Robert Peel, “Religion’s Emerging Role,” in Understanding our Century: Commemorating the 75th Anniversary of The Christian Science Monitor (Boston: The Christian Science Publishing Society, 1984), 107-119.
From a book marking the 75th anniversary of the founding of The Christian Science Monitor:
“Where religion weakens, it may not mean that religion disappears. It may only mean that false gods step in. Carl Jung, no enemy to religion, early in this period warned against the return of the more ‘horrible’ ancient religions:
“‘At any time,’ he wrote, ‘they may break in upon us with destructive force, in the form of mass suggestion, for example.’
“As early as 1923, one month before the famous beer hall Putsch in Munich, the Monitor ran a front-page interview with Adolf Hitler, the ‘Bavarian Mussolini.’ There he was – unknown to the world at large but ‘not to be regarded lightly,’ staring ‘hard’ into the interviewer’s face, making ‘excited gestures’ with his hands, raising his voice until ‘he almost shouted,’ then giving himself away in a statement that he emphasized with careful deliberation:
“What has been possible in Italy also is possible in Germany, where the German people, given a Mussolini, would fall down on their knees before him and worship him more than Mussolini ever has been worshipped in Italy.
“When Hitler finally came to power, the Monitor correspondent would be one of the first American journalists to be expelled from Germany. Later, in 1941, Christian Science itself would be banned from the Third Reich and many of its religious practitioners imprisoned….
“We ignore at our peril what William James calls ‘the stubborn, irreducible facts’ of existence. One of the most stubborn and irreducible is the persistent feeling of humanity that spirituality is not superstition – that there is a spirit in man which even an Auschwitz or a Gulag Archipelago cannot entirely quench….”