Frank Harris wrote: “Nations, like fish, go rotten first at the head.” The epigram states the debacle of our day: our danger lies most in the intellectual and spiritual decay that infiltrates education, art, philosophy, religion in America. In all these spheres intellectual nihilism causes spiritual vacuum: that vacuum of vapid despair lusts to fill itself with any creed: the fashionable creed of the hour is the petty, secular opiate of material security and social amelioration. Thus nihilism is always the first milestone on the road to Communism. Not Christ—but Caesar! Collectivism in the Churches, by Edgar C. Bundy (Church League of America, $5.00) discusses the ways in which our so-called religious “leaders” (especially in the Federal, National and World Councils of Churches), abandoning transcendental faith and spiritual reality, have, in the vacuum of their souls, sought to substitute material panaceas and social adjustments for religion.
Major Bundy believes that the beginning of collectivism lies in the denial of the metaphysical, the transcendental. He quotes David Easton, who glories in this as a religious advance:
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