Religion: Joy and Power

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A gentle-souled German pastor wrote a friend: "Here I was—actually in prison, properly under lock and key! . . . I could not help thinking of old D. Traugott Hahn, who in his prison at St. Petersburg knew full well that, while innocent before man, before God he had deserved prison a thousand times over, just as I have. So God has blessed me by humbling me under His mighty hand. . ."

Another man of God, in like case, wrote: "When, three weeks ago, I was living through the first long Sunday . . . I read the letters of the New Testament which were written in prison. There is joy and power!"

In Germany 20,000 copies of a book of such letters, written by some of the 2,000 pastors who have been arrested since Naziism came into power, were secretly circulated until secret police discovered them. Last fortnight the letters were published in the U. S. under the title I Was in Prison.† The volume's parallels between the imprisoned early Christians and the imprisoned anti-Nazis were pat, pointed. I Was in Prison testified to the resources of faith and courage which the Protestant pastors have found in the Bible. The Bible itself was last week unashamedly unwelcome to the masters of the Third Reich.

The Reich Literary Chamber, a subsidiary of Dr. Goebbels' Propaganda Ministry, announced that henceforth Bibles could be displayed for sale only in religious bookstores—of which there are few in Germany. In other shops, the Bible may be sold only on special order. Thus Germany safeguarded its shelves from a history of Jewish achievement, a chronicle of subversive preaching and prophesying, a guidebook to a radical world order. It also protected itself against a competitor of A. Hitler's Mein Kampf. Last month the American Bible Society revealed that sales of Holy Writ, rising steadily during six years of Naziism, reached 937,000 last year. Mein Kampf sold only 800,000 copies.