Babylon!

The Prayer. Papini* has sent to America ” The Prayer of Papini for the Second Coming of Christ.” It is in the manner of a dramatic soliloquy. Thus:

“The time has come when Thou must reappear to all of us and give a peremptory and unmistakable sign to this generation. Thou seest, Jesus, our need; Thou knowest how great it is, Thou canst not fail to recognize how imperative is our necessity, how heavy and real our anguish, our deprivation, our desperation. Thou knowest how much we have need of Thy intervention, how necessary is Thy return.

“Let it be only a brief return, a sudden coming, followed immediately by a sudden disappearance; a single apparition, an arrival and departure, with a single word as Thou comest and goest, a single sign, an admonition, a lightning flash in the sky, a light in the night, an opening of the heavens, a splendor in the night — one hour alone of Thy eternity, one word alone for all Thy silence.

“Thou knowest how great is the need of Thy word and gesture at this special time. Thou knowest well that Thy glance can transform our spirit, that Thy voice can summon us from the depths of our misery. . . .

“The brute love of each man for himself, each caste for itself, each nation for itself, is stronger and blinder since hate has covered the earth with fire, smoke and human bones. The love of self, after the universal and common defeat, has magnified this hate a hundred times, hatred of the small against the great, the discontented against the restless, the servants against their masters, the ambitious classes against the declining classes, the hegemonic races against the vassal races, the ruling peoples against the peoples under their yoke. The greed for too much has led to the lack of necessities; the pruriency of pleasure, the gnawing of torture, the mania for liberty, the increase of shackles. …

“Accustomed to the dissipations of years of destruction, temperate men have become gluttonous, calm men avid, honest men robbers and even the best of men dishonest. Usury and appropriation is practiced under the name of business, and under the insignia of large industry a small group is engaged in.pirating against the public. . . . The ostentation of the rich has convinced everybody that nothing counts in this Heaven-estranged earth but money and what can be bought and wasted with money. …

“Thou hast said once: ‘ I am with him who is alone. Move the rock and ye will find me, kindle the wood and I am there.’ But to find Thee in stone and wood means the will to seek Thee, the capacity to see Thee. And today most men neither want nor know how to find Thee.

“The great experiment is ended. Mankind, wandering away from the Evangelist, has found desolation and death. More than one promise and more than one threat has been fulfilled. Now in our desperation nothingis left to us but the hope of Thy return. If Thou dost not come to arouse the sleepers in the mire of our Inferno it is a sign that the chastisement for our betrayal seems to Thee still too light and that Thou dost not want to change the order of Thy laws. And Thy will be done now and always in Heaven and on earth.”

The Mountain-top. The artist-prophet of Italy lives on a lonely mountain-top in Arezzo, not far from where St. Francis received the Stigmata. It is approached by a mule path. With him is Giacinta, the once beautiful peasant girl whom he married for ” her chestnut mane and savage, beautiful teeth;” also his two daughters, both beautiful. There he reads omniverously, still desiring to know all. Once he desired to become God by writing an Encyclopedia of Enclycopedias. Now he is busy with La Seconda Nascita, sequel to his masterpiece, L’Uomo Finito; with the libretto of his opera, King Lear; and at odd moments, with his Dictionary.

America. The Dictionary of a Savage†says: ” America is the land of millionaire uncles, the home of trusts, skyscrapers, phonographs, electric trams, lynch laws, of the insupportable Washington, the boring Emerson, the immoral Walt Whitman, the disgusting Longfellow, the angelic Wilson, the philanthropic Morgan and other great men of similar stripe. In compensation America produces poisonous tobacco, sticky chocolate, indigestible potatoes, and gave birth to the Declaration of Independence, which later produced the Declaration of the Rights of Man.

“From which it is evident that the discovery of America, although accomplishedby a sane Italian, was willed by God in 1492 as a repressive and preventative punishment for all the other grand discoveries of the Renaissance: gunpowder, humanism and Protestantism.”

Supplementing his Dictionary, he is now pointing an accusing finger across the Atlantic. “America,” says he, ” was responsible for the War. ” Why ? Because the War was brought on by unchristian commercial competition, and it was America that forced the ruthless pace.

New Book. The world continues to wait with almost universal interest for Papini’s new book on social questions which he calls a ” modern Bible.” His Life of Christ, like most books, has suffered in public esteem from misdirected advertisement. It was made to appear sensational; and it was not sensational. But it served to call attention to the apparent absence of Christ from Christendom. Similarly, his new book may serve to challenge the impotency of the Church in an age which has produced not one, but many Babylons.

*Giovanni Papini, who wrote the Life of Christ, published in March by Harcourt, Brace & Co.

†Papini calls himself ” the Savage.”