Not all of us faced the same grim destiny as the permanent China residents. Many of us could return to an un-scarred and prosperous America. For us the end of the war meant, in fact, the freedom and opportunity for which we had all longed.

About the middle of September, three weeks after he had arrived among us, Colonel Brooks announced that at last he had been able to arrange rail transportation to the coast for those Americans and British who wished to return to their homelands. He told us that soon after we reached Tsingtao, ships would take us to San Francisco or to England, as the case might be.

We left the camp on September 25, 1945, and a strange, dreamlike, overwhelmingly exciting day it was. How could I say goodbye under such circumstances? I knew the parting was for good; that the world was too big and our lots too diverse for us ever to meet again; that even if we did meet through some chance encounter, the relationship we had enjoyed would have vanished with its context. Both context and relationship would be at best old memories rehearsed over a drink, but never relived in any depth or intensity. The farewells were too ultimate even to be sad.

Besides, those of us who were walking out the gate for the last time were looking eagerly ahead to the trucks that waited to carry us into the promising future, and not particularly heeding our disconsolate friends waving from the wall. Many of these had little future and were now losing their one firm reality, the recent past of internment life. Glancing back for a moment at those waving hands, the thought came to me that only when destiny gives us the great gift of an open future are we able fully to live, for intense life in the present is made up in large part of expectancy. Whenever we are alive and excited, it is the future and not the past that enlivens the present moment.

As the army trucks lumbered across the plain to the city, we could see that past receding in proportion to the diminishing size of the camp compound; with each yard forward, we could feel an increment of freedom and with each mile the patterns of normal life seemed to flow back like refreshed blood into our veins.

I felt gloriously alive when I walked into a comfortable railway coach, picked out my own seat next to a window, and watched the countryside flash by. Here were towns and villages, animals and birds, people waving, and the delights of a changing landscape. Each one of us felt himself to be alive and real again. We had left the bloodless life of camp and each had become once more a participating part of the interrelated system of things and people that make up our universe.

Life is participation, I thought, and as it dies when that participation is cut off, so it lives again when the world is re-entered. I think the leisurely picnic lunch which we all enjoyed as the train rushed along through farmlands and villages to Tsingtao was the happiest and most completely carefree meal of my life. Not even for a moment could we keep our eyes off the world of which we were now a part.

Perhaps the most moving aspect of that day's ride was the sight of countless Chinese—farmers, merchants, peddlers, women, children—who lined the tracks in towns or ran from their fields in the countryside toward us, cheering and waving at the train as we passed. We were their allies; we had been captured by our common enemy; now our forces had defeated the hated invader of their country. They stood for hours to give us that momentary expression of their support as our train flashed past.

How variable and transient the most genuine of political sentiments are is shown by the ironic fact that the same group of American and British residents would now be booed, if not attacked, by these same Chinese. The only friendly reception for which such a group might now have some feeble hope would be from the villages and farms of Japan.

We reached Tsingtao in the late afternoon. Again an immense crowd lined the streets to greet us; we were whisked in cabs through these cheering throngs to a luxurious Western-style hotel on the bay commandeered for us by the United States army. We could not but laugh happily at the contrast to our burdened march through Peking two and one-half years before on March 25, 1943.

The hotel was out of this world, a galaxy of wonders to our unaccustomed senses. I stopped short after I had gone through the revolving doors—what was I standing on? I laughed at myself when I looked down and saw a thick carpet under my feet. A large room for two was stranger still. There was space to move about in, a dresser for clothes, and hot water that came out of the faucet when one turned it on! These elements of civilized life greeted us from every side; we said "Hello" to them with a most intense delight. The normal patterns of existence were falling into place one by one.

The final touch to this amazing day came when, showered and shaved, we went down to dinner. A head waiter greeted us at the door of the grand dining hall, ushered us to a table set with tablecloth and silver, and presented us each with an immense menu replete with every delicacy. After we had ordered varied combinations of seafood, steak, and wine, we turned in our chairs to listen to a jazz band, from a visiting American battle cruiser, playing for us the newly popular song, "Don't Fence Me In!"

All too soon we became accustomed to luxury. After a few days, we were itching to be off and home. At the end of ten days, early in October, a troopship arrived to take the Americans in our group to the States. We were bundled aboard with a couple of thousand marines, and we set off for Shanghai, Okinawa, Hawaii, and the west coast of the United States. It was hardly a comfortable or memorable passage. Having been completely closeted from the action of the war, our communication with the soldiers fresh from combat was minimal. They seemed surprised and a little resentful when we prisoners admitted that we had not been badly mistreated—as if a person were a bit of a phony if he hadn't suffered in a camp. We, too, began to feel a touch uncomfortable about our relatively easy lot at Weihsien.

To ease the boredom, one of my friends from camp and I volunteered to work one shift in the ship's bakery, run by a regular navy baker of twenty-three, assisted by a pickup crew of homebound marines. The difference from our camp bakery was laughable: with inexhaustible supplies and mechanized equipment, we could turn out bread, cakes, and pies for two thousand people almost between smokes. I shall never forget our feelings when the young cook, upon discovering there were lumps in the filling for his two hundred and fifty lemon meringue pies, calmly pulled the release lever and sent the whole lot into the Pacific!

After four and one-half weeks at sea, we arrived at San Francisco, and debarked into the midst of a bustling and sumptuous America. One of the few really unpleasant experiences I have had was when the State Department man who came aboard to interview us asked me if I had stayed in China deliberately to escape the draft. Looking at his well-fattened jowls and rotund middle, I asked him why he had chosen "diplomacy" as his contribution to the war effort, and heard no more about the matter.

A week or so later, on March 11, 1946, I was home in Chicago. America was a dream world. All the familiar sights, sounds, and smells, the well-loved people, the buildings and the streets of the university community were there. Yet inwardly, I was a man from another planet.

Everything was absolutely normal—and totally strange. I did not know how to go about finding my place in it. People would tell me how much they had suffered from the rationing. "Why there were times when we had barely enough sugar or butter. Steaks were scarce, and gas was so hard to get that we had to form car pools." I would murmur some word of sympathy. Then they would remember where I had been, and would say, "Oh, but how silly, when you suffered so gravely."

I had in honesty to reply, "On the contrary, we didn't suffer very much." Then our estrangement would be complete, neither of us understanding the world that the other had experienced.

One day shortly after my return, I went with my mother to the grocery on the corner of 55th Street and Woodlawn Avenue in Chicago. It was by no means a supermarket—only an ordinary corner grocery. And yet it completely overwhelmed me. I stood in the middle staring at those shelves piled high with food, cereals, breads, canned vegetables, fruit, and meats, layer on layer of food, spilling over, piles of it in corners, and beyond the butcher's counter, there was more piled high in unopened crates and boxes.

I felt engulfed in food, drowned in immense and inexhaustible wealth, stuffed and bloated with so many fats, calories, and vitamins that I wanted to run outside. Meanwhile, people in the store were talking of their relief that the rigors of rationing were over. I understood then what real affluence meant. The break with our life in camp, which obviously still dominated my consciousness, seemed infinite. What possible bond was there between that life and this?

The next morning at breakfast the cartoon in the paper caught my eye. It was the time when UNRRA (United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration', was embarking on its program; people in Washington were beginning to talk about American aid to devastated countries, the talk that ultimately flowered in the Marshall Plan. Sensing what it termed the misguided "dogoodism" involved in these humanitarian schemes, the Chicago Tribune was already mounting its attack. The cartoon that morning pictured a benevolent but naïve figure labeled UNCLE SUCKER, who was being milked of his possessions by wily and well-fed foreigners. The caption read:

DON'T LET THEM GIVE AWAY WHAT IS OURS.

Suddenly a bell rang in my mind: I heard the voice of Rickey Kolcheck saying, "These are my parcels, and no one's going to take a single one from me"—and I felt at once completely at home. Amid all our plenty we, in overstuffed America, faced precisely the same crisis over which we had struggled with our seven and one-half parcels in a starving camp. The level of material wealth at issue was vastly different. But the human problems remained identical—except that now the stakes were higher.

Could we summon the moral strength, as well as the wisdom and prudence, to share our wealth with a now famished world? Or would we hoard it to ourselves, stuffing ourselves with surfeit but in doing so demolishing all hopes of achieving a humane and peaceful world community?

With a sinking heart, I realized that nowhere could one escape these deeper issues of life: on every level the same choice remains, for the same moral problem is posed to us.

A week or so later I was asked to speak on my experiences. The notion of the continuity of moral problems through the variables of situations fascinated me. I built the speech around that subject. I gave that talk about twice a week for the next six months, at service clubs, women's clubs, schools, and churches around Chicago, in the Midwest generally, and later in Virginia and Tennessee.

The reactions illuminated the thesis of the speech and the themes of my thoughts concerning the human condition. Every-one was quite genuinely horrified on hearing the story of the Red Cross parcels. All found it hard to believe that "Americans" could have acted so selfishly. But when the parallel was drawn, and the similar choice that faced the audience as Americans in today's world was described, most persons in the audience would draw back. My listeners seemed to find the two situations quite dissimilar. They argued with me afterward that whereas to share with one's fellows in a camp was a human necessity, to give those foreigners free food that belonged to us was immoral.

One meeting of a women's church group especially fascinated me. We met in a mammoth suburban residence outside Chicago, the expansive driveway lined with black Cadillacs and Lincolns. This group contained some forty middle-aged women, elegantly dressed and adorned.

As I spoke to these smiling and gracious ladies in the living room, out of the corner of my eye I could see two or three maids putting sandwiches, cookies, and towering chocolate cakes on the dining room table. I suppose I stressed the problems of hunger and the need for sharing even more than usual as my eye traveled from minks to gentle, round faces, to chauffeurs pacing outside, and then back to the cakes again. When I had finished, the president, whose face had worn a slight frown during the latter course of my talk, called for questions. When none was proffered, she rose and addressed the following remarks to me.

"I think our visitor, for all his good intentions, does not understand our point of view on these matters. You see, we don't believe at all in the value of material things. It is the spiritual values of life that we feel are significant. We believe that what America has to offer the world is her spiritual superiority, not any advantage she may have in the realm of mere material goods. Thus we would like to encourage the export to Europe and the rest of the world of our great spiritual ideals, our religious faith, and our sense of morality and of the value of the inner life. So we send moral and religious writings abroad, and do not approve of concentrating on the things that are not so important to the welfare of the soul. That is why we do not support UNRRA; we think it is a shame that more of the churches, which should represent the spiritual and not the material, do not share our views. If there are, then, no more questions let us adjourn the meeting. I can see our hostess has provided us with tantalizing refreshments in the dining room."

Thirty minutes later, as I walked past the long line of elegant limousines, my mouth still filled with the thick sweetness of whipped cream and chocolate, I tasted in all its bitter comedy the irony of the human condition. This girdled and minked group was surfeited in material comfort, and yet they saw themselves as believers solely in the spiritual! It was this very self-deception, necessary for conscience' sake, that allowed them to ignore the claims of their neighbors on their comfort, that made them delight in sharing their "faith" but not their food with a starving world, and that caused them to be the most totally unspiritual and insensitive group I had addressed in a year's time!

Only those, so I mused, who can understand, if not by experience then by sympathy, the full weight of material want and so the value of material goods, can possibly comprehend what the real spiritual issues of life are. For to wish and seek for justice in material things for one's neighbor is perhaps the highest of spiritual attainments, since it is the expression in social relations of what it means to love one's neighbor.* A healthy spirituality, to be spiritual and not callous, must affirm the material order, and concern itself with it—with housing, food, warmth, and comfort. At the same time, a healthy material order is possible only where there is enough moral strength to maintain a responsible integrity with regard to property, a just distribution with regard to goods, and as free an exercise of each one's creativity as is possible. So do the material and the spiritual realms, the secular and the religious, not exclude but cry out for each other. They are but different aspects of our one created, organic human life. And woes betide the philosopher, the theologian, or the society that seeks to sunder them!

Still fascinated by the continuity I discovered between the problems in camp and those which any wider society faced, I spent the winter of my twenty-seventh year pondering what I thought I had learned about man. Eagerly I devoured a good deal of philosophy, psychology, and theology, trying to check each discipline against the experience I had just quitted, since I was now sure that it was a valid sample of our human condition. In this interchange between theory and experience, I began to see some glimmering of answers to the questions which camp life had risen.

The most obvious dilemma had been the moral one: men must be just, fair, and generous if a creative and stable society is to be possible at all, and yet apparently this is for us a supremely difficult if not impossible task. How are we to understand our-selves; why does such an obvious necessity seem so unattainable and even unnatural to our present nature? As in camp, I continued to find both the humanistic and the rigidly pietistic answers to these questions unsatisfactory.

Those humanists who insist that men are naturally wise and good enough to be moral seemed to me to be continually refuted by the patent persistence of dangerous selfishness among people

As Nicholas Berdyaev once wrote: "To eat bread is a material act, to break and share it a spiritual one" whose intentions were good. Those religious perfectionists who believe that pious Christians are holy and holy people are good were refuted by the intolerance and lovelessness of many of the pious. Against both, therefore, the evidence revealed that it is above all things difficult to be good, and that in all of us—the wise, the idealistic, and the religious alike—lay deep forces beyond our easy control which often push us seemingly in spite of ourselves into selfish acts.

Liberal humanists of ten express amazement that their apparently intelligent Christian friends believe many things about God which cannot be proven. At least the Christian can answer that what he believes about God cannot be disproved. But the main article of faith of the humanist, namely, the goodness of mankind and man's consequent capacity to be moral, is refuted by any careful study of human nature. If it is unreasonable to hold a religious faith that cannot be demonstrated, surely it is irrational to defend a humanistic faith that the evidence so universally contradicts.

Our camp experience demonstrated that two things can safely be said about mankind. First, it seemed certain enough that man is immensely creative, ingenious, and courageous in the face of new problems. But it was also equally apparent that under pressure he loves himself and his own more than he will ever admit. Furthermore, both the universality and yet the puzzling "unnaturalness" of this self-love were certainly established by our experience, for men consistently denied the motivations which equally consistently determined their conduct. If men were just plain "good," this self-love would not have been so clearly pervasive in all they did. If, on the other hand, they were just plain "bad," if this self-love were simply "natural" to man, those who acted upon it would not have been so intent to deny its presence and to claim that their acts flowed instead from moral intentions.

The camp experience indicated, moreover, that a man's morality or immorality stems from the deepest spiritual center of his life—from what has been called by Paul Tillich his ultimate loyalty or concern—that center of devotion in a man's existence which provides for his life its final security and meaning, and to which, therefore, he gives his ultimate love and commitment.

Every man has such a spiritual center of security and meaning. It gives his activities purpose and significance, and thus provides his existence with coherence and direction. If anything should happen to this center, a man feels that his life is radically insecure and totally incoherent, that its pieces fall apart into uncoordinated bits. Existence then degenerates into a series of events and actions that lead nowhere, produce nothing, and so mean nothing.

Like the gods of primitive religion, this ultimate concern is something which a man worships with his whole being because it is the source of all value to him, that is, of all security and significance to his life. So, like the god of any worshiper, it determines in turn the decisions a man makes and ultimately the way in which he behaves.

These centers of ultimate concern vary greatly. For a great many men the preservation and advancement of their own power be it financial, political, military, or social, may be what provides them with a sense of security and meaning. Such men will feel radical anxiety and the threat of insignificance until their own position and wealth are advanced to a point where it appears they cannot be threatened by competition. For others it may be their job or profession—be it music, art, scholarship or science—for which they will sacrifice everything, because from it they receive all their meaning. Still others find this sense of security and meaning in the status of their families or of their social group, such as their class, nation, or race, through whose wider success their own precarious security and fragmented meaning gain status.

When, in this sense, a man gives his ultimate devotion to his own welfare or to the welfare of his group, he is no longer free to be completely moral or rational when he finds himself under pressure. Whenever the security of the object of this commitment is threatened, he is driven by an intense anxiety to reinforce that security.

If the total meaning of his life depends upon his own welfare, a shortage of food will threaten the one thing significant to his whole existence and, whether he would ordinarily approve of his actions or not, he will do almost anything to make sure he is fed. His moral interest in the security of others will recede in importance before this challenge to the central concern of his life; and his rational sense of what is just and fair will lose its power to determine his actions.

Although under this kind of pressure he does, as we have seen, act immorally and unjustly, these moral and rational powers do not completely disappear. They remain, but as the servants of his greater concern, his own welfare. Thus, while he still finds himself demanding the seven and one-half parcels for himself, or desperately hanging onto his own living space, he uses moral and rational arguments to justify his self-concern. In this situation, no amount of intelligence or of ideals and good intentions will change his behavior or free him from his selfishness so that he can be good. The more acute mind of the intelligent man may well fashion more plausible rationalizations than can the slower mind of his neighbor. In each of our crucial moral issues this pattern repeated itself: over and over the more educated and respectable people defended their self-concern with more elegant briefs. We came, indeed, to have a grudging respect for the open rascal. He, at least, was forthright in admitting his selfishness.

When a man's basic security is not in danger, when he deals, as in research, with problems that do not concern his own welfare, a man's moral and rational powers are free to function with benevolence and wisdom. Out of experiences in such situations arises the humanist's faith in man's moral self-sufficiency and in his capacity for moral progress. But when man's self is basically threatened, when he is involved in the crisis, a new power enters the scene, a power seemingly stronger than either the moral consciousness or the objective mind. It is the embattled ego fighting with every weapon at its disposal for its own security.

The ethical issues of human community life are, therefore, the outward expression in action of deeper, more inward issues, we might say religious issues. For religion concerns men's ultimate loyalty; those things, be they gods or idols, to which men give their final devotion and commitment. It is what we can only call the religious worship of a finite creature—that creature being one’s owns life or that of his group—that causes the disruptions and conflicts of society. When our ultimate concern is directed to some partial or limited interest, we can, as I found, scarcely avoid inhumanity toward those outside that interest.

Injustice to other men, as Reinhold Niebuhr has said, is the social consequence of an inward idolatry, the worship of one's own self or group. The moral problems of selfishness, the intellectual problems of prejudice, and the social problems of dishonesty, inordinate privilege, and aggression are all together the result of the deeper religious problem of finding in some partial creature the ultimate security and meaning which only the Creator can give.

This then is the religious meaning of sin, far different from the usual meaning given it by the legalist mentality. Sin may be defined as an ultimate religious devotion to a finite interest; it is an overriding loyalty or concern for the self, its existence and its prestige, or for the existence and prestige of a group. From this deeper sin, that is, from this inordinate love of the self and its own, stem the moral evils of indifference, injustice, prejudice, and cruelty to one's neighbor, and the other destructive patterns of action that we call "sins."

Religion does not seem to be, as Matthew Arnold said, "Morality tinged with emotion." Rather, the reverse appears to be truer. A man's morality is his religion enacted in social existence. The rare power of selflessness, what we call true "morality" or "virtue," arises only when a life finds its ultimate devotion to lie beyond itself, thus allowing that person in times of crisis to forget his own concerns and to be free to love and help his neighbor.

The religious dimensions of man's existence can be, therefore, not only the ground of its only hope, but the source of life's deepest perversion. For man's sin is religious in character as is his selflessness, if by religion we mean, as we do here, the ultimate concern or commitment of a man's life.

This is why human religion is so ambiguous and has been the seat of history's greatest fanaticisms and cruelty as well as of its transcendent spiritual grandeur.

This religious dimension of life, giving it its demonic and its self-sacrificial character permeates our personal, communal, and political existence. The presence of this dimension more than anything else renders false any purely secular account of man's problems and hopes. At the very moment man declares himself most proudly to "have come of age," and so to be free at last of "religion," he falls prey to some new personal, political, or racial idolatry which plunges his social life again into turmoil.

At the religious level of existence both our sin and the possibility of our salvation appear, for there our ultimate loyalty is determined. The question in human life is not whether a person, or a society, is religious or not, for no human can escape some ultimate commitment. The question is: To what sort of deity are we ultimately loyal, and what kind of god claims our deepest love and devotion?

While all men are thus religious, by no means are all forms of religion equally creative or uncreative. The common idea that a man's religion is a purely subjective and personal matter, without relevance to his behavior or character is, I believe, quite false. It separates inward commitment and outward behavior, which are intimately related. It is, in fact, the otherwise admirable trait of loyalty to one's family, one's group or nation which, when it becomes central, is the root of much of the injustice, pride, and selfishness we have described and with which we are surrounded.

The only hope in the human situation is that the "religiousness" of men finds its true center in God, and not in the many idols that appear in the course of our experience. If men are to forget themselves enough to share with each other, to be honest under pressure, and to be rational and moral enough to establish community, they must have some center of loyalty and devotion, some source of security and meaning, beyond their own welfare.

This center of loyalty beyond themselves cannot be a human creation, greater than the individual but still finite, such as the family, the nation, tradition, race, or the church. Only the God who created all men and so represents none of them exclusively; only the God who rules all history and so is the instrument of no particular historical movement; only the God who judges His faithful as well as their enemies, and loves and cares for all, can be the creative center of human existence.

The ultimate concern of each man must raise him above his struggles with his neighbor instead of making these conflicts more bitter and intense. Given an ultimate security in God's eternal love, and an ultimate meaning to his own small life in God's eternal purposes, a man can forget his own welfare and for the first time look at his neighbor free from the gnawing of self-concern.

From this we can perhaps now see what the man of real faith is like. He is the man whose center of security and meaning lies not in his own life but in the power and love of God, a man who has surrendered an overriding concern for himself, so that the only really significant things in his life are the will of God and his neighbor's welfare. Such faith is intimately related to love, for faith is an inward self-surrender, a loss of self-centeredness and concern which transforms a man and frees him to love.

The Catholic world calls this depth of self-surrender caritas, the total love of God, and through that love the love of man. The Protestant world calls it "faith," an ultimate trust in God's love and power as the sole basis of the self's life and status. And rightly in both of them this principle of self-surrender to God, which is always the gift of grace, is the basis of what has traditionally been called "salvation." We would probably more easily define the latter reality—so far as we experience it—as an inner serenity of spirit, the capacity for healthy and real relations with others, and a creative concern for the world around us and for our neighbors.

This sort of faith is far different from what we usually associate with religious "belief." To most people "faith" means belief in a set creed or in a list of biblical fundamentals. Moreover, the sort of freedom from anxiety about the self we have mentioned is far different from a rigorous adherence to any particular rule of piety. A man may assent with his mind and lips to even the greatest truths, and practice in his acts all the rules of piety and holiness, and still keep the center of his concern fixed selfishly on his own bodily or spiritual welfare.

Only this is certain: If a man is too sure that he has, through his religion, surrendered his concern for himself and achieved virtue, it is fairly safe to conclude that his security no longer rests in the love of God but in his own holiness. His life then merely reenacts the sin of self-idolatry in a Christian garb. The final pinnacle of faith, therefore, is to recognize our continuing self-concern and thus to trust our inner peace to the love of God alone. In this way even our anxiety about our own holiness and our own salvation is surrendered. The insight that the man of real faith knows he is justified by a grace from beyond himself and never by his own works is the heart of the message of God's love in the New Testament. It is the deepest answer to the dilemmas of man's moral life over which my thoughts that winter puzzled,

The other problem, arising from the camp experience that often occupied my mind was that of meaning in a time of social chaos. At first it seemed as if this one at least had been left behind me in China. What kind of social chaos did postwar America face with its preponderant power in the world, its booming economy, and its seemingly stable political and social order? How in America could "meaning" be a problem to any person of education and energy who had a bit of luck? Were there any grounds for comparison between the fate of those British residents of China dislodged rudely from all their structures of value and the success that seemed to beckon those of us Americans who had lived through the war?

I realized anew that the continuities of experience are as great as its discontinuities and that life under stress, while more vivid, was not necessarily atypical. For as the first postwar year developed, rumblings of trouble could be heard on the edges of our "stable" culture. The dismemberment of the older Western empires in Asia and Africa proceeded apace, and European society drew in sharply to its home ground, gearing itself to a new mode of life in a world where voices other than its own could be heard. But more to the point, another form of society, antithetical in its fundamental principles and hostile in at least its present intentions to the West, began to move into the newly vacated spaces, gaining ground month by month.

During that year, the Iron Curtain was lowered over Eastern Europe, a bitter struggle took place for Greece, and even Italy, near the center of Western life, seemed vulnerable. Above all, China changed from the leading Asiatic ally of the West to its most implacable antagonist. With this development, the whole future of a vast portion of Asia, Africa, and even South America became infinitely problematical. The West had to face the possibility that, far from ruling the rest of the globe, she might soon find herself isolated and even besieged by it. It seemed to be only a matter of time until this new hostile or semi hostile bloc would possess the same weapons which the West now controlled. The nuclear strength that had been the very basis of American security rapidly became the prime symbol of a new insecurity.

America and the West faced a totally new situation. Its long-lived and powerful cultural life had been threatened from the inside before, by internecine wars among its own members and by home-grown fanaticisms such as Nazism. Now, however, it confronted a newly risen world outside its own orbit and so beyond the influence of its own deepest traditions and values. To be sure, Western experience and thought had provided the Marxist ideology with which this new world was fashioning itself. But when Marxism was transplanted to the alien soils of Asia, Africa, and South America, it might well lose many of the ties with European tradition which it still maintained, say, in parts of Eastern Europe and in present-day Russia.

Faced with this combination of an alien cultural substance armed with an accelerating power, the West suffered a new inner experience: it became cognizant of its own potential mortality in history. The future no longer seemed to guarantee an extension of the values and social structures which gave Western life its meanings. Rather, the future might now bring the diminution and even the extinction of these values.

Only a few pessimists prophesied the decline of the West—but hardly an aware person did not sniff this new possibility in the air. Wondering what the next decades might bring, he could sense history and the place of the West in it in a different and anxious way. Perhaps Western values would be destroyed. Perhaps change was not always for the best—and perhaps historical change led to no meaningful place at all. And possibly in some not too distant future, Western man would stare at a world in which he was no more at home than were those China residents when they walked out of Weihsien camp with resigned hopelessness—the world of the treaty ports forever lost to them.

The postwar American world was by no means plunged into despair by this new climate. These possibilities were merely that—possibilities, not certainties—and the chances of maintaining the social order without wars seemed steadily to improve as Europe moved back to health. Nevertheless, the older certainty that the future would be structured by Western values had vanished almost without trace; a meaningful history for us was now at best only a possibility. As a direct consequence, the confidence each person felt in the security of the meanings of his own life had vastly diminished.

Out of this new awareness of the relativity of all things human in history has arisen the question of a larger meaning in history as a whole. I had often heard secular philosophers ask with some impatience, "Is there a legitimate question about the meaning of history? Why not be content with small meanings? With social betterment, with the gradual growth of freedom, equality, and order—why ask about the ultimate nature of history when a perfectly full life can be enjoyed among these natural social values?"

Why indeed? Because such "small meanings" or "natural values" are by no means "natural" in history. Rather, they depend upon a stable social order dominated by democratic values and preserved by a vigorous technology under humanitarian control. Just as the meaning of life for a Westerner in the treaty ports of China depended upon the social order that Western dominance had established there, so the values so apparent in America's secular culture depend upon a particular historical order grounded in Western democratic and humanitarian ideals.

Such a social order is by no means certain or dependable in history—unless one assumes on faith that history will necessarily progress along Western humanitarian lines. But it is precisely that assumption that recent history has made dubious. In another sort of social order, on the contrary, such as Fascism projected, and such as the "harder" forms of Communism seem to promise, these democratic "small meanings" or "secular values" are practically impossible and their future questionable indeed. The question of the meaning of history is thus nothing more than the question of whether those "small meanings" that the democratic naturalist seems to take for granted are permanently available to man. Only in terms of an answer to that question can we have any confidence in the smaller meanings of life within which each of us must live to be creative. By saying he is content with the small meanings; the naturalistic philosopher is merely saying he has already answered the question of the meaning of history in terms of the progressivist faith that values are becoming increasingly available.

The uncertainty of the present situation has unsettled our faith in the permanence of Western culture and its values, and thus it has inescapably raised for us the question of the direction of history as a whole. We are being forced to ask whether the rise and fall of cultures constitutes the whole of history, or whether a thread of purpose may run through its course, giving it meaning even if our own order and values are mortal, as we fear.

The question of the ultimate meaning of life, and so of its historical context, is always posed when the mortality of human schemes of order is revealed, and when as a consequence the normal meanings of daily life are threatened or destroyed. With the asking of this question comes the sober realization that it is easy for us to be afraid and anxious in such historical uncertainty, when the threat of total loss or meaninglessness looms ahead of us. It is also obvious that the temptation to fanaticism in such circumstances is indeed great. Finally, it follows that to live with courage, serenity, and a real love of life in the midst of such uncertainty is a difficult task. To be aware of our contingency, of the mortality of all we love and value, and yet to love life and act creatively in it, requires a deeply rooted sense of the ultimate goodness and meaningfulness of life.

It has thus become apparent that a sense of creative freedom in life is bound up with a sense of dependable order in our social structures. When these structures of life are seen to be vulnerable, and our own activities incapable of establishing meaning in the face of uncontrollable forces of historical destruction, the sense of "Fate" grows. And with that sense comes a feeling of helplessness and despair, of having no freedom in the face of implacable Fortune.

To most humanists, living in a stable culture, the belief in the Providence of God seems to be antithetical to the belief in human creativity and freedom—because the established social order already provides a context for that creativity. When culture itself is unstable, and Fate, that ultimate threat to all meaning, seems to rule everything—as the experience of the Hellenistic world showed—all this changes. Then a belief in Providence, in a structure of meaning in which the individual's freedom and acts have value and so can make sense, becomes the foundation of human creative action, and man can believe in himself again.

Such a view of the vulnerability of life's meanings was one of my deepest experiences in camp, and it helped to prepare me for the even deeper abyss into which the postwar Western world has been forced to stare. The universal problem of selfishness, I found, called for the grace and forgiveness of God—both in camp and in the affluent society of America. Similarly, the problem of the fragmentariness of every human meaning seemed now to me to call for the answer of God's Providence, for that unity of divine power and meaning in the course of events that is not threatened by the historical catastrophes that overwhelm us.

Can we make more sense of our historical destiny than merely to speak of Fate and its designs, to say that at times the promise of fulfillment given to one age is inscrutably withdrawn for the next? Is there any steady meaning to which a man in any age or situation can relate himself and which will give significance and so creative zest to his life? What, if anything, is the Providence of God; where does it appear in the experience of mankind's turbulent and uncertain history? Have I, I wondered, found any answers to these questions from the experiences of an internment camp? I thought I had, although what I had learned was admittedly only the barest beginning.

The first lesson concerned what might be called the negative coherence of history, or, alternatively, the partial intelligibility of the meaningless. What is meaningless in the course of events is the fate that destroys the little systems of value and order which buoy us up, and that sets us adrift in a rootless sea of directionless events. The destruction of the whole established order of treaty-port life is one example. But this incoherent Fate is by no means completely unintelligible or blind. It follows its own logic, and that logic leads back to ourselves, to human choices and human freedom, and so it can become understandable to us.

Fate in history is not sheer fate; it is usually in part the consequence of sins in which we share communally if not personally, the effects of some former misuse of freedom. Fate is thus the mask God's judgment in history wears to those who do not know Him. History is blind only to those unfortunate communities that are blind to their own sins. To those who know and repent, there is both intelligibility and the hope of renewal in the ambiguities of time. Providence is then at least partly the divine judgment, enacted in the course of events. Insofar as this is one aspect of Providence, we can be empirically aware of its presence and inwardly certain of its justice.

The fate that overtook the white residents of China was neither arbitrary nor blind. Rather, it represented the slow but certain unraveling of the consequences of the greed and intolerance which accompanied the imperialism of their forerunners. In the same way the peril that threatens Western values is neither the old age of Western culture nor a remorseless Bad Fortune. It is the peril sown by our own sins of omission and commission which have driven men to hostility against us and to ideas antithetical to the ones we espouse. It is, in other words, the betrayal by our culture of the very values we cherish that in our day endangers the life-span of those values. To realize this, and act upon it, is already to make Fate more comprehensible, and to grasp its opportunities.

If to know the Providence of God is first of all to know in part the long-term justice of one's fate, then it is even more to know the universal opportunity which every fateful situation offers to us. For the man who knew nothing of divine Providence, coming to camp was an arbitrary fate that separated him from every familiar meaning by which he had lived his life. To those—and there were many—who found this new situation to be a strange work of Providence, however incomprehensible these purposes were, there could be no such loss of significance in the new and unexpected situation. Here, too, there could be an opportunity and a significant task to be performed—it might not be that of teacher or architect, but it could be that of stoker, cook, or master baker. A sense of significance that is rooted in the purposes of God cannot be lost in any situation. So it is not relinquished when one moves from Tientsin to Weihsien or from a Western-dominated society to another sort apparently shorn of values.

If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there:
If I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there. . . .
Even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me.
Psalm 139:8, 10

The familiar psalm, often repeated but seldom experienced by most of us, had new import for many who found themselves suddenly plunged into a strange and grim existence, separated from all the usual comforts and goals of life—and yet faced with a new opportunity for creative life. For the man of faith, therefore, his most fundamental career, the service of the God who is ever present, remains in every contingency of an unstable history. This structure of meaning is not removed by any historical Fate, for I believe God rules the Fates that appear to rule so powerfully over us.

Even more, what we are called to do in this service also is ever present, a task that no Fate can remove from us. Our particular jobs of salesman, professor, or senator may prove useless in a camp or even in the next historical moment. But our neighbor is always with us, in the city, in the country, or in the camp. If the meaning of life on its deepest level is the service of God—which in turn means the service of the neighbor's needs and fellowship with him—then this is a task that carries over into any new situation. The creation and preservation of life so that it may be enjoyed by all, the development of community in the direction of justice, the satisfaction of the needs of all our fellows through some practical work well done, and finally the creation of fellowship with others—these fundamental tasks, communal expressions in each case of the love of one's neighbor, are present in any historical situation. In each circumstance they call for courage, integrity, self-sacrifice, energy, and intelligence; and on them depends the life of civilization.

On these two bases, therefore—the universal lordship of God and the universal presence of the neighbor with whom we can establish community—a significant vocation or task with religious roots cannot be removed by the ups and downs of historical fortune. On these terms, it is possible to be realistic without fear about our own mortality and that of the things we love, and to affirm without fanaticism our life and its values. Such deep-seated security about our own fate in God, plus a forthright allegiance to what we value and support in the world, will be increasingly necessary for our culture in the years ahead.

One of the strangest lessons that our unstable life-passage teaches us is that the unwanted is often creative rather than destructive. No one wished to go to Weihsien camp. Yet such an experience, resisted and abhorred, had within it the seeds of new insight and thus of new life for many of us. Almost because of its discomfort, its turmoil, and its boredom, it eventually became the source of certainties and of convictions with which life could henceforth be more creatively faced. This is a common mystery of life, an aspect, if you will, of common grace: out of apparent evil new creativity can arise if the meanings and possibilities latent within the new situation are grasped with courage and with faith.

This common experience—that the Fate which we did not welcome has become nevertheless the ground for future creativity —has, more than anything else, led men to speak of the Providence of God and to believe in His universal creative presence. I did not come to believe that God determined all aspects of the events in which I participated. But the experience of creativity in a circumstance neither intended nor wanted, has led me to believe that God works in and through each situation. And strangely, this divine activity provides the possibility of a new departure, a more vivid life, and a deeper joy than could have been provided by the life I had myself intended.

Men need God because their precarious and contingent lives can find final significance only in His almighty and eternal purposes, and because their fragmentary selves must find their ultimate center only in His transcendent love. If the meaning of men's lives is centered solely in their own achievements, these too are vulnerable to the twists and turns of history, and their lives will always teeter on the abyss of pointlessness and inertia. And if men's ultimate loyalty is centered in themselves, then the effect of their lives on others around them will be destructive of that community on which all depend. Only in God is there an ultimate loyalty that does not breed injustice and cruelty, and a meaning from which nothing in heaven or on earth can separate us.



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