One of the great needs of our time is for a genuine meeting between religion and world affairs. The religious moralist and the political idealist often become so preoccupied with the imperatives of human responsibility, however, that they ignore the conditions of human existence. Ignorance of the limits and possibilities of man and history and ignorance of the more specific political facts of life have sometimes led them to Utopian crusades which have ended in disaster. The long road from Versailles to Pearl Harbor and beyond is cluttered with the whitened bones of crusades that failed—the League of Nations, peace through economic planning, the Kellogg-Briand Pact, and peace through the renunciation of war.

Newspapers in the United States recently carried comparatively brief items about a ceremony held in Warsaw on April 19 to mark the fifteenth anniversary of the Battle of the Warsaw Ghetto. For most readers, these items must have caused a brief moment of shock—shock at remembering the details of that struggle and a further uneasy sensation at the realization that they had so nearly completely forgotten the episode in what already begins to seem an ancient war.