TODAY, civilization is engaged in a secret battle for existence against gathering powers of violence, the force and limit of which are still unguessed.

It is a battle between righteousness and evil, between sanity and insanity, light and darkness, God and Satan. And if civilization does not win, then the world perishes.

It is an evil that was born before Christ came. It is an evil which not only destroys cities and empires and men, but which is more terrible still, for it obtains control of the human mind, and uses it at will; and it obtains sovereignty over the soul, and makes it prisoner. Its aim is to dominate first, then to destroy. It was conceived in the beginning by Erlik (Satan) and by sorcerers and devils. Always, from the first, there have been sorcerers and devils. And when human history began to be remembered and chronicled, devils were living who worshipped Erlik and practiced sorcery.

They have been called by many names. A thousand years before Christ, Hassan Sabbah founded his sect called Hassanis or Assassins. The Yezidees are of them. Their chief is still called Sabbah; their creed is the annihilation of civilization.

The Hassanis are a sect of assassins which has spread out of Asia all over the world, and they are determined upon the annihilation of everything and everybody in it but themselves.

In Germany is a branch of the sect. The Hun is the lineal descendant of the ancient Yezidee; the gods of the Hun are the old demons under other names; the desire and object of the Hun is the same desire—to rule the minds and bodies and souls of men and to use them to their own purposes. Anarchist, Yezidee Hassani, Boche, Bolshevik—all are the same—all are secretly swarming in the hidden places for the same purpose.

The devil-worship, of which one of the modern developments is Bolshevism, and another the terrorism of the Hun, began in Asia long before Christ’s advent. It has always existed, its aim always has been the annihilation of good and the exaltation of evil; the subjection of right by might, and the worldwide triumph of wrong. Perhaps it is as old as the first battle between God and Satan.