When we look around and see men who have forgotten God, what we are looking at is ourselves before God graciously saved us. When we look around and see men who have forgotten God, our response must not be to boast: “God, I thank you that I am not like other men,” men who have forgotten God (Luke 18:11). We need instead to examine our own hearts first.

During my first week of college, way back in the Fall of 1985, I was browsing around in the library and ran across a three-volume set of books titled The Gulag Archipelago. The author’s name was Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. I read a few pages and took the first volume to the librarian’s counter to borrow it. Without any prompting from me, the librarian proceeded to tell me in a somewhat condescending tone that I would never finish volume one, much less all three volumes. That might have been true had he not said that, but because he did say it, I took it as a challenge and proceeded to read all three volumes. I’m glad I did. This is one of the greatest works of the twentieth century. In it, Solzhenitsyn, who lived under Stalinist rule in the Soviet Union, describes his life in the labor camps known as the Gulag.

After completing these volumes, I began to look for other works written by Solzhenitsyn. This was more challenging before the Internet, but I found numerous novels, essays, speeches, and short stories. One of Solzhenitsyn’s most powerful speeches is the Templeton Address he gave on May 10, 1983. The speech is available online, and I highly recommend reading it in its entirety. He begins by pointing out what he believes is the reason for the calamities his homeland experienced.

More than half a century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of older people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.

Since then I have spent well-nigh fifty years working on the history of our Revolution; in the process I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous Revolution that swallowed up some sixty million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat:  Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.

What is more, the events of the Russian Revolution can only be understood now, at the end of the century, against the background of what has since occurred in the rest of the world. What emerges here is a process of universal significance. And if I were called upon to identify briefly the principal trait of the entire twentieth century, here too, I would be unable to find anything more precise and pithy than to repeat once again:  Men have forgotten God.

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