It is natural to try to understand one's own time and to seek to analyse the forces that move it.

There is a great interest in comparative religion and a desire to understand faiths other than our own and even to experiment with exotic cults.

As to judging our own time, and thereby gaining some basis for a judgment of future possibilities, we are doubtless not only too close to it to appraise it but too much formed by it and enclosed within it to do so.

A second characteristic of our time is the prevalence of nationalism. This is still spreading, affecting new communities, more peripheral regions and so-called backward peoples.

Technology gives us the facilities that lessen the barriers of time and distance - the telegraph and cable, the telephone, radio, and the rest.

We have lived through the flood time of fascism and of the nazism which ran its meteoric course at a cost to mankind in suffering and waste beyond all computation.