584 PROSPECTS OF THE WESTERN CIVILIZATION
Communism in the belief that he had found in it Man's way of salvation
was a portent which perhaps foreshadowed the eventual reaction of
Mankind in the mass to the Marxian gospel. In the short run, on the
other hand, Communism did offer to any soul whose house was empty,
swept, and garnished1 an immediate satisfaction for one of the deepest
and most insistent of Man's religious needs by offering to the spiritual
dfracine a purpose of high importance, transcending his own petty per-
sonal aims, as an object for his devotion. A Leviathan embodying the
collective power and corporate interests of the Human Race was a more
imposing idol than any of the individual mannikins whose trivial,
ephemeral, and conflicting personal interests ranked as the ultimate
goals of human endeavour under a post-Christian Western dispensation
in which personal freedom had been cut loose from its religious origin,
inspiration, significance, and sanction. Any hungry soul that was offered
no objects for worship except these paltry Western idols and this im-
posing Russian one would be bound, when faced with that dismal
choice, to opt for becoming a votary of Leviathan. The mission of
converting the World to Communism was more inspiring, exhilarating,
and edifying than the mission of keeping the World safe for the right
to take profits or for the right to strike. 'Holy Russia* was a more
rousing war-cry than 'Happy America'.

Another strong point in the Russian approach was that Russia's
geographical position made it impossible for Russians to waste their
energies, more Americano, by chasing the will-o'-the-wisp of Isolation-
ism. The inextricable implication in the affairs of the rest of the
OikoumenS which was now overtaking the United States as a result of
the OikoumenS's recent coalescence and shrinkage was a plight in which
Russia had found herself since the dawn of Russian history. Isolationism
was an ideal which could not be entertained by the inhabitants of a
land-locked country. Russia marched with the domains of all the non-
Russian civilizations of the Old World; and her frontier with the
Western Society—which, in Russian experience, had been the most
dangerous frontier of all—was a line drawn across an open plain where
there was neither a mountain rampart nor a river moat to lighten the
task of Russia's human defenders. The perilous exposure of her geo-
graphical location thus constrained 'Holy Russia1, like the Biblical Israel
with whom she was identified in her repressed but unexorcized Orthodox
Christian tradition, to see herself as a Zion against whose Lord and
His Anointed the Kings of the Earth would always be standing up and
the rulers taking counsel together.2 'Why do the heathen so furiously
rage together, and why do the people imagine a vain thing?'3 They rage
because the Chosen People are the depositories of a unique truth and
unique righteousness which the froward hearts of the wicked are bent
upon challenging. 'Holy Russia's' defence was not any 'natural frontier'
like the now rapidly narrowing Atlantic Straits that had once insulated
the United States; it was orthodoxy ('I will preach the law'4) supported
by a faith in the inevitability of Truth's and Righteousness's ultimate

* Matt. xii. 44; Luke xi. 25. a Ps. ii. 2.

a Ps. ii. i. 4 ps. ii. 7.