I was staying a few days in a Missionary College, where two hundred boys, of all ages and types, are doing their schooling, so that when they go forth to teach all nations they shall not be found wanting. I had said the Community Mass, and was making my thanksgiving. Two little boys—my servers—were putting out the candles, they were solemn-eyed, radiant, and the red of their cheeks outshone the crimson of their soutanes. I was distracted: insistently those children associated themselves with something. Remotely, subconsciously, an analogy was forming. But for the time I got no further. In the evening I remembered. I had been walking, and when I returned the college was wrapped in a toga of mist, the hills were frosted, the world white and grey, transfigured by the moon. A year back—almost to the very day— rattling through a land of frozen forest and morass, I had been sitting for twelve hours in a railway carriage. Opposite me were two young Bolsheviks. It was they (I realised with a shock) in their crimson exuberance that co-ordinated and completed my analogy.

They, too, were missionaries, those Bolsheviks. They even hoped to convert me. They, too, were ardent, sincere and well instructed. But the gospel they preached was not of the Saviour of mankind. Their gospel was the story of despair, man made, man tricked, man rebellious, self-assertive against he knows not what. (For here is a generation that cannot admit the God its heart is seeking, and secretly has always loved.)