This is Fourth of July time, when many communities will parade to the music of fife and drum, celebrating American political freedom as expressed in the Declaration of Independence. The language of that document contrasts sharply with the public utterances of the new left. There is room in it for God and his natural laws; the tone is that of a sturdy appeal to common sense based on facts. How different is the rhetoric of the new left, with its fondness for four-letter words. It may be that things were no better in 1776 than they are in 1971. But they surely seem to have been. Maybe today’s youth, wearing nineteenth-century clothes and footwear as part of their twentieth-century “mod” outfits, are unconsciously expressing a desire to return to an earlier age. We all know that longing occasionally.
Our readers should note carefully the two essays on Communism in this issue. The one makes it clear that any view of life that leaves out God has in it the seeds of its own decay. The other alerts us to the fact that Communists don’t want dialogue with Christians in order to learn from them; their intention is to convince Christians of the correctness of the Marxist dialectic. If there is to be dialogue, Christians must engage in it with the view of converting the Marxist, not to democracy, capitalism, or even the traditional Christian life style, but to Jesus Christ as sovereign Saviour and Lord.
