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They were telling a story in Europe this week. In a Bulgarian classroom, a Communist teacher asked her hungry pupils to recite the Lord's Prayer. When they had finished, they were still hungry. Then the teacher led them in a new prayer which began "Our Father Stalin. . . ." Suddenly, through a hole in the ceiling, straight from the Marxist heaven, tumbled loaf after loaf of bread.
That story summarized Marxism's challenge. For Marxism offered both reason and faith, both bread and miracles. Sharp ears this week could hear Karl Marx laugh quietly to himself on the Manifesto's birthday. The bourgeois, forgetting their own accomplishments, were remembering his carbuncles. "Yours forever," the old man seemed to say, "Yours forever, Dr. Crankley."
* A few decades later his followers were an organized force, called Luddites. They would converge on an industrial village at dusk, post guards, and smash and burn machinery while the villagers cowered in their cottages. Their counterparts existed in many continental countries.