My reflection has been devoted to the hitherto general, eternal problems of faith and truth, and proceeded, as it were, sub specie aeternitatis. But the last chapter of its own accord has brought us to the actual religious-moral problems as they await the believer and the truth-seeking consciousness at the present time. I would like to conclude by focusing on these issues.

The epoch of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was, by and large, in spite of some striking exceptions, an epoch of the decline of Christian ecclesiastical consciousness. It is not that the light of Christ's truth has completely been extinguished in her; It's impossible. But in the most influential and dominant currents of human religious and moral thought, it shone for human souls only in distorting refractions, indirectly and reflected. The truth was sought mainly by religiously unbelieving people who had forgotten Christ, who did not understand Him intellectually, in their confession of faith, who renounced Him – people who did not know that in this search in themselves lived the power of the Christ from whom they had renounced. And, on the contrary, among the faithful, as part of the Church, as an empirical-human organization, the radiance and burning of the true truth of Christ has weakened to a considerable extent. This must be openly admitted, although it is necessary to avoid the polemical exaggerations into which the opponents of the Church fell, and not to forget that both individual saints and righteous people, and collective centers of Christian truth, continued to live and act in this epoch as part of the empirically real Church. On the whole, however, there arose that paradoxical situation which deeply saddened all true believing Christians and so keenly struck, for example, the noble heart of Gharles Péguy: namely, that the atheists fought for truth and love, while the believers who considered themselves to be members of the Church of Christ either remained indifferent and passive, or even entered into an alliance with evil.

The turning point, if not stopping, then weakening this unnatural situation, was the awakening of the Christian conscience, the sense of Christian responsibility after the world war of 1914-1918, in the twenties of our century, as it was expressed in the movement of social Christianity in England and in the "Stockholm" ecumenical movement of rapprochement between Christian confessions on the basis of common work for the moral regeneration of mankind. One can rightly speak of a movement of Christian revival that has begun in our time, although it is still relatively weak.

In order to understand the meaning and task of the Christian revival, it is necessary to re-realize what the Church of Christ actually means. I spoke about the idea of the church above, in the third chapter of this reflection. But I would like to return here to this topic, namely, to try to sum up the practical and essential result of what has been said above, bypassing as far as possible the entire complex problematics of the question, the entire antinomianism of the concept of the Church that has become clear to us. Let us ask ourselves: what is the Christian Church, as a concrete human reality, conceived in its true essence and purpose? It is, in short, partly a deliberately organized union, partly an involuntary, natural unity of all people, in whose souls shines the inexplicably enchanting image of Christ, or, at least, the flame of Christ's love actually burns – the union and unity of all people who believe that the power that saves and renews the world is self-sacrificing love, and who strive, to the best of their ability, to live and build their lives in accordance with this faith. It can be said that the only unconditionally obligatory "dogma" of the Christian faith, which distinguishes a Christian from a non-Christian, is faith in the absolute value and divine meaning of love, a confession – and moreover, not verbal and intellectual, but actual moral – of this faith; this, according to the above-quoted word of the Apostle (1 John 3:10), is recognized as "the children of God" and "the children of the devil"; This is the boundary separating the "Church" from the "world." Christians – or, to avoid using this worn-out, faded and compromised term, disciples of Christ, members of a mysterious all-embracing union that preserves in its bosom the living mystical reality of Christ and lives by it – are people who, in spite of all the bitter experience of earthly life about the wisdom of the "children of this world," realize that there is only one force that makes sense of life, a force that is worth and should be served, and which, In spite of everything, there is an all-conquering one, for the divine power is the power of self-sacrificing love. In comparison with this fundamental essence of the Church, everything else is a comparatively insignificant detail. What a great inspirational idea that is! How joyful it is to belong to this union, partly visible, partly invisible, especially in the terrible, tragic time of rampant evil and untruth on earth, to feel one's spiritual solidarity with all people, without distinction of nationality and race, in whose souls this flame of love burns and shines, both with all people living today and with all people who have already departed from past generations. through whom an indissoluble bond unites us with all the righteous who have ever lived on earth, and with Christ Himself, this miraculous incarnation of the God of love on earth! And what an inexplicable rapture and peace overwhelms the soul when, having brought this consciousness to its ultimate depth, one feels that this union is a truly real unity, which, like an individual man, has a living soul, and that this common, penetrating and life-giving soul is not a purely earthly and human force, but a divine-human reality – the divine Holy Spirit, uniting all into a mysterious sacred reality. called the mystical "body of Christ"! Then the sacred fire that was kindled in the souls of the first people who took on the living image of Christ, is again kindled in our souls with the same force, and we are seized by that tender joy, that "joy and simplicity of heart" with which the hearts of the first Christians were filled and human life was renewed and comforted. If we imagine for a moment – which, alas, is empirically impossible – that this light of Truth and Love burns in the souls of all people, or at least of the majority, and becomes a force that determines life, how beautiful and happy human life could be, despite all its earthly tragedy! The "Christian revival" is nothing but the awakening, in the soul of the individual and in the consciousness of humanity, of this simple, blissful revelation of the value, living reality, and omnipotence of love as the divine force which unites all men and which alone sustains the life of the world. For the true Christian faith is, as I have already said, the only saving and regenerating force at work in all who seek truth on earth and wish to appease human suffering and overcome evil by love, whether they themselves are aware of it or not, and what their purely theoretical views may be.

By virtue of this, the Christian revival in its basic essence, in its inner driving force, can only be a mysterious, rationally inexplicable new influx of grace-filled forces and the opening of human hearts to meet them. The spirit breathes where it wants and how it wants. But once one has given oneself over to this creative spiritual movement and has intuitively realized it, one can and must be aware of the situation and historical conditions in which it takes place, and thus try to help it to orient itself rationally in the world, to outline the most expedient and natural channel for it.

The historical conditions in which the process of Christian revival is now taking place are determined mainly by two facts: on the one hand, the wide spread and great influence in the world of unbelief or, what is the same thing, of non-Christian and anti-Christian beliefs, by virtue of which the Christian faith is subjected to ridicule, hatred, contempt and often outright persecution, and, on the other hand, the fact that this unbelief prevails in the world. which has passed through many centuries of Christian faith – through centuries when mankind, if not always and not in all things in fact, then in any case recognized itself as Christian. Both of these conditions must be taken into account and correctly taken into account when clarifying the tasks and paths of Christian revival.

I'll start with the first one. It has long been noticed, and is beginning to be more and more recognized by all sensitive souls, that the historical epoch of the Church, which began with Constantine the Great, the "Constantinian epoch," has now passed or is beginning to pass. In the course of the last centuries, beginning with the epoch of rationalism and "enlightenment," the world has ceased and is increasingly ceasing to recognize itself as "Christian"; The phenomenon that was called "Christendom," the identity between the sphere of European spiritual and moral-political culture and the sphere of domination over the minds of the Christian faith, is increasingly evaporating, dimming, weakening, and, in fact, has almost disappeared. The time when the Christian Church – unnaturally – kept the state power itself in its subjection, the time of "theocracy" (in the narrow, specific legal sense of this concept) has long passed; the time has also passed when the state took measures for the external, forcible protection of the Christian faith from unbelief or other faiths, when unbelief itself took a defensive position; It was first replaced by the era of freedom of faith and unbelief, tolerance of all views, equality between faith and unbelief – a legal relationship that is the only one corresponding to the genuine Christian consciousness. But legal tolerance gradually turned first into indifference, into the loss of all interest in religious faith, and then, for the first time in the era of French Jacobinism, and now in the form of communism and National Socialism, into militant atheism, into an overt or covert direct persecution of faith. The Christian Church, not only as an organization, but also as a collective bearer of the Christian faith, has once again found itself in the position of a despised and persecuted minority (which in a sense corresponds to its true essence, to its immanent position in the world). Pope Pius XI once, under the impression of this state of the world, rightly pointed out that among the necessary, defining features of the Church of Christ is that it is a persecuted Church.

This state of affairs undoubtedly contributes enormously to the movement of Christian revival, to the spiritual healing of the Church. For not only the church, which forcibly dominates the world, but also the church, which is comfortably organized and lives in the world, which in practice forgets that the whole world lies in evil, which forgets Christ's promise to His disciples: "In the world ye shall have tribulation," already loses faithfulness to its true essence and purpose. In this sense, the entire centuries-old "Constantine" epoch of the church was the epoch of its secularization; if the Church did not perish in the process of this secularization and the "gates of hell" did not prevail against her, it was only because the light of Christ's truth constantly flared up anew in the hearts of her saints and righteous and saved her from destruction. The Church at the present time, experiencing that she is despised, hated, persecuted like Christ Himself, is psychologically placed in conditions much more favorable for the observation of her true being, i.e., the light of Christ's truth. This is the similarity of our epoch with the epoch of the first centuries of Christianity.

However, we must not forget the reverse side of the matter, determined by another fact noted above, namely, that this position of the Church takes place in the composition of the world, which has passed through many centuries of the epoch of Christian consciousness. The radical currents of Christian religious thought that arise now, as it has always been at all times, recognizing the entire "Constantine" epoch of the Church as a complete misunderstanding, a centuries-old betrayal of the essence of the Christian faith and the Church, and demanding that the Church reaffirm openly and unconditionally in its early Christian essence, these currents forget the simple and indisputable fact that historical situations are in their very essence unique. Any attempt at a simple restoration of the ancient past, of a "restoration" in spiritual and religious life, is even less possible, leads even more to misunderstandings and distortions than in political life. To forget, simply to erase an experience once lived is not only in fact impossible, but even religiously inadmissible: God demands of us that we realize His truth and our duty precisely in that concrete situation which has been created on the basis of all our past (including sinful) and which includes the memory of this past; This proposition is a new proposition, and in no way a mere repetition of the old.

I will begin with the fact that the forces that are currently hostile to the Church and persecute it can only be misunderstood as "new paganism." Paganism in the strict sense of this concept is a pre-Christian faith, or, in general, a faith that did not know the monotheistic idea of God as Spirit, as the Creator and Guardian of the world.

It is not for nothing that the Apostle Paul recognized the Athenians as "somehow especially pious," and the entire Christian Church throughout its entire historical path used for its own purposes the achievements of ancient religious and philosophical thought – beginning with the idea of the "Logos" in the Evangelist John, with the Alexandrian Platonists – the Church Fathers and Bl. Augustine and ending with the influence of Aristotelianism in the worldview of the Catholic Church since the thirteenth century. It is not without reason that many historians of the Christian Church see in antiquity a "second Old Testament", which, like the Jewish Old Testament, formed the basis of the Christian faith. A completely different matter is modern godlessness and the rejection of Christianity. It is not paganism, which does not know Christianity, but the falling away from Christ and His truth of the world, which once knew them and believed in them. The assertion that the world "fell away" from Christ only because it was never truly Christian at all, and instead of Christ's truth it knew only its distortion and, without any reason, first of all imagined itself to be "Christian" – this assertion of Christian radicalism contains a distorting exaggeration. Of course, the world was only superficially Christianized and often confused the authentic truth of Christ with its human perversions. It goes without saying that "Christendom" remained an extremely dark and sinful world, and even paradoxically did and blessed evil in the name of Christ. But if he thought he was Christian, he was still right in the sense that he at least wanted to be Christian. And the light of Christ's true truth, though often only refracted and distorted by its human representatives, nevertheless reached his soul; Suffice it to recall the great contribution to European spiritual culture of genuine Christian saints and founders of monastic orders and the reverent respect for them in the Christian world. And as I have repeatedly pointed out, all the moral foundations of European coexistence are, consciously or unconsciously, the fruits and expressions of its genuine, though far from perfect, Christianization. Therefore, the forces that have now rebelled against Christian truth and the Church are not pagan forces, but demonic ones – dark forces that have renounced Christ, betrayed Him and raised a new rebellion against His cause of enlightenment and salvation of the world. It is quite natural and understandable for a believing Christian that this rebellion against Christ and His truth is thereby an attempt to abolish, to destroy the common moral principles of life, including those that were recognized as indisputable in the era of pre-Christian paganism.

And at the same time, in this situation, it is generally revealed that the most elementary, habitual – from the point of view of the absolute Christian ideal, imperfect – moral concepts and principles of human coexistence, such as freedom of conscience, the inviolability and sanctity of the human person, the subordination of the state – in its domestic and foreign policy – to the law and, through it, the principle of justice, the collective responsibility of society for the fate of all its members, The fundamental equality of all people, the sanctity of the marriage and family union are the essence of the expression and reflection, in the sphere of the law, of Christian truth itself. Along with this, there are, however, many phenomena more or less sanctioned or tolerated by legal consciousness, which directly contradict Christ's truth and express its pre-Christian consciousness. I will mention the institution of the death penalty, this greatest blasphemy against the human person, or in general the certainty of criminal law as the beginning of retribution; Assuming further moral progress, one can be sure that such phenomena and concepts will seem to future centuries as savage, monstrous, and senseless as torture or burning for heresies now seem to us.

However, at least in the advanced, morally responsible part of humanity, the sense of Christian truth is acute enough to condemn such phenomena and strive for their abolition. No matter how tormented our conscience may be by such manifestations of still more or less legalized or tolerated untruth, it would be wrong and unjust to deny that the centuries-old Christian education of mankind – for all its elementary and insufficient nature – has brought forth its fruitful fruits, hopefully already ineradicable in the human soul. By virtue of this, the Christian revival can and must be adjacent to the same realized Christian upbringing, it must be precisely the rebirth of the sprouts of Christian seeds that have already broken out, a new awakening of the dormant and weakened Christian consciousness. Overcoming everything that is dead and sinfully human in the traditions of the Church, it must rely on everything that is alive, righteous and creative in these traditions, it must not be a destructive revolution that sweeps away the entire past of Christian culture as evil, but an evolution, an awakening of this past to a new, stronger and more creative life. In the face of the evil of anti-religious and anti-humanitarian beliefs that are approaching the world, our religious and moral thought must become both more responsible and more modest. The dream of the fullest possible realization of Christian truth should not displace from our consciousness a loving union with all people who recognize themselves as Christians and wish to remain Christians, with all homines bonae voluntatis.

We must burn with the Christian zeal of the apostles and early Christians, but we must avoid conceit, identify ourselves with them; Remembering that we ourselves are epigones, that we ourselves have been weakened by centuries of cooling faith and distortion of Christian truth, we must not exalt ourselves and exaggerate our own spiritual powers. It is precisely because even the most elementary and imperfect, but nevertheless positive achievements of the Christian consciousness are now beginning to crumble, stand under the threat of oblivion and death, that we must carefully observe them – appreciate and support everything that is good and true in them. And in the face of the ever-approaching danger on the part of the principal enemies of the Christian faith – I do not mean those who intellectually reject it, but its real enemies, who in practice reject its moral principles and precepts – what is needed is not disunity, but the unification of the entire Christian world, meaning by it, as indicated above, all of humanity, no matter how imperfect it may be. because it either reverently preserves within itself the image of Christ, or at least actually recognizes the truth of Christ as obligatory, without even realizing that this truth has been revealed to it and revealed to it by Christ. We must, following the example of the father of the Gospel parable, with loving condescension, nay, with rapturous joy, go to meet every prodigal son, since he preserves at least a vague memory of his father's house and at least a timid dream of returning to it stirs in his soul.