has been created in these last months. . . . Violence and falsehood, perfidy and hypocrisy, blandishments and blackmail are closely interwoven to oppress the Church. An oath taken under such conditions is objectively invalid. . . .”

The point the Vatican organ makes may be true from a technically legal standpoint, but may it not well be asked, If the bishops really had “this faith” would they have yielded under the pressure of violence and blackmail, or succumbed to Communist hypocrisy, perfidy, falsehood and blandishments and signed that compromising oath?

In view of the foregoing incident, which may be said to be quite typical, must the answer to Jesus’ question as to whether upon arriving he would find “this faith” upon the earth be in the negative? Not at all. No? Then where can “this faith” be found? The 1954 Yearbook of Jehovah’s Witnesses gives eloquent reports of integrity-keeping in Iron Curtain countries as well as in other totalitarian lands, such as the Dominican Republic.

For instance, in East Germany the Communists have sneered, “We shall see who can hold his breath the longest,” and upward of two thousand witnesses of Jehovah have been arrested and at the present time more than a thousand are still incarcerated, with an average prison sentence of six and three-quarters years each. Has this caused them to compromise in the slightest? It has not.

For another striking example of Christians’ having “this faith,” note the report from Poland: “In this fight for peace no one should feel too young or too old, even a six-year-old child or a man of a hundred years can successfully engage in this battle if he but wishes to. Such do not worry about the loss of their health or even their life and they have overcome the fear of police clubs and of prisons. The enemy’s purpose is to stop the work by arresting the leaders of this wonderful movement for freedom [but] in spite of all we are constantly endeavoring to improve the organization and setting new quotas, which we have not only been reaching but even surpassing. . . . You do not need to worry about us, because our older brothers reared us carefully and we are able to take care of ourselves in all the problems of life in spite of the fact that we are young.”

More reports could be quoted from the Yearbook but the foregoing should suffice to prove that at the present time there are Christians on earth who have such strong faith that God will cause justice to be done to them that they ‘do not worry about the loss of their health or even their life and have overcome the fear of police clubs and of prisons.’ The Communist tactics of violence and blackmail, perfidy and hypocrisy, falsehood and blandishments that have been so effective against the Polish bishops have proved futile when directed against the Christian witnesses of Jehovah.

Apology Accepted

● The January 15, 1954, issue of The Watchtower published an article entitled “Do You Respect Plagiarists?” It exposed repeated plagiarism of articles from our publications by a Churches of Christ minister and a Churches of Christ editor, these plagiarized articles appearing as their own in the Gospel Broadcast, a Churches of Christ paper published in Dallas, Texas. When this practice of plagiarism was made public in The Watchtower a written apology was received by us from the minister and the editor, which we accepted. The February 11, 1954, issue of Gospel Broadcast published the exchange of letters.