ABSTRACT
Guy Hermet, the French historian, once said that the Spanish Civil War
had been ‘the last war of religion’. He was thinking, of course, of the terri-
ble wars between Catholics and Protestants that had soaked Europe in
blood during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and he regarded the
war in Spain, therefore, as an anachronism, no less than he would have so
regarded a dinosaur that had, by some strange means, managed to survive
until our own day. Yet the events of recent decades have proved him wrong,
for we have seen in different parts of the world, including the civilized and secular Europe of our present time, how faith in Jesus Christ and his gospel
and how other religions too, which should have sown seeds of peace and
love, have been used to urge on the destruction of entire ‘rival’ peoples.1
