Great Throughts Treasury

"The powers of this world, founded upon force and forging ever more perfect weapons of death, will always dismiss Him as impossible."

"Here then, is modern man, disposed to treat himself as a denizen of this world and nothing more. What is the huge and patent result? Well, it is plain enough. He begins to work and strive exclusively for an object in this world. The purpose of his work is not the reasonable satisfaction of human needs in order that the spiritual destiny of man may be achieved, but the accumulation of material power, prestige, gain. And man himself becomes the servant, the slave of this process. The end of human activity is no longer a human end, but something inhuman. Man is not to be regarded as the master and ruler of the world process. He has banished God, he has banished the eternal meaning from his politics and economics, but it is not his humanity that is allowed to supply the meaning. And it must be so. For in turning from God he turned from himself. In starting a non-religious civilization he impoverished his own manhood, and stood, a poor defenseless organism of dust, before the mighty forces which he had unchained but could no longer control."

"We are living in what is probably one of the supreme crises in human history. [I can assure you that it is with no light sense of my responsibility that I speak to you at this time, upon the basic issues of human life.] The profoundest thought now in the world is persuaded that we have reached the end of the modern experiment. The spiritual springs of what we have called the modern world are exhausted. Its driving force has gone. The economic breakdown is but the outer symbol of a deep-seated collapse of the human spirit. And that is why those people who fondly imagine that we are experiencing no more than a specially severe example of a periodic trade slump are dangerously deceiving themselves. There is going to be no such industrial revival as will restore for us the old, comfortable life upon the old foundations. Economically we have reached what my friend Fr. Demant calls one of the major crises in man's history."