the modern care for sick people is so quick that there is no way to catch up with the school system to catch up with the increase of the population. To quote the situation in North Africa, 52 percent of the North Africans today are under 20. I repeat
this is not, it is official statistics, 52 percent of the North Africans are under 20 and should be in school, meaning that 48 percent of the rest of the population should pay enough taxes to support in school the 52 percent of the unproductive population. For that reason and for the reason that the population of North Africa is increasing at a rate of between 3 or 4 percent a year, meaning that it will double every 20 or
30 years, that this is absolutely hopeless. No budget of no state, even a very wealthy state in the US of America, if 52 percent of the population of America would be under 20, no state budget, no billions would be able to solve the problem of illiteracy. Due to this situation, you may understand why dictatorial methods probably will at some point be the only means to change the situation. In a democracy, let's speak again about North Africa,
in France, and France has applied democratic methods much more than it is believed usually. In a democracy, you have to pay the schoolmaster at a normal salary. You cannot compel him to go to the desert to teach children if you do not pay him a salary equal to the salary paid at home in France or he will not be ready to go. In a democracy, you cannot compel families that still believe that it's not worthwhile to
send their children to school. You cannot compel these families to send their children to school. In a democracy, you cannot force a factory worker after his nine hours of work in the factory to attend evening class and to become literate. In dictatorial regimes, it is done because a choice in China or in Soviet Russia is between going to school or going to prison. In China, I've even been reading reports saying that the cleanliness of the homes
verified is verified by special inspectors and that the housewife which is untidying her household goes to prison and so the houses are clean. And let us be very simple and very clear, if you have explored with me the situation, the condition of certain underdeveloped nations which are still living in the medieval condition, at some point in some desperate dead ends, dictatorial methods are necessary. The last time I went to Morocco, it was in September, we had
a long discussion with one of the experts in agriculture of the Moroccan government who is himself a Muslim, and he told us that in October, the king of Morocco, just before he came to your country, would start what they call Operation Plowshare, meaning that they would drive tractors, they bought 1,000 tractors in America, they would drive these tractors without consideration for private properties. The land in that region of Morocco being too small, they cannot be
cultivated mechanically except if the surface of plowing is very wide, and they have to face almost a revolution of the farmers against such methods. Imagine what would happen if some government would do that in Ohio or in this part of the country. What they answered was, well, you are going to take sand or sawdust and to put it at your limits, and some traces will remain of the limits of your property, so you will afterwards be
able to do your own sowing in this situation. And the official told us, we have five years to feed Morocco. Morocco is starving and is starving because our population is still using antiquated methods to till the land, and if we do not use the methods the Russians would use, we are going to lose the game and the communists will come and take our place. So in order to face the problem and to solve the problem, we
have to use dictatorial methods. If we would explore the situation in Egypt or in Tunisia, we would discover that Bourguiba, for example, has used dictatorial methods to give equality to white women, that he has created also new nationalized land with the holy property of the religious institutions, that Nasser has divided the land forcibly and so on, and that he has taken, among other things, the Suez Canal, which has left us Frenchmen very bitter because the shareholders
of the Suez Canal were usually very modest French people who had all their savings in the Suez affair and who have been completely ruined by the unilateral action of Nasser. But we are now trying to understand the situation of underdeveloped countries, to understand also what is going to happen in Tunisia in certain situations of emergency, urgency, urgency decisions have to be taken and this is dictatorship. What should be the answer to Christians, of missionaries, the answer
of missionaries or of servants, Christian servants of these nations under such circumstances. I try to explore the situation. We are now, to be quite clear, starting a service project in Morocco, precisely of French people, French Christians, in a country out of which France has been expelled as a political power. You see immediately the difference of approach, France being expelled as a political controlling power and French Christians going to the country where their officials have been expelled
to do some sort of a Christian service. Well, the word, the answer to these pre-democratic regimes and dictatorships is service. They are not taking us anymore as controllers, not even sometimes as experts. There is a national pride awake in the newly independent nations that rejects everything coming from the West and also from America. Believe me, in this affair we are all in the same situation and men of Africa in Asia consider much more the color
of our skin to reject everything coming from the West and especially the Muslims are very reluctant. So we have to come back in a new attitude, not only a new garment but a new deep attitude. I see the program under the form of a literacy campaign as done in some places in Africa and Asia, aid to villages, clearance of slums, building of homes. Mennonite, an American Mennonite team by the way, you may not know that, has
been for three years now in Algeria in a little town called Flaters and there between the the adversaries, they have been building perseverently homes for North Africans using non-violence as their flag, as their witness, not answering any menace and they have been menaced by the French and menaced by the Muslims. This is the typical thing to be done. Everywhere the Christian is still allowed to go. He must go, no more as the advisor, as the
man from the top, not even from the UNESCO. I remember this friend of mine who is an important official at the UNESCO telling me I've been inspecting refugee camps in Arab lands around Israel several times and because I have a car and because I have a good salary and people know it, the refugees have thrown stones at me and he added it but I envy the members of the Society of Friends who in these camps live
in a dirt hut and share the life of the refugees. They are not hated, they are loved. Everywhere we are still allowed to enter, we should have more people and I add here one thing which is important, not specialists. The world certainly needs our experts in agriculture and in medical science and in literacy but the world needs non-specialists. The specialist is a lonely man. The specialist is a man who has between him and the other,
the poor, a tremendous distance. He is maybe obeyed and he is maybe respected but he cannot be loved. What we need is church members, perhaps not even missionaries. I would say that probably one of the solutions would be that every man preparing to enter into the Christian ministry should spend two or three years of his life before taking a church in this country or in France as a volunteer in the slums or in the poor villages.
It would be for him a tremendous experience. He would gather human experiences that he will never find when he would be at the head of a church and he would also bring that element of non-specialized friendly service which is indispensable to build now bridges with the underdeveloped nations. And now I come to the second type of dictator, the dictator who comes when democracy has failed. For let us be clear, communist dictators will take possession of
the countries where western democracy will fail to establish justice. I am not going to make an apology of communism. I will remain in the field of theory but remind you that in the eyes of communist theoreticians the dictatorship of the proletariat is not going to last forever. It is a transitory period which is necessary to destroy private enterprise to substitute a collective exploitation instead. And once, this is always a theory and I am not saying that
this is possible, probably the experience of Russia shows that after a dictator comes another one, but anyhow the theory should be that when social justice has been once for all established the state becomes much less important, less authoritarian and the good administration of things will allow more liberty and perhaps the re-innovation of democracy. Well this is all theoretical but let us be clear that for many people in the world today, I would imagine that for
some people in Egypt, Nasser himself not being of that kind, the communist approach, the dream of a period of 10 or 20 years during which a drastic dictatorship could be applied using communist methods and liquidate the old regime and partition the land and create forcibly a new industry and teach people that this period is very interesting, very important for them. It is absolutely clear that a non-violent Christian under such a regime is hardly tried. It's
absolutely certain that a communist dictatorship, first of all, sees as one of its aims the destruction of conservative forces among which they classify the church. I don't think that they try to destroy today the church for its own sake. There is little sign of profound hatred against religion in the modern communist regimes except perhaps in China where things are still very hot but it doesn't seem that to be true that in Russia today there is a
profound resentment against the church anymore but they classify the church among the conservative forces, the forces that teach resignation to the nation, resignation to the military and therefore it must be discarded, it must be made imparted. Well, what can we do, I would say we can witness. When service is no more allowed, you know that one of the first things that the dictators are trying to suppress in communist nations is the services as done by church.
They don't allow the church anymore to make propaganda for itself in organizing social service or slum clearance or everything must be in the hands of the government. So when the church is reduced to its worship, to its chapel and when the church is forbidden even to organize campaigns to raise funds or building programs, well what can the church do, she can witness. And this is certainly the case of what is happening in eastern Germany. All the
news that we have from eastern Germany shows that the church is rendering a strong witness and one of the best statements I've heard about this situation is this statement. Everywhere in eastern Europe, in the satellite countries, the communist regime has met Roman Catholicism. Roman Catholicism is essentially an institution that tends to absorb also the functions of the state and that defends as far as it can its institutions and its schools and its property, its land if
it possesses its land. And therefore the clash between the communist regime in Poland or in Hungary or even Czechoslovakia where the Catholics are in the majority has a certain political aspect. It is absolutely clear that Cardinal Migenti is not simply a church man defending the gospel of Christ but that he has a political role and he showed it in Hungarian events a year ago. He showed that he belonged to the conservative wing and that he was
anti-communist for political grounds too. While in eastern Germany, which is overwhelmingly Protestant, the communist regime for the first time has encountered the individual Christian who is not following a party line as indicated by the church but is obeying his own conscience. And this new aspect, this kind of, and it's the, if we take the figure so often described by Karl Barth, the horizontal things which belong to the world and the vertical things which belong to
God, if the lines are not horizontal, if it's not two adversaries fighting on the same level, but if there is an interpenetration of spiritual vertical forces as given, granted by divine grace, by the procedure of redemption in each individual, and this individual becoming a free witness to divine grace in the world, then you have a new situation. And evidently the Church of Christ in eastern Germany, although it is under a terrific strain, not only has preserved
its liberty, you all know that the Church has been strong enough to tell the youth that would accept this kind of a consecration to the state, the communist state called Jugendwehr, that the Church has been strong enough to tell the youth you are not going, you will not be admitted to communion if you accept the consecration to the communist state. This is not a fight for a political end, this is a fight for a Christian principle,
for a truth which is in the gospel that a man cannot be servant of God and servant of totalitarian power. Now this is typically what I call Christian witness, and it is perfectly possible in the communist world. It is hard, it is a hard struggle. The student pastor in Leipzig, as you may know, has been in prison lately because he was opposed to the Jugendwehr and express it but it is a possible struggle. And I would
here evoke, not because I approve him entirely, I have strong divergences with him, but I would evoke the figure of a man that some of you may recognize in the description I'm going to give of him, but I shall not pronounce his name. He is a professor of theology and has been I think for a time not very far from here in Philadelphia and he is living in West, in East Germany and is teaching at one
of the universities there. He is a member of the communist party. Now this is something that seems to you perhaps shocking. It is less shocking for us French people. We have every Sunday in our church audiences members of the communist party. I have had among my church members even a member of the elders who was coming every Sunday morning with a red star and his lepo and it was of course quite clear with him that that
would mean that he was politically a communist but that he didn't accept the philosophy of marxist materialism in all its implications. Well this man, although he's a very sophisticated Christian, believes that he can be a member of the communist party. But being a member doesn't mean for him that he is silent. Every time he notices, he knows of an injustice, of denial of human dignity, of human liberty inflicted by the occupying Russians or by the German
communist party. Any segregation against this or that student or that person that he knows, my friend goes to Berlin. He knocks on the door of some of the leading authorities there and has obtained the liberation of several people and justly treated because he's courageous. He has been himself menaced of course of expulsion from the party, menaced of being imprisoned but he takes it for his duty. He says being a communist I take it for my duty
to resist the state when the state is committing injustice. And if you add to that that he, when I met him for the last time, took my coach with a tremendous authority and said pulling me eastward, saying, Henry what are you doing in the west? Don't you know that the west is rotten? That the pursuit of money, the pursuit of more goods, more material goods is not what Jesus Christ has taught us in the gospel. We
know here in the east, I know perfectly well that revolution doesn't go without mistakes but at least our aim is to found a world which will be closer to the gospel of Jesus Christ than the western world. I have lived in the west. I have left the west. I couldn't breathe in the west. Here I feel at home. Why don't you come and join us in this great struggle in 10 or 20 years? Of course it
will be a period of suffering and of anguish but in 10 and 20 years when you will ask a young man to follow Jesus Christ and not to serve mammon, he will be able to do it while a young man in the west cannot do it. He's caught by the pursuit of money, the need for to compete with other people, to grab for more goods because this is the only way to survive in the west. In
the east we are relaxed. In the east we know that this is not the purpose of society but we pursue justice and so on. It was very moving. It was very moving and should, if we do not agree, and I couldn't agree with him because I do not see in the dictatorship, in the communist dictatorship, a way to go back to freedom. I see appearing new methods of exploitation and I do not see how they will
be able to go back to freedom and this is why I couldn't agree with him. I said your illusion is that you will be able to find a way back. I'm not sure it will be possible. Therefore I'm not agreed with him but anyhow we should be much more clear in our minds that the rejection, our block, the complete erasing from our minds of the possibility to live in the communist regime and to remain a Christian
should not be admitted and sometimes, although I am a decided anti-communist, in seeing, looking at the situation of Europe, seeing how France is fatally driven by its old imperialistic attitude to fight for maintaining its rule against the wishes of the population. The Algerian war is not popular but it's a kind of vicious circle out of which we cannot escape. The man who possesses cannot easily get rid of his possession and when I see Western Germany
that is so much hailed and admired by American newspapers where my friends, my best friends in the church of Western Germany are deploring what they see that after so much suffering, so much tragedy, Western Germany has not been able to create a new world but has been caught in the old fatal search for prosperity, for money, has gone back to vulgar materialism, the hunting for material goods instead of being liberated, being free to serve God out
of this tragedy of the destruction of Germany in 1945. I sometimes wonder if a hospital, a cure with a good surgical operation in the hands of the communists would not be necessary, even in our countries. I see it clearly for the underdeveloped countries, I see it also for the countries that I would call post-democratic. For after all we should also not forget that if there is a pre-democratic dictatorship and if there is a communist
dictatorship there are also what I call post-democratic dictatorships. I'm calling now by their name the dictatorship of Mussolini, the dictatorship of Hitler and the dictatorship of Franco and the dictatorship that may come to France someday if our democratic regime is unable to solve the multiple problems, the multiple impasses before which we stand. What is the post-democratic dictatorship? It is an adaptation of the communist dictatorial methods to fight a struggle against communism. I repeat, because
this is important, you may someday, my dear American friends, be tempted to resort to that method. Mussolini, after the First World War, seeing Italy on the verge of becoming communist, copied the methods of Lenin to better fight Lenin, meaning that he had the one-party system, that he had the secret police system, that he had the reorganization of the state from the top to the bottom, the disciplining of the individual and so on, and the suppression
of civil liberties, with one difference, that at least in the communist regime this is done for the sake of a complete reshaping of society, for a complete sharing of riches, for a complete reorganization of education and for instructing people to serve the collectivity instead of serving their own interests, while the tragedy of fascism is that it is a dictatorship without horizon, a dictatorship without aim. Those who have lived in Italy, I have visited Italy many times,
in Mussolini, and I've been lately in Spain, know that the horror of the Franco regime is that everybody hates it because there is no future, there is no aim. The aim is simply to maintain the privileges of those who possess, to maintain the upper class at its post, and yet they are enduring all the suffering, all the surgical operation, all the renunciation to liberties, to freedom they have to endure for a completely unexisting aim. The aim
in Franco-Spain is the glorification of the Spanish nation united to an attempt to control the nation by the Catholic Church. You have read many descriptions, you know how it is, but I still remember this man that we met on the train when we were traveling, my wife and I, a few months ago between Madrid and the French border, a man who could hardly speak another language than Spanish, he couldn't know, but my wife being Italian
and myself having some Latin knowledge, he could understand what he was saying, and he was crying, saying, we are alone in the compartment with him, you know the terrible thing is that in order to eat, we are obliged to lie, to lie, to lie all the time. This was an indictment against fascism, much worse than anything else because it showed the capitulation of a person who hadn't the courage to go to prison, and yet who had
still conscience alive and was obliged to his own conscience in order to obey the fundamental needs of his time. In such a situation, the Christian as a non-violent disciple of Christ can only do one thing to resist. Now here still I have to draw a line, non-violent resistance cannot be a resistance to overthrow a government. If you want to overthrow a government, as the Algerians try today to overthrow the French government in Algeria, if
your party is about to be destroyed by the secret police, you will have at one moment to take arms and to use violence. It's the deep philosophy of Mohammed. The line of partition between Mohammed and Jesus Christ runs at the moment Mohammed being menaced by his own cousins, the Qurayshids in Mecca, who were about to take him and to kill him because they disliked his message, fled in 622 to Medina and organized the resistance because he
believed that the prophet of God cannot let himself be killed in the hands of the enemy of God and that he has to resort to war. This was in Mohammed's life probably a lack of faith and a lack of knowledge of a God who is himself a God of humility and sacrifice in Christ. The God of Mohammed was not incarnated and probably he could not, because he was reincarnated, act in another way than to defend himself
in the most carnal way. It's one of these returning of the situations. If you want to be too absolute, sometimes you go too far in the other sense. Well, let us abandon Mohammed and come back to the church and the nonviolent Christian in a fascist or in a Nazi regime. We have to get prepared for that possibility. You have to get prepared. Remember that if tomorrow, in fact, America would be about to be invaded by Russians,
there would be a strong chance for your government suddenly to become dictatorial by fear and by the need of defending the easygoing American and to crystallize this fluid nation that you are, this fluid critical nation just as fluid and critical as the French nation. All these wonderful newspaper men who are all the day drawing cartoons and telling little stories about the White House, you see, and if to stop that and to crystallize everything, suddenly you would
have a collective emotion throwing you in a dictatorial adventure, which would be the most disastrous of all because it would be a dictatorial adventure to save your interests, your privileges, and not a dictatorial adventure to change society and to improve its deep constitution. Well, there the duty of the church is resistance, but not in a magnificent story of the confessing church, a minority in the Protestant church of Germany, in Germany during the Second World War, who
was not struggling at the beginning, not even to protect Jewish lives. They were not so advanced. Many of the members of the confessing church were sharing racial prejudice, the strange thing, but they were constrained to in front of the menace of the what was called the German Christians who wanted to unite all confessions into a kind of a vague Germanic creed. They were felt bound to confess at Barman the traditional Augustinian confession of faith and to
remind the population and the members of the church that the church is founded upon holy baptism and that you enter in the church by baptism and by no other means, and baptism cannot be refused to anybody Jew or pagan. And this was the beginning of the tremendous adventure which has resulted by a moral defeat of Hitler struggling against a handful of confessional members of the church, confessional pastors and members of the church. And the interesting result
is that, as you know, Martin Niemöller, the leader of this confessing movement, who was a very conservative Lutheran in his still, and his followers like some of the bishops, Wurm who is dead, El who is dead, Wilm who is still alive, another man called Kloppenburg and other people, these people imposing the foundation of eternal truth again, which is confessed by the church, laid the cornerstone of new Germany. If there is something new in Germany today, it
was laid by them. Because the supreme thing that we do, my friends, is not to try to improve the world, but is to confess our faith. It's the confession of our faith used by God, which is able to regenerate the world. In fact, we do not regenerate the world. We do not change the world, but we remind the world that God is able to regenerate him. At this point, I want to tell you a last word,
a last word of conclusion. I have seen so many conflicts. I've been through two world wars, two invasions. I am now deeply involved in the North African conflict. I know that the testimony of the church goes through what I would call tunnels, dark times when you simply maintain the truth without knowing where the light is going to come from. And we should remember that Gethsemane was a tunnel. The victory of Christ was not yet there when
he was praying on his knees. The church goes through these tunnels. In world history, it goes through these tunnels until later on, if we have remained faithful to Christ, which remains to his love and to nonviolence, which is, of course, one of the evident consequences of this attitude of faith, then later on, if we look backwards, we understand what did happen. In a private conversation this afternoon, I said, certainly the apostles of Jesus Christ, when the
eleven who had survived organized the church in teaching, preaching, and nonviolence, and when one after the other, they fell victims of their love attitude, when all, finally, they were crucified or beheaded, the disciples did not know the future. We, looking back towards the apostolic times, we say that, of course, it was the will of God, it was that the church should conquer the world in such a way, but they didn't know. They did simply rely upon
God, they trusted him, they obeyed him, and they persevered in faith, and should our fate today, should our destiny be different, should the church of Christ not today confronted by dictators instead of making plans for its self-defense or the defense of the West by missiles or by other procedures or, on the contrary, trying to make a daydream, to imagine what the defense of the West could be against dictatorships in using nonviolence, which is just as
unrealistic as any other dream. Why should we not accept the day after day attitude of obedience to the certain amount of faith in God, of confidence in the power of redemption in Christ, completely disarmed and nonviolent, witnessing for the one who is the great victor of history? And then later on, our sons or grandsons turning back, looking back to ourselves, would say, of course, God had chosen that way to expand the gospel in the world, but
I do not see how in turning back and examining the history of the 20th century, they could ever say it was the missile or it was the H-bomb who saved Christianity or it was the Christian missions in the Arab countries.