I Should like to consider in this essay one particular aspect of the present spiritual crisis—namely, contemporary atheism and its inner meaning, Such a topic, the meaning of contemporary atheism, involves very deep and intricate problems. I do not pretend to dogmatize about them; the views that I shall offer are somewhat tentative views, which originate in a desire to look for the hidden spiritual significance of the present agony of the world.

In an introductory part I shall try, first, to analyze briefly the various kinds of atheism we might have to deal with, in order to characterize more accurately contemporary atheism.

At Easter, 1900, Solovyev published a revised version of his Three Discussions and prefaced it with these words:: “Even in this amended form, I still feel numerous defects in the work. But not less felt is the distant image of pale death which quietly advises me not to put off the publication of this book to an indefinite and unsure date.” He thus proved to be a good prophet even in regard to his own life. A few months later, on the 31st of July, 1900, he died.

Represented by a small, pioneering religious group in the Anglo-American colonies, the Catholic faith was not transplanted in conspicuous degree to the United States until the nineteenth century. Mainly through immigration the Catholic population in the United States rose from a mere 50,000 in 1800 to more than twelve millions a century later. Though many believed that countless Catholics were lost in the transition process—the question has been endlessly debated—few denied the preeminent success of the Catholic Church in handling immigrants. Its swelling membership steadily augmented its influence on most phases of American life, including the social movements which played so large and significant a part in the nation's development during the nineteenth century.

Little more than four decades separated the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871 from the first World War of 1914–1918. In terms of material welfare, upon which the economists helped to fix attention, these were the most successful decades in history. In 1650 there were apparently something like half a billion inhabitants of this planet. During the forty-five years from 1870 to 1914 nearly half a billion were added. Population increased by almost as large a number in a generation and a half as it had increased during untold generations separating Adam from Newton. In the wealthier countries of Western Europe (Great Britain, Sweden, Norway, Germany and France) and in North America, the real income per person gainfully employed has been estimated to have improved seventy-five percent or more, while the hours of work were substantially reduced. In the United States the per capita output of the manufacturing industries grew nearly four times over. Professor Tawney has explained that, “during the greater part of history, the normal condition of the world has been one of scarcity. … But, as a result of the modernization of production and transport, first in Great Britain, then on the continent of Europe and in North America, then in parts of the Far East, mere scarcity ceased, after the middle of the nineteenth century, to be, except in the last, the haunting terror which till recently it had been.”

The unsuccessful European revolutions and successful counter-revolutions of 1848–49 elicited complex and surprisingly little-studied responses in Russia. The court, the bureaucracy and the upholders of the status quo in general reacted much as they had to the great French Revolution of 1789. Their never banished fears of Western revolutionary contagion were fanned anew. This new paroxysm of anxiety was reflected in panicky domestic measures of repression, such as the arrest of a number of members of the relatively harmless Petrashevski discussion group, including the novelist Dostoievski, and in such foreign policy acts as Russian armed intervention against the Hungarian liberal revolution.

In late May of this year the Commission on Organization of the Executive Branch of the Government, commonly known as the Hoover Commission, submitted its concluding report to the Congress. This was the nineteenth in a series of reports released at intervals beginning early in February. The relatively brief individual printed reports of the Commission were accompanied by appendixes containing the most important substantiating evidence garnered from an estimated total of two and a half million words contained in studies made for the use of the Commission.

This documentary output contains the results of the most extensive study ever made of the problem of executive reorganization in the federal government. The Commission on Organization, created by act of Congress in the summer of 1947, started under the most auspicious circumstances, was liberally supplied with appropriations for its work, and has enjoyed widespread public interest in its recommendations. With a distinguished membership drawn from public and private life, from the executive and legislative branches of the federal government, and from both major political parties, the Commission was given an extremely broad assignment by die Congress.