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English writings, 1915–1921
St Nikolai Velimirović
A Serbian’s Vision of America (1921), 1. Foreword (Hamilton Fish Armstrong)
Bishop Nicholai has just returned to his diocese of Ochrida, in southern Serbia, after travelling for three months through the United States. He did not come to this country to ask for any funds or relief, and he has taken nothing material back with him. He told me the day after his arrival in New York that he had come to learn whether there exists in America that moral strength which should be the accompaniment of great physical strength. “If so,” he said, “I will plead with America to spend it as generously in changing the moral misery of Europe as she has spent her wealth in helping Europe’s physical misery.”
In the following article Bishop Nicholai describes briefly what he has learned here. It is based on notes made during several long talks with him, as well as on a statement written by him for the New York Evening Post. It seemed to me that what Bishop Nicholai said regarding the world situation and the implications that would follow America’s adoption of any long-continued policy of self-interest and attempted isolation could not be allowed to pass unrecorded. He comes of a race which is interested in fundamental causes; we are of a race which is interested more in the study of effects, in the accumulation of facts, in mapping out day-by-day action. Perhaps the realists of modern America can find something of value among a philosopher’s objective ideas.
It is with the foregoing in mind that the present pamphlet has been printed for private distribution.
Hamilton Fish Armstrong.
128 East 36th Street, New York.
May 15, 1921.