As a result , although we still make use of this distinction , there is much confusion as to the meaning of the basic terms employed . Just what is meant by " spirit " and by " matter " ? The terms are generally taken for granted as though they referred to direct and axiomatic elements in the common experience of all . Yet in the contemporary context this is precisely what one must not do . For in the modern world neither " spirit " nor " matter " refer to any generally agreed-upon elements of experience . We are in a transitional stage in which many of the connotations of former usage have had to be revised or rejected . When the words are used , we are never sure which of the traditional meanings the user may have in mind , or to what extent his revisions and rejections of former understandings correspond to ours . 
One of the most widespread features of contemporary thought is the almost universal disbelief in the reality of spirit . Just a few centuries ago the world of spirits was as populous and real as the world of material entities . Not only in popular thought but in that of the highly educated as well was this true . Demons , fairies , angels , and a host of other spiritual beings were as much a part of the experiential world of western man as were rocks and trees and stars . In such a world the words " matter " and " spirit " both referred to directly known realities in the common experience of all . In it important elements of Christianity and of the Biblical view of reality in general , which now cause us much difficulty , could be responded to quite naturally and spontaneously . 
The progress of science over these last few centuries and the gradual replacement of Biblical by scientific categories of reality have to a large extent emptied the spirit world of the entities which previously populated it . In carrying out this program science has undoubtedly performed a very considerable service for which it can claim due credit . The objectification of the world of spirit in popular superstition had certainly gone far beyond what the experience of spirit could justify or support . Science is fully competent to deal with any element of experience which arises from an object in space and time . When , therefore , it turned its attention to the concrete entities with which popular imagination had peopled the world of spirit , these entities soon lost whatever status they had enjoyed as actual elements of external reality . In doing so science has unquestionably cleared up widespread misconceptions , removed extraneous and illusory sources of fear , and dispelled many undesirable popular superstitions . There have been , indeed , many important and valuable gains from the development of our present scientific view of the world for which we may be rightly grateful . 
All this has not , however , been an unmixed blessing . The scientific debunking of the spirit world has been in a way too successful and too thorough . The house has been swept so clean that contemporary man has been left with no means , or at best with wholly inadequate means , for dealing with his experience of spirit . Although the particular form of conceptualization which popular imagination had made in response to the experience of spirit was undoubtedly defective , the raw experience itself which led to such excesses remains with us as vividly as ever . We simply find ourselves in the position of having no means for inquiring into the structure and meaning of this range of our experience . There is no framework or structure of thought with respect to which we can organize it and no part of reality , as we know and apprehend it , with respect to which we can refer this experience . Science has simply left us helpless and powerless in this important sector of our lives . 
The situation in which we find ourselves is brought out with dramatic force in Arthur Miller 's play The Crucible , which deals with the Salem witch trials . As the play opens the audience is introduced to the community of Salem in Puritan America at the end of the eighteenth century . Aside from a quaint concern with witches and devils which provides the immediate problem in the opening scene , it is a quite normal community . The conversation of the characters creates an atmosphere suggesting the usual mixture of pleasures , foibles , irritations , and concerns which would characterize the common life of a normal village in any age . There is no occasion to feel uneasy or disturbed about these people . Instead , the audience can sit back at ease and , from the perspective of an enlightened time which no longer believes in such things , enjoy the dead seriousness with which the characters in the play take the witches and devils which are under discussion . A teenage girl , Abigail Williams , is being sharply questioned by her minister uncle , the Reverend Samuel Parris , about a wild night affair in the woods in which she and some other girls had seemed to have had contact with these evil beings . For all involved in this discussion the devil is a real entity who can really be confronted in the woods on a dark night , the demon world is populated with real creatures , and witches actually can be seen flying through the air . 
As the play unfolds , however , the audience is subtly brought into the grip of an awful evil which grows with ominously gathering power and soon engulfs the community . Everyone in Salem , saint and sinner alike , is swept up by it . It is like a mysterious epidemic which , starting first with Abigail and Parris , spreads inexorably with a dreadfully growing virulence through the whole town until all have been infected by it . It grows terribly and unavoidably in power and leaves in its wake a trail of misery , moral disintegration , and destruction . The audience leaves the play under a spell , It is the kind of spell which the exposure to spirit in its living active manifestation always evokes . 
If one asks about this play , what it is that comes upon this community and works within it with such terrible power , there is no better answer to give than " spirit " . This is not to attempt to say what spirit is , but only to employ a commonly used word to designate or simply identify a common experience . In the end the good man , John Proctor , expresses what the audience has already come to feel when he says , " A fire , a fire is burning ! I hear the boot of Lucifer , I see his filthy face " ! The tragic irony of the play is that the very belief in and concern with a devil who could be met in the woods and combatted with formulae set out in books was the very thing that prevented them from detecting the real devil when he came among them . We marvel at their blindness for not seeing this . Yet are not we of the mid-twentieth century , who rightly do not believe there is any such " thing " as the devil , just as bad off as they — only in a different way ? In our disbelief we think that we can no longer even use the word and so are unable to even name the elemental power which is so vividly real in this play . We are left helpless to cope with it because we do not dare speak of it as anything real for fear that to do so would imply a commitment to that which has already been discredited and proved false . 
Even Mr. Miller himself seems uncertain on this score . In a long commentary which he has inserted in the published text of the first act of the play , he says at one point : " However , that experience never raised a doubt in his mind as to the reality of the underworld or the existence of Lucifer 's many-faced lieutenants . And his belief is not to his discredit . Better minds than Hale 's were — and still are — convinced that there is a society of spirits beyond our ken " . ( page 33 ) On the other hand , a little later on he says : " Since 1692 a great but superficial change has wiped out God 's beard and the Devil 's horns , but the world is still gripped between two diametrically opposed absolutes . The concept of unity , in which positive and negative are attributes of the same force , in which good and evil are relative , ever-changing , and always joined to the same phenomenon — such a concept is still reserved to the physical sciences and to the few who have grasped the history of ideas … . When we see the steady and methodical inculcation into humanity of the idea of man 's worthlessness — until redeemed — the necessity of the Devil may become evident as a weapon , a weapon designed and used time and time again in every age to whip men into a surrender to a particular church or church-state " . ( page 34 ) 
Apparently he does not intend that those who read or view this play should think of the devil as being actually real . Yet such is the dramatic power of his writing that the audience is nevertheless left in the grip of the terrible power and potency of that which came over Salem . It casts a spell upon them so that they leave with a feeling of having been in the mysterious presence of an evil power . It is not enough in accounting for this feeling to analyze it into the wickedness of individual people added together to produce a cumulative effect . For this does not account for the integral , elemental power of that which grows with abounding vigor as the play unfolds , nor does it explain the strange numinous sense of presentness which comes over those who watch the play like a spell . The reality of spirit emerges in this play in spite of the author 's convictions to the contrary .  SPIRIT AND COMMUNITY  
There is nothing in the whole range of human experience more widely known and universally felt than spirit . Apart from spirit there could be no community , for it is spirit which draws men into community and gives to any community its unity , cohesiveness , and permanence . Think , for example , of the spirit of the Marine Corps . Surely this is a reality we all acknowledge . We can not , of course , assign it any substance . It is not material and is not a " thing " occupying space and time . Yet it exists and has an objective reality which can be experienced and known . So it is too with many other spirits which we all know : the spirit of Nazism or Communism , school spirit , the spirit of a street corner gang or a football team , the spirit of Rotary or the Ku Klux Klan . Every community , if it is alive has a spirit , and that spirit is the center of its unity and identity . 
In searching for clues which might lead us to a fresh apprehension of the reality of spirit , the close connection between spirit and community is likely to prove the most fruitful . For it is primarily in community that we know and experience spirit . It is spirit which gives life to a community and causes it to cohere . It is the spirit which is the source of a community 's drawing power by means of which others are drawn into it from the world outside so that the community grows and prospers . Yet the spirit which lives in community is not identical with the community . The idea of community and the idea of spirit are two distinct and separable ideas . 
One characteristic of the spirit in community is its givenness . The members of the community do not create the spirit but rather find it present and waiting for them . It is for them a given which they and they alone possess . The spirit of the Marine Corps was present and operative before any of the present members of it came into it . It is they , of course , who keep it alive and preserve it so the same spirit will continue to be present in the Corps for future recruits to find as they come into it .  If the content of faith is to be presented today in a form that can be " understanded of the people " — and this , it must not be forgotten , is one of the goals of the perennial theological task — there is no other choice but to abandon completely a mythological manner of representation . 
This does not mean that mythological language as such can no longer be used in theology and preaching . The absurd notion that demythologization entails the expurgation of all mythological concepts completely misrepresents Bultmann 's intention . His point is not that mythology may not be used , but that it may no longer be regarded as the only or even the most appropriate conceptuality for expressing the Christian kerygma . When we say that a mythological mode of thought must be completely abandoned , we mean it must be abandoned as the sole or proper means for presenting the Christian understanding of existence . Mythological concepts may by all means still be used , but they can be used responsibly only as " symbols " or " ciphers " , that is , only if they are also constantly interpreted in nonmythological ( or existential ) terms . 
The statement is often made that when Bultmann argues in this way , he " overestimates the intellectual stumbling-block which myth is supposed to put in the way of accepting the Christian faith " . But this statement is completely unconvincing . If Bultmann 's own definition of myth is strictly adhered to ( and it is interesting that this is almost never done by those who make such pronouncements ) , the evidence is overwhelming that he does not at all exaggerate the extent to which the mythological concepts of traditional theology have become incredible and irrelevant . Nor is it necessary to look for such evidence in the great urban centers of our culture that are admittedly almost entirely secularized and so profoundly estranged from the conventional forms in which the gospel has been communicated . On the contrary , even in the heart of " the Bible belt " itself , as can be attested by any one who is called to work there , the industrial and technological revolutions have long been under way , together with the corresponding changes in man 's picture of himself and his world . 
In fact , it is in just such a situation that the profundity of Bultmann 's argument is disclosed . Although the theological forms of the past continue to exist in a way they do not in a more secularized situation , the striking thing is the rapidity with which they are being reduced to a marginal existence . This is especially in evidence among the present generation of the suburban middle class . Time and again in counseling and teaching , one encounters members of this group whose attempts to bring into some kind of unity the insubstantial mythologies of their " fundamentalist " heritage and the stubborn reality of the modern world are only too painfully obvious . 
The same thing is also evidenced by the extreme " culture-Protestantism " so often observed to characterize the preaching and teaching of the American churches . In the absence of a truly adequate conceptuality in which the gospel can be expressed , the unavoidable need to demythologize it makes use of whatever resources are at hand — and this usually means one or another of the various forms of " folk religion " current in the situation . This is not to say that the only explanation of the present infatuation with Norman Vincent Peale 's " cult of reassurance " or the other types of a purely cultural Christianity is the ever-present need for a demythologized gospel . But it is to say that this need is far more important for such infatuation than most of the pundits seem to have suspected . 
However , even if the latent demand for demythologization is not nearly as widespread as we are claiming , at least among the cultured elements of the population there tends to be an almost complete indifference to the church and its traditional message of sin and grace . To be sure , when this is pointed out , a common response among certain churchmen is to fulminate about " the little flock " and " the great crowd " and to take solace from Paul 's castigation of the " wisdom of the wise " in the opening chapter of First Corinthians . But can we any longer afford the luxury of such smug indigation ? Can the church risk assuming that the " folly " of men is as dear to God as their " wisdom " , or , as is also commonly implied , that " the foolishness of God " and " the foolishness of men " are simply two ways of talking about the same thing ? Can we continue to alienate precisely those whose gifts we so desperately need and apart from whose co-operation our mission in the world must become increasingly precarious ? 
There is an ancient and venerable tradition in the church ( which derives , however , from the heritage of the Greeks rather than from the Bible ) that God is completely independent of his creation and so has no need of men for accomplishing his work in the world . by analogy , the church also has been regarded as entirely independent of the " world " in the sense of requiring nothing from it in order to be the church . But , as Scripture everywhere reminds us , God does have need of his creatures , and the church , a fortiori , can ill afford to do without the talents with which the world , by God 's providence , presents it . 
And yet this is exactly the risk we run when we assume , as we too often do , that we can continue to preach the gospel in a form that makes it seem incredible and irrelevant to cultured men . Until we translate this gospel into a language that enlightened men today can understand , we are depriving ourselves of the very resources on which the continued success of our witness most certainly depends . 
In arguing in this way , we are obviously taking for granted that a demythologized restatement of the kerygma can be achieved ; and that we firmly believe this will presently become evident when we set forth reasons to justify such a conviction . But the main point here is that even if such a restatement were not possible , the demand to demythologize the kerygma would still be unavoidable . 
This is what we mean when we say this demand must be accepted without condition . If to be a Christian means to say yes where I otherwise say no , or where I do not have the right to say anything at all , then my only choice is to refuse to be a Christian . Expressed differently : if the price for becoming a faithful follower of Jesus Christ is some form of self-destruction , whether of the body or of the mind — sacrificium corporis , sacrificium intellectus — then there is no alternative but that the price remain unpaid . 
This must be stressed because it is absolutely essential to the argument of this concluding chapter . Modern man , as Dietrich Bonhoeffer has told us , has " come of age " ; and though this process by no means represents an unambiguous gain and is , in fact , marked by the estrangement from the depths that seems to be the cost of human maturation , it is still a positive step forward ; and those of us who so richly benefit from it should be the last to despise it . In any event , it is an irreversible step , and if we are at all honest with ourselves , we will know we have no other alternative than to live in the world in which God has seen fit to place us . 
To say this , of course , is to take up a position on one side of a controversy going on now for some two hundred years , or , at any rate , since the beginning of the distinctively modern period in theological thought . We have aligned ourselves with that " liberal " tradition in Protestant Christianity that counts among the great names in its history those of Schleiermacher , Ritschl , Herrmann , Harnack , and Troeltsch , and more recently , Schweitzer and the early Barth and , in part at least , Bultmann . It is to this same tradition that most of the creative figures in the last century and a half of American theology also belong . For we must number here not only the names of Bushnell , Clarke , and Rauschenbusch , not to mention those of " the Chicago School " and Macintosh , but those of the brothers Niebuhr and ( if America may claim him ! ) Tillich as well . Finally , we may also mention the several members of the self-consciously " neoliberal " movement that developed at the University of Chicago and is heavily indebted philosophically to the creative work of Alfred North Whitehead . 
What makes this long and diverse tradition essentially one is that those who have belonged to it have been profoundly in earnest about being modern men in a distinctively modern world . Although they have also been concerned to stand squarely within the tradition of the apostolic church , they have exhibited no willingness whatever to sacrifice their modernity to their Christianity . They have insisted , rather , on living fully and completely within modern culture and , so far from considering this treason to God , have looked upon it as the only way they could be faithful to him . 
When we say , then , that today , in our situation , the demand for demythologization must be accepted without condition , we are simply saying that at least this much of the liberal tradition is an enduring achievement . However much we may have to criticize liberal theology 's constructive formulations , the theology we ourselves must strive to formulate can only go beyond liberalism , not behind it . 
In affirming this we have already taken the decisive step in breaking the deadlock into which Bultmann 's attempt to formulate such a theology has led . For we have said , in effect , that of the two alternatives to his position variously represented by the other participants in the demythologizing discussion , only one is really an alternative . If the demand for demythologization is unavoidable and so must be accepted by theology unconditionally , the position of the " right " is clearly untenable . Whereas Bultmann 's " center " position is structurally inconsistent and is therefore indefensible on formal grounds alone , the general position of the " right " , as represented , say , by Karl Barth , involves the rejection or at least qualification of the demand for demythologization and so is invalidated on the material grounds we have just considered . 
It follows , then , provided the possibilities have been exhausted , that the only real alternative is the general viewpoint of the " left " , which has been represented on the Continent by Fritz Buri and , to some extent at least , is found in much that is significant in American and English theology . 
In order to make the implications of our position as clear as possible , we may develop this argument at greater length . 
We may show , first , that there can not possibly be an alternative other than the three typically represented by Bultmann , Barth , and Buri . To do this , it is sufficient to point out that if the principle in terms of which alternatives are to be conceived is such as to exclude more than two , then the question of a " third " possibility is a meaningless question . Thus , if what is at issue is whether " All S is P " , it is indifferent whether " Some S is not P " or " No S is P " , since in either case the judgment in question is false . Hence , if what is in question is whether in a given theology myth is or is not completely rejected , it is unimportant whether only a little bit of myth or a considerable quantity is accepted ; for , in either event , the first possibility is excluded . Therefore , the only conceivable alternatives are those represented , on the one hand , by the two at least apparently self-consistent but mutually exclusive positions of Buri and Barth and , on the other hand , by the third but really pseudo position ( analogous to a round square ) of Bultmann . 
A second point requires more extended comment . It will be recalled from the discussion in Section 7 that the position of the " right " , as represented by Barth , rests on the following thesis : The only tenable alternative to Bultmann 's position is a theology that ( 1 ) rejects or at least qualifies his unconditioned demand for demythologization and existential interpretation ; ( 2 ) accepts instead a special biblical hermeneutics or method of interpretation ; and ( 3 ) in so doing , frees itself to give appropriate emphasis to the event Jesus Christ by means of statements that , from Bultmann 's point of view , are mythological .  
ONE HUNDRED years ago there existed in England the Association for the Promotion of the Unity of Christendom . Representing as it did the efforts of only unauthorized individuals of the Roman and Anglican Churches , and urging a communion of prayer unacceptable to Rome , this association produced little fruit , and , in fact , was condemned by the Holy Office in 1864 . 
Now again in 1961 , in England , there is perhaps nothing in the religious sphere so popularly discussed as Christian unity . The Church Unity Octave , January 18-25 , was enthusiastically devoted to prayer and discussion by the various churches . Many people seem hopeful , yet it is difficult to predict whether or not there will be any more real attainment of Christian unity in 1961 than there was in 1861 . But it must be readily seen that the religious picture in England has so greatly changed during these hundred years as to engender hope , at least on the Catholic side . For the " tide is well on the turn " , as the London Catholic weekly Universe has written . 
I came to England last summer to do research on the unpublished letters of Cardinal Newman . As an American Catholic of Irish ancestry , I came with certain preconceptions and expectations ; being intellectually influenced by Newman and the general 19th-century literature of England , I knew only a Protestant-dominated country . Since arriving here , however , I have formed a far different religious picture of present-day England . In representing part of this new picture , I will be recounting some of my own personal experiences , reactions and judgments ; but my primary aim is to transcribe what Englishmen themselves are saying and writing and implying about the Roman and Anglican Churches and about the present religious state of England . 
Since the Protestant clergy for the most part wear gray or some variant from the wholly black suit , my Roman collar and black garb usually identify me in England as a Roman Catholic cleric . In any case , I have always been treated with the utmost courtesy by Englishmen , even in Devonshire and Cornwall , where anti-Catholic feeling has supposedly existed the strongest and longest . 
Nowhere have I seen public expression of anti-Catholicism . On my first Guy Fawkes Day here , I found Catholics as well as non-Catholics celebrating with the traditional fireworks and bonfires , and was told that most Englishmen either do not know or are not concerned with the historical significance of the day . A Birmingham newspaper printed in a column for children an article entitled " The True Story of Guy Fawkes " , which began : 
" When you pile your " guy " on the bonfire tomorrow night , I wonder how much of the true story of Guy Fawkes you will remember ? In the 355 years since the first Guy Fawkes Night , much of the story has been forgotten , so here is a reminder " . The article proceeded to give an inaccurate account of a catholic plot to kill King James /1 , .   IN SPITE OF the increase in numbers and prestige brought about by the conversions of Newman and other Tractarians of the 1840 's and 1850 's , the Catholic segment of England one hundred years ago was a very small one ( four per cent , or 800,000 ) which did not enjoy a gracious hearing from the general public . The return of the Catholic hierarchy in 1850 was looked upon with indignant disapprobation and , in fact , was charged with being a gesture of disloyalty . In 1864 Newman professedly had to write his Apologia with his keenest feelings in order to be believed and to command a fair hearing from English readers . 
Now , in 1961 , the Catholic population of England is still quite small ( ten per cent , or 5 million ) ; yet it represents a very considerable percentage of the churchgoing population . A Protestant woman marveled to me over the large crowds going in and out of the Birmingham Oratory ( Catholic ) Church on Sunday mornings . She found this a marvel because , as she said , only six per cent of English people are churchgoers . She may not have been exact on this number , but others here feel quite certain that the percentage would be less than ten . From many sides come remarks that Protestant churches are badly attended and the large medieval cathedrals look all but empty during services . A Catholic priest recently recounted how in the chapel of a large city university , following Anglican evensong , at which there was a congregation of twelve , he celebrated Mass before more than a hundred . 
The Protestants themselves are the first to admit the great falling off in effective membership in their churches . According to a newspaper report of the 1961 statistics of the Church of England , the " total of confirmed members is 9,748,000 , but only 2,887,671 are registered on the parochial church rolls " , and " over 27 million people in England are baptized into the Church of England , but roughly only a tenth of them continue " . An amazing article in the Manchester Guardian of last November , entitled " Fate of Redundant Churches " , states than an Archbishops ' Commission " reported last month that in the Church of England alone there are 790 churches which are redundant now , or will be in 20 years ' time . A further 260 Anglican churches have been demolished since 1948 " . And in the last five years , the " Methodist chapel committee has authorized the demolition or , more often , the sale of 764 chapels " . Most of these former churches are now used as warehouses , but " neither Anglicans nor Nonconformists object to selling churches to Roman Catholics " , and have done so . 
While it must be said that these same Protestants have built some new churches during this period , and that religious population shifts have emptied churches , a principal reason for this phenomenon of redundancy is that fewer Protestants are going to church . It should be admitted , too , that there is a good percentage of lapsed or nonchurchgoing Catholics ( one paper writes 50 per cent ) . Still , it is clear from such reports , and apparently clear from the remarks of many people , that Protestants are decreasing and Catholics increasing . 
An Anglican clergyman in Oxford sadly but frankly acknowledged to me that this is true . A century ago , Newman saw that liberalism ( what we now might call secularism ) would gradually but definitely make its mark on English Protestantism , and that even high Anglicanism would someday no longer be a " serviceable breakwater against doctrinal errors more fundamental than its own " . That day is perhaps today , 1961 , and it seems no longer very meaningful to call England a " Protestant country " . One of the ironies of the present crusade for Christian unity is that there are not , relatively speaking , many real Christians to unite . 
Many English Catholics are proud of their Catholicism and know that they are in a new ascendancy . The London Universe devoted its centenary issue last December 8 to mapping out various aspects of Catholic progress during the last one hundred years . With traditional nationalistic spirit , some Englishmen claim that English Catholicism is Catholicism at its best . I have found myself saying with other foreigners here that English Catholics are good Catholics . It has been my experience to find as many men as women in church , and to hear almost everyone in church congregations reciting the Latin prayers and responses at Mass . 
They hope , of course , to reclaim the non-Catholic population to the Catholic faith , and at every Sunday Benediction they recite by heart the " Prayer for England " : 
" O Blessed Virgin Mary , Mother of God and our most gentle queen and mother , look down in mercy upon England , thy " dowry " , and upon us all who greatly hope and trust in thee … . Intercede for our separated brethren , that with us in the one true fold they may be united to the chief Shepherd , the vicar of thy Son … " . A hymn often to be heard in Catholic churches is " Faith of our Fathers " , which glories in England 's ancient faith that endured persecution , and which proclaims : " Faith of our Fathers : Mary 's prayers/Shall win our country back to thee " . The English saints are widely venerated , quite naturally , and now there is great hope that the Forty Martyrs and Cardinal Newman will soon be canonized . 
Because they have kept the faith of their medieval fathers , English Catholics have always strongly resented the charge of being " un-English " . I have not seen this charge made during my stay here , but apparently it is still in the air . For example , a writer in a recent number of The Queen hyperbolically states that " of the myriad imprecations the only one which the English Catholics really resent is the suggestion that they are 'un-English' " . In this connection , it has been observed that the increasing number of Irish Catholics , priests and laity , in England , while certainly seen as good for Catholicism , is nevertheless a source of embarrassment for some of the more nationalistic English Catholics , especially when these Irishmen offer to remind their Christian brethren of this good .   ONE OF THE more noteworthy changes that have taken place since the mid-19th century is the situation of Catholics at Oxford and Cambridge Universities . At Oxford one hundred years ago there were very few Catholics , partly because religious tests were removed only in 1854 . Moreover , for those few there was almost no ecclesiastical representation in the city to care for their religious needs . Now , not only are there considerably more laity as students and professors at Oxford , but there are also numerous houses of religious orders existing in respectable and friendly relations with the non-Catholic members of the University . Some Catholic priests lecture there ; Catholic seminarians attend tutorials and row on the Cherwell with non-Catholic students . 
Further evidence that Roman Catholicism enjoys a more favorable position today than in 1861 is the respectful attention given to it in the mass media of England . The general tone of articles appearing in such important newspapers as the Manchester Guardian and the Sunday Observer implies a kindly recognition that the Catholic Church is now at least of equal stature in England with the Protestant churches . On successive Sundays during October , 1960 , Paul Ferris ( a non-Catholic ) wrote articles in the Observer depicting clergymen of the Church of England , the Church of Rome and the Nonconformist Church . The Catholic priest , though somewhat superficially drawn , easily came out the best . There were many letters of strong protest against the portrait of the Anglican clergyman , who was indeed portrayed as a man not particularly concerned with religious matters and without really very much to do as clergyman . Such a series of articles was certainly never printed in the public press of mid-Victorian England . There was so much interest shown in this present-day venture that it was continued on B.B.C. , where comments were equally made by an Anglican parson , a Free Church minister and a Catholic priest . 
Catholic priests have frequently appeared on television programs , sometimes discussing the Christian faith on an equal footing with Protestant clergymen . A notable example of this was the discussion of Christian unity by the Catholic Archbishop of Liverpool , Dr. Heenan , and the Anglican Archbishop of York , Dr. Ramsey , recently appointed Archbishop of Canterbury . The good feeling which exists between these two important church figures is now well known in England . The Holy Sacrifice of the Mass with commentary has been televised several times in recent months . And it was interesting to observe that B.B.C. 's television film on Christmas Eve was The Bells of St. Mary 's . 
Of course , the crowning event that has dramatically upset the traditional pattern of English religious history was the friendly visit paid by Dr. Fisher , then Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury , to the Vatican last December . It was the first time an English Primate has done this since the 14th century . English Catholics reacted to this event with moderate but real hope . 
Almost daily something is reported which feeds this Catholic hope in England : statistics of the increasing numbers of converts and Irish Catholic immigrants ; news of a Protestant minister in Leamington who has offered to allow a Catholic priest to preach from his pulpit ; a report that a Catholic nun had been requested to teach in a non-Catholic secondary school during the sickness of one of its masters ; the startling statement in a respectable periodical that " Catholics , if the present system is still in operation , will constitute almost one-third of the House of Lords in the next generation " ; a report that 200 Protestant clergymen and laity attended a votive Mass offered for Christian unity at a Catholic church in Slough during the Church Unity Octave .  The death of a man is unique , and yet it is universal . The straight line would symbolize its uniqueness , the circle its universality . But how can one figure symbolize both ? 
Christianity declares that in the life and death of Jesus Christ the unique and the universal concur . Perhaps no church father saw this concurrence of the unique and the universal as clearly , or formulated it as precisely , as Irenaeus . To be the Savior and the Lord , Jesus Christ has to be a historical individual with a biography all his own ; he dare not be a cosmic aeon that swoops to earth for a while but never identifies itself with man 's history . Yet this utterly individual historical person must also contain within himself the common history of mankind . His history is his alone , yet each man must recognize his own history in it . His death is his alone , yet each man can see his own death in the crucifixion of Jesus . Each man can identify himself with the history and the death of Jesus Christ because Jesus Christ has identified himself with human history and human death , coming as the head of a new humanity . Not a circle , then , nor a straight line , but a spiral represents the shape of death as Irenaeus sees it ; for a spiral has motion as well as recurrence . As represented by a spiral , history may , in some sense , be said to repeat itself ; yet each historical event remains unique . Christ is both unique and universal . 
The first turn of the spiral is the primeval history of humanity in Adam . As Origen interprets the end of history on the basis of its beginning , so Irenaeus portrays the story of Adam on the basis of the story of Christ . " Whence , then , comes the substance of the first man ? From God 's Will and Wisdom , and from virgin earth . For 'God had not rained' , says the Scripture , before man was made , 'and there was no man to till the earth' . From this earth , then , while it was still virgin God took dust and fashioned the man , the beginning of humanity " . Irenaeus does not regard Adam and Eve merely as private individuals , but as universal human beings , who were and are all of humanity . Adam and Eve were perfect , not in the sense that they possessed perfection , but in the sense that they were capable of development toward perfection . They were , in fact , children . Irenaeus does not claim pre-existence for the human soul ; therefore there is no need for him , as there is for Origen , to identify existence itself with the fall . Existence is created and willed by God and is not the consequence of a pre-existent rebellion or of a cosmic descent from eternity into history . Historical existence is a created good . 
The biblical symbol for this affirmation is expressed in the words : " So God created man in his own image ; in the similitude of God he created him " . There are some passages in the writings of Irenaeus where the image of God and the similitude are sharply distinguished , so most notably in the statement : " If the [ Holy ] Spirit is absent from the soul , such a man is indeed of an animal nature ; and , being left carnal , he will be an imperfect being , possessing the image [ of God ] in his formation , but not receiving the similitude [ of God ] through the Spirit " . Thus the image of God is that which makes a man a man and not an oyster ; the similitude of God , by contrast , is that which makes a man a child of God and not merely a rational creature . Recent research on Irenaeus , however , makes it evident that he does not consistently maintain this distinction . He does not mean to say that Adam lost the similitude of God and his immortality through the fall ; for he was created not exactly immortal , nor yet exactly mortal , but capable of immortality as well as of mortality . 
Therefore Irenaeus describes man 's creation as follows : 
" So that the man should not have thoughts of grandeur , and become lifted up , as if he had no lord , because of the dominion that had been given to him , and the freedom , fall into sin against God his Creator , overstepping his bounds , and take up an attitude of self-conceited arrogance towards God , a law was given him by God , that he might know that he had for lord the lord of all . And He laid down for him certain conditions : so that , if he kept the command of God , then he would always remain as he was , that is , immortal ; but if he did not , he would become mortal , melting into earth , whence his frame had been taken " . These conditions man did not keep , and thus he became mortal ; yet he did not stop being human as a result . There is no justification for systematizing the random statements of Irenaeus about the image of God beyond this , nor for reading into his imprecise usage the later theological distinction between the image of God ( humanity ) and the similitude of God ( immortality ) . 
Man was created with the capacity for immortality , but the devil 's promise of immortality in exchange for disobedience cost Adam his immortality . He was , in the words of Irenaeus , " beguiled by another under the pretext of immortality " . The true way to immortality lay through obedience , but man did not believe this . 
" Eve was disobedient ; for she did not obey when as yet she was a virgin . And even as she , having indeed a husband , Adam , but being nevertheless as yet a virgin … , having become disobedient , was made the cause of death , both to herself and to the entire human race ; so also did Mary , having a man betrothed [ to her ] , and being nevertheless a virgin , by yielding obedience , become the cause of salvation , both to herself and the whole human race " . Because he interprets the primitive state of man as one of mere potentiality or capacity and believes that Adam and Eve were created as children , Irenaeus often seems inclined to extenuate their disobedience as being " due , no doubt , to carelessness , but still wicked " . His interpretation of the beginning on the basis of the end prompts him to draw these parallels between the Virgin Eve and the Virgin Mary . That parallelism affects his picture of man 's disobedience too ; for as it was Christ , the Word of God , who came to rescue man , so it was disobedience to the word of God in the beginning that brought death into the world , and all our woe . 
With this act of disobedience , and not with the inception of his individual existence , man began the downward circuit on the spiral of history , descending from the created capacity for immortality to an inescapable mortality . At the nadir of that circuit is death . " Along with the fruit they did also fall under the power of death , because they did eat in disobedience ; and disobedience to God entails death . Wherefore , as they became forfeit to death , from that [ moment ] they were handed over to it " . This leads Irenaeus to the somewhat startling notion that Adam and Eve died on the same day that they disobeyed , namely , on a Friday , as a parallel to the death of Christ on Good Friday ; he sees a parallel also to the Jewish day of preparation for the Sabbath . In any case , though they had been promised immortality if they ate of the tree , they obtained mortality instead . The wages of sin is death . Man 's life , originally shaped for immortality and for communion with God , must now be conformed to the shape of death . 
Nevertheless , even at the nadir of the circuit the spiral of history belongs to God , and he still rules . Even death , therefore , has a providential as well as a punitive function . 
" Wherefore also He [ God ] drove him [ man ] out of Paradise , and removed him far from the tree of life , not because He envied him the tree of life , as some venture to assert , but because He pitied him , [ and did not desire ] that he should continue a sinner for ever , nor that the sin which surrounded him should be immortal , and evil interminable and irremediable . But He set a bound to his [ state of ] sin , by interposing death , and thus causing sin to cease , putting an end to it by the dissolution of the flesh , which should take place in the earth , so that man , ceasing at length to live in sin , and dying to it , might live to God " . This idea , which occurs in both Tatian and Cyprian , fits especially well into the scheme of Irenaeus ' theology ; for it prepares the way for the passage from life through death to life that is achieved in Christ . As man can live only by dying , so it was only by his dying that Christ could bring many to life . 
It is probably fair to say that the idea of death is more profound in Irenaeus than the idea of sin is . This applies to his picture of Adam . It is borne out also by the absence of any developed theory about how sin passes from one generation to the next . It becomes most evident in his description of Christ as the second Adam , who does indeed come to destroy sin , but whose work culminates in the achievement of immortality . This emphasis upon death rather than sin as man 's fundamental problem Irenaeus shares with many early theologians , especially the Greek-speaking ones . They speak of the work of Christ as the bestowal of incorruptibility , which can mean ( though it does not have to mean ) deliverance from time and history . 
Death reminds man of his sin , but it reminds him also of his transience . It represents a punishment that he knows he deserves , but it also symbolizes most dramatically that he lives his life within the process of time . These two aspects of death can not be successfully separated , but they dare not be confused or identified . The repeated efforts in Christian history to describe death as altogether the consequence of human sin show that these two aspects of death can not be separated . Such efforts almost always find themselves compelled to ask whether Adam was created capable of growing old and then older and then still older , in short , whether Adam 's life was intended to be part of the process of time . If it was , then it must have been God 's intention to translate him at a certain point from time to eternity . One night , so some of these theories run , Adam would have fallen asleep , much as he fell asleep for the creation of Eve ; and thus he would have been carried over into the life eternal . The embarrassment of these theories over the naturalness of death is an illustration of the thesis that death can not be only a punishment , for some termination seems necessary in a life that is lived within the natural order of time and change . 
On the other hand , Christian faith knows that death is more than the natural termination of temporal existence . It is the wages of sin , and its sting is the law . If this aspect of death as punishment is not distinguished from the idea of death as natural termination , the conclusion seems inevitable that temporal existence itself is a form of punishment rather than the state into which man is put by the will of the Creator . This seems to have been the conclusion to which Origen was forced . If death receives more than its share of attention from the theologian and if sin receives less than its share , the gift of the life eternal through Christ begins to look like the divinely appointed means of rescue from temporal , i.e. , created , existence . Such an interpretation of death radically alters the Christian view of creation ; for it teaches salvation from , not salvation in , time and history . Because Christianity teaches not only salvation in history , but salvation by the history of Christ , such an interpretation of death would require a drastic revision of the Christian understanding of the work of Christ .  
Furthermore , as an encouragement to revisionist thinking , it manifestly is fair to admit that any fraternity has a constitutional right to refuse to accept persons it dislikes . The Unitarian clergy were an exclusive club of cultivated gentlemen — as the term was then understood in the Back Bay — and Parker was definitely not a gentleman , either in theology or in manners . Ezra Stiles Gannett , an honorable representative of the sanhedrin , addressed himself frankly to the issue in 1845 , insisting that Parker should not be persecuted or calumniated and that in this republic no power to restrain him by force could exist . Even so , Gannett judiciously argued , the Association could legitimately decide that Parker " should not be encouraged nor assisted in diffusing his opinions by those who differ from him in regard to their correctness " . We today are not entitled to excoriate honest men who believed Parker to be downright pernicious and who barred their pulpits against his demand to poison the minds of their congregations . One can even argue — though this is a delicate matter — that every justification existed for their returning the Public Lecture to the First Church , and so to suppress it , rather than let Parker use it as a sounding board for his propaganda when his turn should come to occupy it . Finally , it did seem clear as day to these clergymen , as Gannett 's son explained in the biography of his father , they had always contended for the propriety of their claim to the title of Christians . Their demand against the Calvinist Orthodoxy for intellectual liberty had never meant that they would follow " free inquiry " to the extreme of proclaiming Christianity a " natural " religion . 
Grant all this — still , when modern Unitarianism and the Harvard Divinity School recall with humorous affection the insults Parker lavished upon them , or else argue that after all Parker received the treatment he invited , they betray an uneasy conscience . Whenever New England liberalism is reminded of the dramatic confrontation of Parker and the fraternity on January 23 , 1843 — while it may defend the privilege of Chandler Robbins to demand that Parker leave the Association , while it may plead that Dr. N. L. Frothingham had every warrant for stating , " The difference between Trinitarians and Unitarians is a difference in Christianity ; the difference between Mr. Parker and the Association is a difference between no Christianity and Christianity " — despite these supposed conclusive assurances , the modern liberal heaves repeatedly a sigh of relief , of positive thanksgiving , that the Association never quite brought itself officially to expel Parker . Had it done so , the blot on its escutcheon would have remained indelible , nor could the Harvard Divinity School assemble today to honor Parker 's insurgence other than by getting down on its collective knees and crying " peccavi " . 
Happily for posterity , then , the Boston Association did not actually command Parker to leave the room , though it came too close for comfort to what would have been an unforgivable brutality . Fortunately , the honor of the denomination can attest that Cyrus Bartol defended Parker 's sincerity , as did also Gannett and Chandler Robbins ; whereupon Parker broke down into convulsions of weeping and rushed out of the room , though not out of the Fellowship . In the hall , after adjournment , Dr. Frothingham took him warmly by the hand and requested Parker to visit him — whereupon our burly Theodore again burst into tears . 
All this near tragedy , which to us borders on comedy , enables us to tell the story over and over again , always warming ourselves with a glow of complacency . It was indeed a near thing , but somehow the inherent decency of New England ( which we inherit ) did triumph . Parker was never excommunicated . To the extent that he was ostracized or even reviled , we solace ourselves by saying he asked for it . Yet , even after all these stratagems , the conscience of Christian liberality is still not laid to rest , any more than is the conscience of Harvard University for having done the abject penance for its rejection of Ralph Waldo Emerson 's The Divinity School Address of naming its hall of philosophy after him . In both cases the stubborn fact remains : liberalism gave birth to two brilliant apostates , both legitimate offspring of its loins , and when brought to the test , it behaved shabbily . Suppose they both had ventured into realms which their colleagues thought infidel : is this the way gentlemen settle frank differences of opinion ? Is it after all possible that no matter how the liberals trumpet their confidence in human dignity they are exposed to a contagion of fear more insidious than any conservative has ever to worry about ? 
However , there is a crucial difference between the two histories . Emerson evaded the problem by shoving it aside , or rather by leaving it behind him : he walked out of the Unitarian communion , so that it could lick the wound of his departure , preserve its self-respect and eventually accord him pious veneration . Parker insisted upon not resigning , even when the majority wanted him to depart , upon daring the Fellowship to throw him out . Hence he was in his lifetime , as is the memory of him afterwards , a canker within the liberal sensitivity . He still points an accusing finger at all of us , telling us we have neither the courage to support him nor the energy to cut his throat . 
Actually , the dispute between Parker and the society of his time , both ecclesiastical and social , was a real one , a bitter one . It can not be smoothed over by now cherishing his sarcasms as delightful bits of self-deprecation or by solemnly calling for a reconsideration of the justice of the objections to him . The fact is incontestable : that liberal world of Unitarian Boston was narrow-minded , intellectually sterile , smug , afraid of the logical consequences of its own mild ventures into iconoclasm , and quite prepared to resort to hysterical repressions when its brittle foundations were threatened . Parker , along with Garrison and Charles Sumner , showed a magnificent moral bravery when facing mobs mobilized in defense of the Mexican War and slavery . Nevertheless , we can find reasons for respecting even the bigotry of the populace ; their passions were genuine , and the division between them and the abolitionists is clear-cut . But Parker as the ultra-liberal minister within the pale of a church which had proclaimed itself the repository of liberality poses a different problem , which is not to be resolved by holding him up as the champion of freedom . Even though his theological theses have become , to us , commonplaces , the fundamental interrogation he phrased is very much with us . It has been endlessly rephrased , but I may here put it thus : at what point do the tolerant find themselves obliged to become intolerant ? And then , as they become aware that they have reached the end of their patience , what do they , to their dismay , learn for the first time about themselves ? 
There can be no doubt , the Boston of that era could be exquisitely cruel in enforcing its canons of behavior . The gentle Channing , revered by all Bostonians , orthodox or Unitarian , wrote to a friend in Louisville that among its many virtues Boston did not abound in a tolerant spirit , that the yoke of opinion crushed individuality of judgment and action : " No city in the world is governed so little by a police , and so much by mutual inspections and what is called public sentiment . We stand more in awe of one another than most people . Opinion is less individual or runs more into masses , and often rules with a rod of iron " . Even more poignantly , and with the insight of a genius , Channing added — remember , this is Channing , not Parker ! — that should a minister in Boston trust himself to his heart , should he " speak without book , and consequently break some law of speech , or be hurried into some daring hyperbole , he should find little mercy " . 
Channing wrote this — in a letter ! I think it fair to say that he never quite reached such candor in his sermons . But Theodore Parker , commencing his mission to the world-at-large , disguised as the minister of a " twenty-eighth Congregational Church " which bore no resemblance to the Congregational polities descended from the founders ( among which were still the Unitarian churches ) , made explicit from the beginning that the conflict between him and the Hunkerish society was not something which could be evaporated into a genteel difference about clerical decorum . Because he spoke openly with what Channing had prophesied someone might — with daring hyperbole — Parker vindicated Channing 's further prophecy that he who committed this infraction of taste would promptly discover how little mercy liberals were disposed to allow to libertarians who appeared to them libertines . An institutionalized liberalism proved itself fundamentally an institution , and only within those defined limits a license . 
By reminding ourselves of these factors in the situation , we should , I am sure , come to a fresh realization , however painful it be , that the battle between Parker and his neighbors was fought in earnest . He arraigned the citizens in language of so little courtesy that they had to respond with , at the least , resentment . What otherwise could " the lawyer , doctor , minister , the men of science and letters " do when told that they had " become the cherubim and seraphim and the three archangels who stood before the golden throne of the merchant , and continually cried , 'Holy , holy , holy is the Almighty Dollar' " ? Nor , when we recollect how sensitive were the emotions of the old Puritan stock in regard to the recent tides of immigration , should we be astonished that their thin lips were compressed into a white line of rage as Parker snarled at them thus : " Talk about the Catholics voting as the bishop tells ! reproach the Catholics for it ! You and I do the same thing . There are a great many bishops who have never had a cross on their bosom , nor a mitre on their head , who appeal not to the authority of the Pope at Rome , but to the Almighty Dollar , a pope much nearer home . Boston has been controlled by a few capitalists , lawyers and other managers , who told the editors what to say and the preachers what to think " . This was war . Parker meant business . And he took repeated care to let his colleagues know that he intended them : " Even the Unitarian churches have caught the malaria , and are worse than those who deceived them " — which implied that they were very bad indeed . It was " Duty " he said that his parents had given him as a rule — beyond even the love that suffused his being and the sense of humor with which he was largely supplied — and it was duty he would perform , though it cost him acute pain and exhausted him by the age of fifty . Parker could weep — and he wept astonishingly often and on the slightest provocation — but the psychology of those tears was entirely compatible with a remorseless readiness to massacre his opponents . " If it gave me pleasure to say hard things " , he wrote , " I would shut up forever " . We have to tell ourselves that when Parker spoke in this vein , he believed what he said , because he could continue , " But the TRUTH , which cost me bitter tears to say , I must speak , though it cost other tears hotter than fire " . Because he copiously shed his own tears , and yielded himself up as a living sacrifice to the impersonalized conscience of New England , he was not disturbed by the havoc he worked in other people 's consciences . 
Our endeavor to capture even a faint sense of how strenuous was the fight is muffled by our indifference to the very issue which in the Boston of 1848 seemed to be the central hope of its Christian survival , that of the literal , factual historicity of the miracles as reported in the Four Gospels . It is idle to ask why we are no longer disturbed if somebody , professing the deepest piety , decides anew that it is of no importance whether or not Christ transformed the water into wine at eleven A. M. on the third of August , A. D. 32 . We have no answer as to why we are not alarmed . So we are the more prepared to give Parker the credit for having taken the right side in an unnecessary controversy , to salute his courage , and to pass on , happily forgetting both him and the entire episode . We have not the leisure , or the patience , or the skill , to comprehend what was working in the mind and heart of a then recent graduate from the Harvard Divinity School who would muster the audacity to contradict his most formidable instructor , the majesterial Andrews Norton , by saying that , while he believed Jesus " like other religious teachers " , worked miracles , " I see not how a miracle proves a doctrine " .  
I have , within the past fifty years , come out of all uncertainty into a faith which is a dominating conviction of the Truth and about which I have not a shadow of doubt . It has been my lot all through life to associate with eminent scientists and at times to discuss with them the deepest and most vital of all questions , the nature of the hope of a life beyond this . I have also constantly engaged in scientific work and am fully aware of the value of opinions formed in science as well as in the religions in the world . n an amateu6rish , yet in a very real sense , I have followed the developments of archaeology , geology , astronomy , herpetology , and mycology with a hearty appreciation of the advances being made in these fields . 
At one time I became disturbed in the faith in which I had grown up by the apparent inroads being made upon both Old and New Testaments by a " Higher Criticism " of the Bible , to refute which I felt the need of a better knowledge of Hebrew and of archaeology , for it seemed to me that to pull out some of the props of our faith was to weaken the entire structure . 
Doubts thus inculcated left me floundering for a while and , like some higher critical friends , trying to continue to use the Bible as the Word of God while at the same time holding it to have been subjected to a vast number of redactions and interpolations : attempting to bridge the chasm between an older , reverent , Bible-loving generation and a critical , doubting , Bible-emancipated race . Although still aware of a great light and glow of warmth in the Book , I stood outside shivering in the cold . 
In one thing the higher critics , like the modernists , however , overreached themselves , in claiming that the Gospel of John was not written in John 's time but well after the first century , perhaps as late as 150 A.D. Now , if any part of the Bible is assuredly the very Word of God speaking through His servant , it is John 's Gospel . To ask me to believe that so inexpressibly marvelous a book was written long after all the events by some admiring follower , and was not inspired directly by the Spirit of God , is asking me to accept a miracle far greater than any of those recorded in the Bible . Here I took my leave of my learned friends to step out on another path , to which we might give the modern name of Pragmatism , or the thing that works . Test it , try it , and if it works , accept it as a guiding principle . 
So , I put my Bible to the practical test of noting what it says about itself , and then tested it to see how it worked . As a short , possibly not the best method , I looked up " Word " in the Concordance and noted that the Bible claims from Genesis 1 to Revelation 22 to be God 's personal message to man . The next traditional step then was to accept it as the authoritative textbook of the Christian faith just as one would accept a treatise on any earthly " science " , and I submitted to its conditions according to Christ 's invitation and promise that , " If any man will do his will , he shall know of the doctrine , whether it be of God , or whether I speak of myself " ( John 7:17 ) . 
The outcome of such an experiment has been in due time the acceptance of the Bible as the Word of God inspired in a sense utterly different from any merely human book , and with it the acceptance of our Lord Jesus Christ as the only begotten Son of God , Son of Man by the Virgin Mary , the Saviour of the world . 
I believe , therefore , that we are without exception sinners , by nature alienated from God , and that Jesus Christ , the Son of God , came to earth , the representative Head of a new race , to die upon the cross and pay the penalty of the sin of the world , and that he who thus receives Christ as his personal Saviour is " born again " spiritually , with new privileges , appetites , and affections , destined to live and grow in His likeness forever . Nor can any man save himself by good works or by a commendable " moral life " , although such works are the natural fruits and evidences of a saving faith already received and naturally expressing itself through such avenues . 
I now ever look for Christ acording to His promises and those of the Old Testament as well , to appear again in glory to put away all sin and to reign in righteousness over the whole earth . 
To state fully what the Bible means as my daily spiritual food is as intimate and difficult as to formulate the reasons for loving my nearest and dearest relatives and friends . The Bible is as obviously and truly food for the spirit as bread is food for the body . Again , as faith reveals God my Father and Christ my Saviour , I follow without question where He leads me daily by His Spirit of love , wisdom , power and prayer . I place His precepts and His leadings above every seeming probability , dismissing cherished convictions and holding the wisdom of man as folly when opposed to Him . I discern no limits to a faith vested in God and Christ , who is the sum of all wisdom and knowledge , and daring to trust Him even though called to stand alone before the world . 
Our Lord 's invitation with its implied promise to all is , " Come and see " . 
I STOOD at the bedside of my patient one day and beheld a very sick man in terrible pain . As I ministered to his needs , I noticed that his face was radiant in spite of his suffering and I learned that he was trusting not only in the skill of his doctor and nurse but also the Lord . 
In his heart he had that peace of which the Lord spoke when He said , " Peace I leave with you , my peace I give unto you : not as the world giveth , give I unto you . Let not your heart be troubled , neither let it be afraid " . 
What a joy to realize that we , too , can claim this promise tendered by the Lord during His earthly ministry to a group of men who were very dear to Him . He was about to leave them , to depart from this world , and return to His Father in Heaven . Before He left them He promised that His peace would be their portion to abide in their hearts and minds . 
I praise God for the privilege of being a nurse who has that peace through faith in the Lord Jesus Christ . It makes my work a great deal easier to be able to pray for the Lord 's guidance while ministering to the physical needs of my patients . 
How often have I looked to Jesus when entering the sick room , asking for His presence and help in my professional duties as I give my talents not only as the world giveth but as one who loves the Saviour and His creatures . 
Looking unto God , the Prophet Isaiah wrote these blessed words almost three thousand years ago : " Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace , whose mind is stayed on thee : because he trusteth in thee " . 
Are you longing for peace in your heart ? Such a calm and assuring peace can be yours . As only a member of the family can share in the innermost joys of the family , likewise one must belong to the family of God in order to receive the benefits that are promised to those who are His own . 
Perhaps you are not His child . Perhaps you do not know if you belong to Him . You may know that you are in God 's family and be just as sure of it as you are that you belong to the family of your earthly father . 
" God so loved the world , that he gave his only begotten Son , that whosoever believeth in him should not perish , but have everlasting life " , and " as many as received him , to them gave he power to become the sons of God , even to them that believe on his name " . 
It is to those who believe on His name and belong to Him that He gives His peace ; not that empty peace the world offers , but a deep , abiding peace which nothing can destroy . 
Why not open your heart to the Lord Jesus Christ now , accept Him as your Saviour and let Him fill you with peace that only He can give . 
Then , with the hymn writer of old , you can say : 
" I am resting today in His wonderful peace , 
Resting sweetly in Jesus ' control . 
I am kept from all danger by night and by day , 
And His glory is flooding my soul " . 
SATELLITES , SPUTNIKS , ROCKETS , BALLOONS ; what next ? Our necks are stiff from gazing at the wonders of outer space , which have captured the imagination of the American public . Cape Canaveral 's achievements thunder forth from the radio , television , and newspaper . 
While we are filling outer space with scientific successes , for many the " inner " space of their soul is an aching void . 
Proof ? An average of 50 suicides are reported in America each day ! One out of every three or four marriages end in divorce ! Over $200,000,000 is paid yearly to the 80,000 full-time fortune-tellers in the United States by fearful mankind who want to " know " what the future holds ! Delinquency , juvenile and adult , is at an all-time high ! Further proof ? Read your daily newspaper ! 
Unfortunately , in our rush to beat the Russians , we have forgotten these truth-packed words of Jesus Christ : " What shall it profit a man , if he shall gain the whole world [ that includes outer space ] , and lose his own soul ? Or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul " ? ( Mark 8:36 , 37 ) . 
Gaining outer space and losing " inner " space is bad business according to God 's standards . 
It is true that we must keep up our national defenses and scientific accomplishments ; only a fool would think otherwise . But we must not forget man 's soul . 
Is putting a rocket in orbit half so significant as the good news that God put His Son , Jesus Christ , on earth to live and die to save our hell-bound souls ? " For God so loved the world , that he gave his only begotten Son , that whosoever believeth in him should not perish , but have everlasting life " ( John 3:16 ) . 
Never forget that a chain is only as strong as its weakest link . Your spiritual " inner " space helps determine the spirituality of America as a nation . We trust you are not one of the 70,000,000 Americans who do not attend church , but who feel that various forms of recreation are more important than worshipping the God who made our country great . 
Is forgiveness of past sins , assurance of present help , and hope of future bliss in your orbit ? Or are you trying the devil 's substitutes to relieve that spiritual hunger you feel within ? Pleasure , fame and fortune , drowning your troubles with a drink , and " living it up " with the gang are like candy bars when you 're hungry : they may ease your hunger temporarily , but they 'll never take the place of a satisfying , mouth-watering steak . 
So it is spiritually . No amount of religious ceremonies or even joining a church will relieve the gnawing of your " inner " space . Why ? Because your soul was made to be filled with God Himself , not religious functions " about " Him . Only He can satisfy the deepest longings . That is why the Bible commands you to " Taste and see that the Lord is good : blessed [ happy ] is the man that trusteth in him " ( Psalm 34:8 ) . 
You can receive God into your heart and life by a step of personal faith . Accept the sinless Son of God , Jesus Christ , as your own personal Saviour . " As many as received him [ Jesus ] , to them gave he power to become the sons of God , even to them that believe on his name "  " The Lord is my light and my salvation ; whom shall I fear ? the Lord is the strength of my life ; of whom shall I be afraid " ? Psalm 27:1 
A certain teacher scheduled a " Fear Party " for her fourth grade pupils . It was a session at which all the youngsters were told to express their fears , to get them out in the open where they could talk about them freely . The teacher thought it was so successful that she asks : " Would n't it be helpful to all age groups if they could participate in a similar confessional of their fears and worries " ? 
Dr. George W. Crane , a medical columnist , thinks it would . He says : " That would reduce neurotic ailments tremendously . Each week an estimated 20 million patients call upon us doctors . Of this number , 50% , or 10 million patients have no diagnosable physical ailments whatever . They are 'worry warts ' . Yet they keep running from one physician to another , largely to get a willing ear who will listen to their parade of troubles . One of the most wholesome things you could schedule in your church would thus be a group confessional where people could admit of their inner tensions " . 
We are evidently trying hard to think of new ways to deal with the problem of fear these days . It must be getting more serious . People are giving their doctors a hard time . One doctor made a careful survey of his patients and the reasons for their troubles , and he reported that 40% of them worried about things that never happened ; 30% of them worried about past happenings which were completely beyond their control ; 12% of them worried about their health , although their ailments were imaginary ; 10% of them worried about their friends , neighbors , and relatives , most of whom were quite capable of taking care of themselves . Only 8% of the worries had behind them real causes which demanded attention . 
Well , most of our fears may be unfounded , but after you discover that fact , you have something else to worry about : Why then do we have these fears ? What is the real cause of them ? What is there about us that makes us so anxious ? 
Look at the things we do to escape our fears and to forget our worries . We spend millions of dollars every year on fortune tellers and soothsayers . We spend billions of dollars at the race tracks , and more billions on other forms of gambling . We spend billions of dollars on liquor , and many more billions on various forms of escapist entertainment . We consume tons of aspirin and tranquilizers and sleeping pills in order to get a moment 's relief from the tensions that are tearing us apart . 
A visitor from a more peaceful country across the sea was taken to one of our amusement parks , and after he had seen it all , he said to a friend : " You must be a very sad people " . " Sad " was not the right word , of course . He should have said " jittery " , for that 's what we are . And that 's worse than sad . Watch people flock to amusement houses , cocktail lounges , and night clubs that advertise continuous entertainment , which means an endless flow of noise and frivolity by paid entertainers who are supposed to perform in those incredible ways which are designed to give men a few hours of dubious relaxation — watch them and you can tell that many of them are running away from something . 
In one of his writings Pascal speaks of this mania for diversion as being a sign of misery and fear which man can not endure without such opiates . Yes , and as tension mounts in this world , fear is increasing . Does that explain why there is now such a big boom in the bomb shelter business ? We have so many new things to fear in this age of nuclear weapons , dreadful things which are too horrible to contemplate . I doubt that " fear parties " and " group confessionals " will help very much . Suppose we do get our fears out in the open , what then ? Is n't that where most of them are already — right out on the front page of our newspapers ? Maybe we are talking about them too much . The question is : what are we going to do about them ? 
Meanwhile , the enemy will capitalize on our fears , if he can . Hitler did just that 23 years ago , building up tensions that first led to a Munich and then to a world war . The fear of war can make us either too weak to stand and too willing to compromise , or too reckless and too nervous to negotiate for peace as long as there is any chance to negotiate . It is said that fear in human beings produces an odor that provokes animals to attack . It could have the same effect on Communists . The President of the United States has said : " We will never negotiate out of fear , and we will never fear to negotiate " . That is a sound position , but it is important that Moscow shall recognize it not merely as the word of a president but as the mind of a free people who are not afraid . And that 's another reason why it is imperative for us these days to conquer our fears , to develop the poise that promotes peace . 
Turning to the Word of God , we find the only sure way to do that . In Psalm 27:1 you read those beautiful words which you must have in your heart if you are to master the fears that surround you , or to drive them out if they have you in their grip : " The Lord is my light and my salvation ; whom shall I fear ? the Lord is the strength of my life ; of whom shall I be afraid " ? 
Well , you say , those are beautiful words all right , but it was easy for the psalmist to sing them in his day . He did n't live in a world of perpetual peril like ours . He did n't know anything about the problems we face today . 
No ? Read the next two verses : " When the wicked , even mine enemies and my foes , came upon me to eat up my flesh , they stumbled and fell . Though an host should encamp against me , my heart shall not fear : though war should rise against me , in this will I be confident " . 
That is almost a perfect description of the predicament in which we find ourselves today , is n't it ? Our enemy is also threatening to devour us . He has already devoured huge areas of the world , putting men behind concrete walls and iron curtains and barbed wire , reducing them to slavery , systematically crushing not only their bodies but their souls , and shooting them to death if they try to escape their prison . Yes indeed , we too can see a warlike host of infidels encamped against us . 
What a terrible thing , that " wailing wall " in Berlin ! A man with a baby in his arms stood there pleading for his wife who is on the other side with the rest of the family . Another man tried to swim across the river from the East to the West , but was shot and killed . A middle aged woman opened a window on the third floor of her house which was behind the wall , she threw out a few belongings and then jumped ; she was fatally injured . The entrance to a church has been walled up , so that the congregation , most of which is in the western sector , can not worship God there anymore . Practically everybody in Berlin has relatives and friends that live in the opposite part of the city . People stand at the wall giving vent to their feelings , weeping , pounding it with their fists , pleading for loved ones . But the enemy answers them from loudspeakers that pour out Communist propaganda with a generous mixture of terrible profanity . There is only one escape left , a tragic one , and too many people are taking it : suicide . The normal rate of suicides in East Berlin was one a day , but since the border was closed on August 13 it has jumped to 25 a day ! 
These things may be happening many miles away from us but really they are right next door . We are all involved in them , deeply involved . And nobody knows what comes next . We live from crisis to crisis . And there is only one way for a man to conquer his fears in such a world . He must learn to say with true faith what the psalmist said in a similar world : " The Lord is my light and my salvation ; whom shall I fear ? the Lord is the strength of my life ; of whom shall I be afraid " ? 
Notice that this man had a threefold conception of God which is the secret of his faith . First , " the Lord is my light " . He lived in a very dark world , but he was not in the dark . The same God who called this world into being when He said : " Let there be light " ! — those were His very first creative words — He began the world with light — this God still gives light to a world which man has plunged into darkness . For those who put their trust in Him He still says every day again : " Let there be light " ! And there is light ! 
In fact , He came into this world Himself , in the person of His Son , Jesus Christ , who stood here amid the darkness of human sin and said : " I am the light of the world : he that followeth me shall not walk in darkness , but shall have the light of life " . The psalmist could say that God was his light even though he could only anticipate the coming of Christ . He lived in the dawn ; he could only see the light coming over the horizon . We live in the bright daylight of that great event ; for us it is a fact in history . Why should we not have the same faith , and an even greater experience of the light which it gives ? 
This is the faith that moved the psalmist to add his second conception of God : " The Lord is … my salvation " . He knew that his God would save him from his enemies because He had saved him from his sins . If God could do that , He could do anything . The enemies at his gate , threatening to eat up his flesh , were nothing compared with the enemy of sin within his own soul . And God had conquered that one by His grace ! So why worry about all the others ? 
The apostle Paul said the same thing in the language and faith of the New Testament : " He that spared not His own Son , but delivered Him up for us all , how shall He not with Him freely give us all things ? … If God be for us , who can be against us ? … Who shall separate us from the love of Christ ? shall tribulation , or distress , or persecution , or famine , or nakedness , or peril , or sword " ? ( Romans 8:31 , 32 , 35 ) 
Salvation ! This is the key to the conquest of fear . This gets down to the heart of our problem , for it reconciles us with God , whom we fear most of all because we have sinned against Him . When that fear has been removed by faith in Jesus Christ , when we know that He is our Savior , that He has paid our debt with His blood , that He has met the demands of God 's justice and thus has turned His wrath away — when we know that , we have peace with God in our hearts ; and then , with this God on our side , we can face the whole world without fear . 
And so the psalmist gives us one more picture of God : " The Lord is the strength of my life " . The word is really " stronghold " . It recalls those words of another psalm : " God is our refuge and strength , a very present help in trouble . Therefore will not we fear , though the earth be removed , and though the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea … Come , behold the works of the Lord , what desolations He hath made in the earth .  But , again , we have no real evidence on this from that quarter until the close of the ninth century A.D. , when an Arabic scholar , Tabit ibn Korra ( 836-901 ) is said to have discussed the magic square of three . Thus , while it remains possible that the Babylonians and/or the Pythagoreans may perhaps have had the magic square of three before the Chinese did , more definite evidence will have to turn up from the Middle East or the Classical World before China can lose her claim to the earliest known magic square by more than a thousand years .  2 . THE " LO SHU " SQUARE AS AN EXPRESSION OF CENTRALITY  The concept of the Middle Kingdom at peace , strong and united under a forceful ruler , which had been only a longed-for ideal in the time of the Warring States , was finally realized by the establishment of a Chinese Empire under the Ch'in dynasty ( 221-207 B.C. ) . But this was only accomplished by excessive cruelty and extremes of totalitarian despotism . Among the many severe measures taken by the First Emperor , Shih Huang-ti , in his efforts to insure the continuation of this hard-won national unity , was the burning of the books in 213 B.C. , with the expressed intention of removing possible sources for divergent thinking ; but , as he had a special fondness for magic and divination , he ordered that books on these subjects should be spared . Many of the latter were destroyed in their turn , during the burning of the vast Ch'in palace some ten years later ; yet some must have survived , because the old interest in number symbolism , divination , and magic persisted on into the Han dynasty , which succeeded in reuniting China and keeping it together for a longer period ( from 202 B.C. to A.D. 220 ) . In fact , during the first century B.C. , an extensive literature sprang up devoted to these subjects , finding its typical expression in the so-called " wei books " , a number of which were specifically devoted to the Lo Shu and related numerical diagrams , especially in connection with divination . However , the wei books were also destroyed in a series of Orthodox Confucian purges which culminated in a final proscription in 605 . 
After all this destruction of old literature , it should be obvious why we have so little information about the early history and development of the Lo Shu , which was already semisecret anyhow . But , in spite of all this , enough evidence remains to show that the magic square of three must indeed have been the object of a rather extensive cult — or series of cults — reaching fullest expression in the Han period . 
Although modern scholars have expressed surprise that " the simple magic square of three " , a mere " mathematical puzzle " , was able to exert a considerable influence on the minds and imaginations of the cultured Chinese for so many centuries , they could have found most of the answers right within the square itself . But , up to now , no one has attempted to analyze its inherent mathematical properties , or the numerical significance of its numbers — singly or in combination — and then tried to consider these in the light of Old Chinese cosmological concepts . 
Such an analysis speedily reveals why the middle number of the Lo Shu , 5 , was so vitally significant for the Chinese ever since the earliest hints that they had a knowledge of this diagram . The importance of this 5 can largely be explained by the natural mathematical properties of the middle number and its special relationship to all the rest of the numbers — quite apart from any numerological considerations , which is to say , any symbolic meaning arbitrarily assigned to it . Indeed , mathematically speaking , it was both functionally and symbolically the most important number in the entire diagram . 
If one takes the middle number , 5 , and multiplies it by 3 ( the base number of the magic square of three ) , the result is 15 , which is also the constant sum of all the rows , columns , and two main diagonals . Then , if the middle number is activated to its greatest potential in terms of this square , through multiplying it by the highest number , 9 ( which is the square of the base number ) , the result is 45 ; and the latter is the total sum of all the numbers in the square , by which all the other numbers are overshadowed and in which they may be said to be absorbed . 
Furthermore , the middle number of the Lo Shu is not only the physical mean between every opposing pair of the other numbers , by reason of its central position ; it is also their mathematical mean , since it is equal to half the sum of every opposing pair , all of which equal 10 . In fact , the neat balance of these pairs , and their subtle equilibrium , would have had special meaning in the minds of the Old Chinese . For they considered the odd numbers as male and the even ones as female , equating the two groups with the Yang and Yin principles in Nature ; and in this square , the respective pairs made up of large and small odd ( Yang ) numbers , and those composed of large and small even ( Yin ) numbers , were all equal to each other . Thus all differences were leveled , and all contrasts erased , in a realm of no distinction , and the harmonious balance of the Lo Shu square could effectively symbolize the world in balanced harmony around a powerful central axis . 
The tremendous emphasis on the 5 in the Lo Shu square — for purely mathematical reasons — and the fact that this number so neatly symbolized the heart and center of the universe , could well explain why the Old Chinese seem to have so revered the number 5 , and why they put so much stress on the concept of Centrality . These twin tendencies seem to have reached their height in the Han dynasty . 
The existing reverence for Centrality must have been still further stimulated toward the close of the second century B.C. , when the Han Emperor Wu Ti ordered the dynastic color changed to yellow — which symbolized the Center among the traditional Five Directions — and took 5 as the dynastic number , believing that he would thus place himself , his imperial family , and the nation under the most auspicious influences . His immediate motive for doing this may not have been directly inspired by the Lo Shu , but this measure must inevitably have increased the existing beliefs in the latter 's efficacy . 
After this time , inscriptions on the Han bronze mirrors , as well as other writings , emphasized the desirability of keeping one 's self at the center of the universe , where cosmic forces were strongest . Later , we shall see what happened when an emperor took this idea too literally . 
All this emphasis on Centrality and on the number 5 as a symbolic expression of the Center , which seems to have begun as far back as 400 B.C. , also may conceivably have led to the development of the Five-Elements School and the subsequent efforts to fit everything into numerical categories of five . We find , for example , such groupings as the Five Ancient Rulers , the Five Sacred Mountains , the Five Directions ( with Center ) , the Five Metals , Five Colors , Five Tastes , Five Odors , Five Musical Notes , Five Bodily Functions , Five Viscera , and many others . This trend has often been ascribed to the cult of the Five Elements itself , as though they had served as the base for all the rest ; but why did the Old Chinese postulate five elements , when the Ancient Near East — which may have initiated the idea that natural elements exerted influence in human life and activities — recognized only four ? And why did the Chinese suddenly begin to talk about the Five Directions , when the animals they used as symbols of the directions designated only the usual four ? Obviously , something suddenly caused them to start thinking in terms of fives , and that may have been the workings of the Lo Shu . 
This whole tendency had an unfortunate effect on Chinese thinking . Whereas the primary meanings of the Lo Shu diagram seemed to have been based on its inner mathematical properties — and we shall see that even its secondary meanings rested on some mathematical bases — the urgent desire to place everything into categories of fives led to other groupings based on other numbers , until an exaggerated emphasis on mere numerology pervaded Chinese thought . Scholars made numbered sets of as many things as possible in Nature , or assigned arbitrary numbers to individual things , in a fashion that seems to the modern scientific mind as downright nonsensical , and philosophical ideas based upon all this tended to stifle speculative thought in China for many centuries .  3 . YIN AND YANG IN THE " LO SHU " SQUARE  Although the primary mathematical properties of the middle number at the center of the Lo Shu , and the interrelation of all the other numbers to it , might seem enough to account for the deep fascination which the Lo Shu held for the Old Chinese philosophers , this was actually only a beginning of wonders . For the Lo Shu square was a remarkably complete compendium of most of the chief religious and philosophical ideas of its time . As such , one can not fully understand the thought of the pre-Han and Han periods without knowing the meanings inherent in the Lo Shu ; but , conversely , one can not begin to understand the Lo Shu without knowing something about the world view of the Old Chinese , which they felt they saw expressed in it . 
The Chinese world view during the Han dynasty , when the Lo Shu seems to have been at the height of its popularity , was based in large part on the teachings of the Yin-Yang and Five-Elements School , which was traditionally founded by Tsou Yen . According to this doctrine , the universe was ruled by Heaven , T'ien — as a natural force , or in the personification of a Supreme Sky-god — governing all things by means of a process called the Tao , which can be roughly interpreted as " the Order of the Universe " or " the Universal Way " . Heaven , acting through the Tao , expressed itself by means of the workings of two basic principles , the Yin and the Yang . The Yang , or male principle , was the source of light , heat , and dynamic vitality , associated with the Sun ; while the Yin , or female principle , flourished in darkness , cold , and quiet inactivity , and was associated with the Moon . Together these two principles influenced all things , and in varying combinations they were present in everything . 
We have already seen that odd numbers were considered as being Yang , while the even numbers were Yin , so that the eight outer numbers of the Lo Shu represented these two principles in balanced equilibrium around the axial center . During the Han dynasty , another Yin-Yang conception was applied to the Lo Shu , considering the latter as a plan of Ancient China . Instead of linking the nine numbers of this diagram with the traditional Nine Provinces , as was usually done , this equated the odd , Yang numbers with mountains ( firm and resistant , hence Yang ) and the even numbers with rivers ( sinuous and yielding , hence Yin ) ; taking the former from the Five Sacred Mountains of the Han period and the latter from the principal river systems of Old China . 
Thus the middle number , 5 , represented Sung-Shan in Honan , Central China ; the 3 , T'ai-Shan in Shantung , East China ; the 7 , Hwa-Shan in Shensi , West China ; the 1 , Heng-Shan in Hopei , North China ( or the mountain with the same name in neighboring Shansi ) ; and the 9 , Huo-Shan in Anhwei , which was then the South Sacred Mountain . For the rivers , the 4 represented the Huai , to the ( then ) Southeast ; the 2 , the San Kiang ( three rivers ) in the ( then ) Southwest ; the 8 , the Chi in the Northeast ; and the 6 , the ( upper ) Yellow River in the Northwest . 
Note that by Western standards this plan was " upside down " , as it put North at the bottom and South at the top , with the other directions correspondingly altered ; but in this respect it was merely following the accepted Chinese convention for all maps . The same arrangement was used when the Lo Shu was equated with the Nine Provinces ; and whenever the Lo Shu involved directional symbolism , it was oriented in this same fashion .  Few persons who join the Church are insincere . They earnestly desire to do the will of God . When they fall by the wayside and fail to achieve Christian stature , it is an indictment of the Church . These fatalities are dramatic evidence of " halfway evangelism " , a failure to follow through . A program of Lay Visitation Evangelism can end in dismal defeat with half the new members drifting away unless practical plans and strenuous efforts are made to keep them in the active fellowship . 
The work of Lay Visitation Evangelism is not completed when all of the persons on the Responsibility List have been interviewed . In the average situation about one-third of those visited make commitments to Christ and the Church . The pastor and the Membership Preparation and Assimilation Committee must follow through immediately with a carefully planned program . The first thirty to sixty days after individuals make their decision will determine their interest and participation in the life of the Church . Neglect means spiritual paralysis or death .  PREPARATION FOR MEMBERSHIP  CHURCHES THAT HAVE a carefully planned program of membership preparation and assimilation often keep 85 to 90 per cent of their new members loyal and active . This is the answer to the problem of " membership delinquency " . 
It is important that persons desiring to unite with the Church be prepared for this experience so that it may be meaningful and spiritually significant . It is unfair and unchristian to ask a person to take the sacred vows of Church membership before he has been carefully instructed concerning their implications . 
Preparation for Church membership begins immediately after the commitment is received .  1 )  
The pastor writes a personal letter to each individual , expressing his joy over the decision , assuring him of a pastoral call at the earliest convenient time , and outlining the plan for membership preparation classes and Membership Sunday . Some pastors write a letter the same night the decision is reported by the visitors . It should not be postponed later than the next day . A helpful leaflet may be enclosed in the letter .  2 )  
The pastor calls in the home of each individual or family for a spiritual guidance conference . If possible , he should make an appointment in order that all persons involved may be present . This is not a social call . It is definitely a " spiritual guidance conference " . He will discuss the significance of Christian commitment , the necessity of family religion and private devotions , and the importance of the membership preparation sessions . There may be problems of conduct or questions of belief which will require his counsel . Each conference should be concluded naturally with prayer . A piece of devotional material , such as The Upper Room , may be left in each home .  3 )  
A minimum of four sessions of preparation for membership is necessary for adults . Some churches require more . None should ask less . Those who join the Church need to be instructed in the faith and the meaning of Christian discipleship before they take the sacred vows . They will have a greater appreciation for the Church and a deeper devotion to it if membership requires something of them . 
Many churches find the Sunday school hour to be the most practical time for adult preparation classes . Others meet on Sunday night , at the mid-week service , or for a series of four nights . Some pastors have two sessions in one evening , with a refreshment period between . 
The sessions should cover four major areas :  A  
- The Christian Faith  B  
- History of the Church  C  
- Duties of Church Membership  D  
- The Local Church and Its Program 
Following each instruction period a piece of literature dealing with the topic should be handed each one for further reading during the week . This procedure is much more effective than giving out a membership packet .  FOURTH SESSION IMPORTANT  MOST PASTORS FIND that the fourth session should take at least two hours and therefore hold it on a week night prior to Reception Sunday . In this session the persons seeking membership are provided information concerning the work of the denomination as well as the program and activities of the local church . The lay leadership of the church may be invited to speak on the various phases of church life , service opportunities , the church school , missions , men 's work , women 's work , youth program , social activities , and finances . The budget of the church may be presented and pledges solicited at this session . An " interest finder " or " talent sheet " may be filled out by each person . ( See sample on pp. 78-79 . ) The fourth session may be concluded with a tour of the church facilities and refreshments . The social time gives an opportunity for church leaders to become acquainted with the new members .  ADDITIONAL SUGGESTIONS FOR MEMBERSHIP PREPARATION  IN CONDUCTING the Membership Preparation-Inquirers ' Class , the pastor should plan a variety of teaching techniques in order to develop greater interest on the part of the class . The following have been found effective .  1 )  
Extend the number of classes . Some churches have six or more training sessions of two hours each , generally held on Sunday night or during the week . This gives greater opportunity for the learning process .  2 )  
Use dramatization — for example , in discussing the Lord 's Supper or church symbolism .  3 )  
Use audio-visual aids . Some excellent filmstrips with recordings and motion pictures may be secured from your denominational headquarters to enrich the class session .  4 )  
Have a " Question Box " . Some new members will hesitate to ask questions audibly . Urge them to write out their questions for the box .  5 )  
Use a textbook with assigned readings each week .  6 )  
Select class members for reports on various phases of the study .  7 )  
Conduct examinations , using a true-false check sheet .  8 )  
Ask each member to write a statement on such topics as : " What Christ Means to Me " , " What the Church Means to Me " , " Why Join the Church " , " The Duties of Church Members " , etc .  9 )  
Assign a series of catechism questions to be memorized .  10 )  
Invite class members to share in an extra period of Bible study each week .  11 )  
Ask each new member to bring his Pledge of Loyalty to the Reception Service .  WHAT ABOUT TRANSFERS ?  THERE IS A GROWING CONVICTION among pastors and Church leaders that all those who come into the fellowship of the Church need preparatory training , including those coming by transfer of membership . George E. Sweazey writes : " There is danger in trying to make admission to the Church so easy and painless that people will scarcely know that anything has happened " . 
People appreciate experiences that demand something of them . Those who transfer their membership are no exception to the rule . For most of them , it will be their first experience in membership training , since this is a recent development in many churches . Those coming from other denominations will welcome the opportunity to become informed . 
The preparatory class is an introductory face-to-face group in which new members become acquainted with one another . It provides a natural transition into the life of the local church and its organizations .  RECEPTION INTO THE CHURCH FELLOWSHIP  THE TOTAL PROCESS of evangelism reaches the crescendo when the group of new members stands before the congregation to declare publicly their faith and to be received into the fellowship of the Church . This should be a high moment in their lives , a never-to-be-forgotten experience . They should sense the tremendous significance of joining the spiritual succession reaching back to Christ our Lord and forward to an eternal fellowship with the saints of the ages . 
Every detail of the service merits careful attention — the hymns , the sermon , the ritual , the right hand of fellowship , the introduction to the congregation , the welcome of the congregation . This is a vital part of their spiritual growth and assimilation . It will help to determine the attitude of the new members toward the Church . It can mean the difference between participation and inaction , spiritual growth and decay . 
The worship service is the natural and logical time to receive new members into the Church . The atmosphere for this momentous experience can be created most effectively through the worship experience . Psychologically the reception should be the climax , following the sermon .  1 )  
Ask the new members to meet thirty minutes before the service to complete " talent sheets " and pledge cards . Some denominations ask new members to sign personally the chronological membership register . Provide a name card for each new member . Outline plans for the entire service .  2 )  
Arrange a reserved section in the sanctuary where all new members may sit together . Sponsors may sit with them also .  3 )  
Invite sponsors or Fellowship Friends to stand back of the new members in the reception service .  4 )  
Give each new member a certificate of membership .  5 )  
Introduce each new member to the congregation , asking him to face the congregation .  6 )  
Lead the congregation in a response of welcome .  7 )  
Have a reception for new members in the parlor or social hall immediately after the service .  8 )  
Take a picture of the group of new members to be put in the church paper or placed on the bulletin board .  9 )  
Have a fellowship luncheon or dinner with new members as guests .  CHAPTER 6 PLANNING FOR THE ASSIMILATION AND GROWTH OF NEW MEMBERS  THE CHURCH is " the family of God " . The members of the " family " are drawn together by a common love for Christ and a sincere devotion to His Kingdom . Every member of the family must have a vital place in its life . This is no spectator-type experience ; everyone is to be a participant . 
Yet the most difficult problem in the Church 's program of evangelism is right at this point — helping new members to become participating , growing parts of the fellowship . Very easily they may be neglected and eventually join the ranks of the unconcerned and inactive . 
A study of major denominational membership statistics over a twenty-year period revealed the appalling fact that nearly 40 per cent of those who joined the Church were lost to the Church within seven years . One denomination had a membership of 1,419,833 at the beginning of the period under study , and twenty years later its membership stood at 1,541,991 — a net growth of only 122,158 . Yet during the same period there were 1,080,062 additions . Another major church body had 4,499,608 members and twenty years later its membership stood at 4,622,444 . During this time 4,122,354 new members were brought into the fellowship . Still another denomination had 7,360,187 members twenty years ago . During this period 7,484,268 members were received , yet the net membership now is only 9,910,741 . These figures indicate that we are losing almost as many as we are receiving into membership . 
This problem is illustrated by the fact that many local churches drop from the active membership rolls each year as many as they receive into the fellowship . Studies of membership trends , even in some areas where population is expanding , show that numbers of churches have had little net increase , though many new members were received . Something is wrong when these things happen . The local " family of God " has failed its new members through neglect and unconcern for their spiritual welfare .  BASIC NEEDS  NEW MEMBERS can become participating , growing members . But this will not happen merely through the natural process of social life . It must be planned and carefully developed . The entire membership of the local church must be alerted to their part in this dynamic process . 
If the church has followed the plan of cultivation of prospects and carried through a program of membership preparation as outlined earlier in this book , the process of assimilation and growth will be well under way . Those who enter the front door of the church intelligently and with Christian dedication will not so easily step through the back door because of lost interest . 
However , it is not enough to bring persons to Christian commitment and train them in the meaning of Christian discipleship . When they unite with the Church they must find in this fellowship the satisfaction of their basic spiritual needs or they will never mature into effective Christians . 
The Church expects certain things of those who become members . The new members justifiably expect some things from their church family : 
- Welcome into the fellowship 
- Sincere Christian love and understanding 
- Inspiring and challenging worship experiences 
- Social and recreational activities 
- Opportunities for Christian service 
- Opportunities for study of the Christian faith and the Bible 
- Creative prayer experiences 
- Guidance in Christian social concerns  
MEN need unity and they need God . Care must be taken neither to confuse unity with uniformity nor God with our parochial ideas about him , but with these two qualifications , the statement stands . The statement also points to a classic paradox : The more men turn toward God , who is not only in himself the paradigm of all unity but also the only ground on which human unity can ultimately be established , the more men splinter into groups and set themselves apart from one another . To be reminded of this we need only glance at the world map and note the extent to which religious divisions have compounded political ones , with a resultant fragmentation of the human race . Massacres attending the partition of India and the establishment of the State of Israel are simply recent grim evidences of the hostility such divisions can engender . The words of Cardinal Newman come forcibly to mind : " Oh how we hate one another for the love of God " ! 
The source of this paradox is not difficult to identify . It lies in institutions . Institutions require structure , form , and definition , and these in turn entail differentiation and exclusion . A completely amorphous institution would be a contradiction in terms ; to escape this fate , it must rule some things out . For every criterion which defines what something is , at the same time proclaims — implicitly if not openly — what that something is not . Some persons are so sensitive to this truth as to propose that we do away with institutions altogether ; in the present context this amounts to the advice that while being religious may have a certain justification , we ought to dispense with churches . The suggestion is naive . Man is at once a gregarious animal and a form-creating being . Having once committed himself to an ideal which he considers worthwhile , he inevitably creates forms for its expression and institutions for its continuance . To propose that men be religious without having religious institutions is like proposing that they be learned without having schools . Both eventualities are possible logically , but practically they are impossible . As much as men intrinsically need the unity that is grounded in God , they instrumentally require the institutions that will direct their steps toward him . 
Yet the fact remains that such institutions do set men at odds with their fellows . Is there any way out of the predicament ? The only way that I can see is through communication . Interfaith communication need not be regarded as an unfortunate burden visited upon us by the necessity of maintaining diplomatic relations with our adversaries . Approached creatively , it is a high art . It is the art of relating the finite to the infinite , of doing our best to insure that the particularistic requirements of religious institutions will not thwart God 's intent of unity among men more than is minimally necessary . In a certain sense , interfaith communication parallels diplomatic communication among the nation-states . 
What are the pertinent facts affecting such communication at the present juncture of history ? I shall touch on three areas : personal , national , and theological .  /1 ,  By personal factors I mean those rooted in personality structure . Some interfaith tensions are not occasioned by theological differences at all , but by the need of men to have persons they can blame , distrust , denounce , and even hate . Such needs may rise to pathological proportions . Modern psychology has shown that paralleling " the authoritarian personality " is " the bigoted personality " in which insecurity , inferiority , suspicion , and distrust combine to provide a target for antagonism so indispensable that it will be manufactured if it does not exist naturally . Fortunately the number of pathological bigots appears to be quite small , but it would be a mistake to think that more than a matter of degree separates them from the rest of us . To some extent the personal inadequacies that prejudices attempt to compensate for are to be found in all of us . 
Interfaith conflicts which spring from psychological deficiencies are the most unfortunate of all , for they have no redeeming features whatsoever . It is difficult to say what can be done about them except that we must learn to recognize when it is they , rather than pretexts for them , that are causing the trouble , and do everything possible to nurture the healthy personalities that will prevent the development of such deficiencies .  /2 ,  While the personality factors that aggravate interfaith conflict may be perennial , nationalism is more variable . The specific instance I have in mind is the Afro-Asian version which has gained prominence only in this second half of the twentieth century . 
Emerging from the two centuries of colonial domination , the Afro-Asian world is aflame with a nationalism that has undone empires . No less than twenty-two nations have already achieved independence since World War /2 , , and the number is growing by the year . As an obvious consequence , obstacles to genuine interfaith communication have grown more formidable in one important area : relations between Christians and non-Christians in these lands . Colonialism alone would have been able to make these difficulties serious , for Christianity is so closely tied to colonialism in the minds of these people that repudiation of the one has tended automatically toward the repudiation of the other . Actually , however , this turns out to be only part of the picture . Nationalism has abetted not only the repudiation of foreign religions but the revival of native ones , some of which had been lying in slumber for centuries . The truth is that any revival of traditional and indigenous religion will serve to promote that sense of identity and Volksgeist which these young nations very much need . Insofar as these nations claim to incarnate traditions and ways of life which constitute ultimate , trans-political justifications for their existence , such people are inevitably led to emphasize the ways in which these traditions and ways are theirs rather than someone else 's . 
All this works severely against the kind of cross-cultural communication for which Christian missions stand . Africans and Asians tend to consider not only missions but the local churches they have produced as centers and agents of Western culture and ideology if not of direct political propaganda . The people hardest hit by this suspicion are , of course , Christians on the mainland of China . But the problem extends elsewhere . For example , in Burma and Ceylon many Buddhists argue that Buddhism ought to be the official state religion . In 1960 Ceylon nationalized its sectarian — preponderantly Christian — schools , to the rejoicing of most of its 7,000,000 Buddhists and the lament of its 800,000 Roman Catholics . Again , India has imposed formidable barriers against the entrance of additional missionaries , and fanatical Hindu parties are expected to seek further action against Christians once the influence making for tolerance due to Nehru and his followers is gone . 
The progressive closing of Afro-Asian ears to the Christian message is epitomized in a conversation I had three years ago while flying from Jerusalem to Cairo . I was seated next to the director of the Seventh Day Adventists ' world radio program . He said that on his tour the preceding year a considerable number of hours would have been available to him on Japanese radio networks , but that he had then lacked the funds to contract for them . After returning to the United States and raising the money , he discovered on getting back to Japan that the hours were no longer available . It was not that they had been contracted for during the interval ; they simply could no longer be purchased for missionary purposes . It is not unfair to add on the other side that the crude and almost vitriolic approach of certain fundamentalist sects toward the cultures and religions among which they work has contributed measurably to this heightening of anti-Christian sentiment . Ironically , these are the groups which have doubled or tripled their missionary efforts since World War /2 , , while the more established denominations are barely maintaining pre-war staffs . 
Although I have emphasized the barriers which an aroused nationalism has raised against relations between Christians and non-Christians in Asia , the fact is that this development has also widened the gulf between certain Afro-Asian religions themselves . The partition of India has hardly improved relations between Hindus and Muslims ; neither has the establishment of the State of Israel fostered harmony between Muslims and Jews .  /3 ,  I turn finally to several theological developments .  1 .  
Theocracy reconsidered . The modern world has been marked by progressive disaffection with claims to divine sanction for the state , whatever its political form . The American Constitution was historic at this point in providing that " Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof " . One of our foremost jurists , David Dudley Field , has gone so far as to call this provision " the greatest achievement ever made in the course of human history " . 
The trend throughout the world 's religions has been toward a recognition of at least the practical validity of this constitutional enactment . Pakistan was created in 1947 expressly as a Muslim state , but when the army took over eleven years later it did so on a wave of mass impatience which was directed in part against the inability of political and religious leaders to think their way through to the meaning of Islam for the modern political situation . " What is the point " , Charles Adams reports the Pakistanis as asking , " in demanding an Islamic state and society if no one , not even the doctors of the sacred law themselves , can say clearly and succinctly what the nature of such a state and society is " ? The current regime of President Mohammad Ayub Khan is determinedly secular . And while the nation was formerly named " The Islamic Republic of Pakistan " , it is now simply " The Republic of Pakistan " . 
Comparable trends can be noted elsewhere . The new regime in Turkey is intentionally less Muslim than its predecessor . The religious parties in Israel have experienced a great loss of prestige in recent months . During the years when Israel was passing from crisis to crisis — the Sinai campaign , the infusion of multitudes of penniless immigrants — it was felt that the purpose of national unity could be best served if the secular majority were to yield to the religious parties . Now that Israel enjoys relative prosperity and a reduction of tensions , the secularists are less disposed to compromise . And in this country Gustave Weigel 's delineation of the line between the sacral and secular orders during the last presidential campaign served to provide a most impressive Roman Catholic defense of the practical autonomy of both church and state . The failure at that time of the Puerto Rican bishops to control the votes of their people added a ring of good sense to Father Weigel 's theological argument . Everywhere there seems to be a growing recognition of the fact that governments and religious institutions alike are too fallible and corruptible — in a word , too human — to warrant any claim of maintaining partnership with the divine .  2 .  
Salvation reconsidered . My father went as a missionary to China in a generation that responded to Student Volunteer Movement speakers who held watches in their hands and announced to the students in their audiences how many Chinese souls were going to hell each second because these students were not over there saving them . That mention of this should bring smiles to our lips today is as clear an indication as we could wish of the extent to which attitudes have changed . I do not mean to imply that Christians have adopted the liberal assumption , so prevalent in Hinduism , that all religions are merely different paths to the same summit . Leslie Newbiggin reflects the dominant position within the World Council of Churches when he says , " We must claim absoluteness and finality for Christ and His finished work , but that very claim forbids us to claim absoluteness and finality for our understanding of it " . Newbiggin 's qualification on the Christian claim is of considerable significance . The Roman Catholic Church has excommunicated one of its priests , Father Feeney , for insisting that there is no salvation outside the visible church . In mentioning this under " salvation reconsidered " I do not mean to imply that Roman Catholic doctrine has changed in this area but rather that it has become clearer to the world community what that doctrine is .  When they say that under no circumstances would it ever be right to " permit " the termination of the human race by human action , because there could not possibly be any proportionate grave reason to justify such a thing , they know exactly what they mean . Of course , in prudential calculation , in balancing the good directly intended and done against the evil unintended and indirectly done , no greater precision can be forthcoming than the subject allows . Yet it seems clear that there can be no good sufficiently great , or evil repelled sufficiently grave , to warrant the destruction of mankind by man 's own action . 
I mean , however , that the moral theologian knows what he means by " permit " . He is not talking in the main about probabilities , risks and danger in general . He is talking about an action which just as efficaciously does an evil thing ( and is known certainly and unavoidably to lead to this evil result ) as it efficaciously does some good . He is talking about double effects , of which the specific action causes directly the one and indirectly the other , but causes both ; of which one is deliberately willed or intended and the other not intended or not directly intended , but still both are done , while the evil effect is , with equal consciousness on the part of the agent , foreknown to be among the consequences . This is what , in a technical sense , to " only permit " an evil result means . It means to do it and to know one is doing it , but as only a secondary if certain effect of the good one primarily does and intends . Of course , grave guiltiness may be imputed to the military action of any nation , or to the action of any leader or leaders , which for any supposed good " permits " , in this sense , the termination of the human race by human action . Certainly , in analyzing an action which truly faced such alternatives , " it is never possible that no world would be preferable to some worlds , and there are in truth no circumstances in which the destruction of human life presents itself as a reasonable alternative " . 
Naturally , where one or the other of the effects of an action is uncertain , this has to be taken into account . Especially is this true when , because the good effect is remote and speculative while the evil is certain and grave , the action is prohibited . Presumably , if the reverse is the case and the good effect is more certain than the evil result that may be forthcoming , not only must the good and the evil be prudentially weighed and found proportionate , but also calculation of the probabilities and of the degree of certainty or uncertainty in the good or evil effect must be taken into account . There must not only be greater good than evil objectively in view , but also greater probability of actually doing more good than harm . If an evil which is certain and extensive and immediate may rarely be compensated for by a problematic , speculative , future good , by the same token not every present , certain , and immediate good ( or lesser evil ) that may have to be done will be outweighed by a problematic , speculative , and future evil . Nevertheless , according to the traditional theory , a man begins in the midst of action and he analyzes its nature and immediate cosequences before or while putting it forth and causing these consequences . He does not expect to be able to trammel up all the future consequences of his action . Above all , he does not debate mere contingencies , and therefore , if these are possibly dreadful , find himself forced into inaction . He does what he can and may and must , without regarding himself as lord of the future or , on the other hand , as covered with guilt by accident or unforeseen consequences or by results he did not " permit " in the sense explained . By contrast , a good deal of nuclear pacifism begins with the contingencies and the probabilities , and not with the moral nature of the action to be done ; and by deriving legitimate decision backward from whatever may conceivably or possibly or probably result , whether by anyone 's doing or by accident , it finds itself driven to inaction , to non-political action in politics and non-military action in military affairs , and to the not very surprising discovery that there are now no distinctions on which the defense of justice can possibly be based . 
Mr. Philip Toynbee writes , for example , that " in terms of probability it is surely as likely as not that mutual fear will lead to accidental war in the near future if the present situation continues . If it continues indefinitely it is nearly a statistical certainty that a mistake will be made and that the devastation will begin " . Against such a termination of human life on earth by human action , he then proposes as an alternative that we " negotiate at once with the Russians and get the best terms which are available " , that we deliberately " negotiate from comparative weakness " . He bravely attempts to face this alternative realistically , i.e. , by considering the worst possible outcome , namely , the total domination of the world by Russia within a few years . This would be by far the better choice , when " it is a question of allowing the human race to survive , possibly under the domination of a regime which most of us detest , or of allowing it to destroy itself in appalling and prolonged anguish " . Nevertheless , the consequence of the policy proposed is everywhere subtly qualified : it is " a possible result , however improbable " ; " the worst , and least probable " result ; " if it did n't prevail mankind would still be given the opportunity of prevailing " ; for " surely anything is better than a policy which allows for the possibility of nuclear war " . If we have not thought and made a decision entirely in these terms , then we need to submit ourselves to the following " simple test " : " Have we decided how we are to kill the other members of our household in the event of our being less injured than they are " ? Thus , moral decision must be entirely deduced backward from the likely eventuality ; it is no longer to be formulated in terms of the nature of present action itself , its intention , and proximate effect or the thing to be done . 
Several of the replies to Mr. Toynbee , without conscious resort to the traditional terminology with regard to the permission of evil , succeed in restoring the actual context in which present moral and political decisions must be made , by distinguishing between choosing a great evil and choosing in danger of this evil . " It is worse for a nation to give in to evil … than to run the risk of annihilation " . " I am consciously prepared to run the continued risk of 'race suicide by accident' rather than accept the alternative certainty of race slavery by design . But I can only make this choice because I believe that the risk need not increase , but may be deliberately reduced " [ by precautions against accidents or by limiting war ? ] " Quoting Mr. Kennan 's phrase that anything would be better than a policy which led inevitably to nuclear war , he [ Toynbee ] says that anything is better than a policy which allows for the possibility of nuclear war " . " If asked to choose between a terrible probability and a more terrible possibility , most men will choose the latter " . " If … Philip Toynbee is claiming that the choice lies between capitulation and the risk of nuclear war , I think he is right . I do not accept that the choice is between capitulation and the certainty of nuclear war " . Even Professor Arnold Toynbee , agreeing with his son , does so in these terms : " Compared to continuing to incur a constant risk of the destruction of the human race , all other evils are lesser evils … . Let us therefore put first things first , and make sure of preserving the human race at whatever the temporary price may be " . 
Mr. Philip Toynbee affirms at one point that if he shared the anticipations of Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four , if he believed Communism was not only evil but " also irredeemably evil " , then he might " think it right to do anything rather than to take the risk of a communist world . Even a nuclear holocaust is a little less frightful to contemplate than a race of dehumanised humans occupying the earth until doomsday " . No political order or economic system is so clearly contrary to nature . But one does not have to affirm the existence of an evil order irredeemable in that sense , or a static order in which no changes will take place in time , to be able truthfully to affirm the following fact : there has never been justitia imprinted in social institutions and social relationships except in the context of some pax-ordo preserved by clothed or naked force . On their way to the Heavenly City the children of God make use of the pax-ordo of the earthly city and acknowledge their share in responsibility for its preservation . Not to repel injury and uphold and improve pax-ordo means not simply to accept the misshapen order and injustice that challenges it at the moment , but also to start down the steep slope along which justice can find no place whereon to stand . Toynbee seems to think that there is some other way to give justice social embodiment . " I would far rather die after a Russian occupation of this country — by some deliberate act of refusal — than die uselessly by atomisation " . Would such an act of refusal be useful ? He does not mean , in fact he addresses himself specifically to reject the proposition , that " if we took the risk of surrendering , a new generation in Britain would soon begin to amass its strength in secret in order to reverse the consequences of that surrender " . He wants to be " brutally frank and say that these rebellions would be hopeless — far , far more hopeless than was the Hungarian revolution of 1956 " . This is not a project for regaining the ground for limited war , by creating a monopoly in one power of the world 's arsenal of unlimited weapons . It is a proposal that justice now be served by means other than those that have ever preconditioned the search for it , or preconditioned more positive means for attaining it , in the past . " It is no good recommending surrender rather than nuclear warfare with the proviso that surrender could be followed by the effective military resistance by occupied peoples . Hope for the future … would lie in the natural longing of the human race for freedom and the right to develop " . This is to surrender in advance to whatever attack may yet be mounted , to the very last ; it is to stride along the steep slope downward . The only contrary action , in the future as in the past , runs the risk of war ; and , now and in the future unlike in the past , any attempt to repel injury and to preserve any particular civilized attainment of mankind or its provisional justice runs some risk of nuclear warfare and the danger that an effect of it will , by human action , render this planet less habitable by the human race . That is why it is so very important that ethical analysis keep clear the problem of decision as to " permitted " effects , and not draw back in fright from any conceivable contingency or suffer paralysis of action before possibilities or probabilities unrelated , or not directly morally related , to what we can and may and must do as long as human history endures . 
Finally , just as no different issues are posed for thoughtful analysis by the foreshortening of time that may yet pass before the end of human life on this earth , but only stimulation and alarm to the imagination , the same thing must be said in connection with the question of what we may perhaps already be doing , by human action , to accelerate this end . We should not allow the image of an immanent end brought about indirectly by our own action in the continuing human struggle for a just endurable order of existence to blind us to the fact that in some measure accelerating the end of our lease may be one consequence among others of many other of mankind 's thrusts toward we know not what future .  
MUCH MORE than shelter , housing symbolizes social status , a sense of " belonging " , acceptance within a given group or neighborhood , identification with particular cultural values and social institutions , feelings of pride and worth , aspirations and hopes basic to human well-being . For almost one-sixth of the national population discrimination in the free selection of residence casts a considerable shadow upon these values assumed as self-evident by most Americans . 
Few business groups in recent years have come under heavier pressure to face these realities than real estate brokers and home builders . This pressure has urged re-evaluation of the assumptions underlying their professional ethics ; it has sought new sympathy for the human aspirations of racial minority groups in this country . It is not surprising that , as spokesman for real estate interests , the National Association of Real Estate Boards ( NAREB ) and its local associations have sought to limit and often ignore much of this pressure . 
How does the local realtor see himself in the context of housing restrictions based on race , religion or ethnic attachment ? What does he conceive his role to be in this area of social unrest ? What ought to be , what is his potential role as a force for constructive social change ? What social , ethical and theological insights can the church and university help him bring to bear upon his situation ? 
Recently , a group of the faculty at Wesleyan University 's Public Affairs Center sought some answers to these questions . Several New England realtors were invited to participate in a small colloquium of property lawyers , political scientists , economists , social psychologists , social ethicists and theologians . Here , in an atmosphere of forthrightness and mutual criticism , each sought to bring his particular insights to bear upon the question of discrimination in housing and the part each man present played in it . 
For a number of years , Wesleyan has been drawing varied groups of political and business leaders into these informal discussions with members of the faculty and student body , attempting to explore and clarify aspects of their responsibility for public policy . This article presents our observations of that session , of the realtors as they saw themselves and as the faculty and students saw them . 
Such conversation quickly reveals an ethically significant ambivalence in the self-images held by most realtors . Within the membership of this group , as has been found true of men in other professional or trade associations , the most ready portrayal of oneself to " the public " is that of a neutral agent simply serving the interests of a seller or buyer and mediating between them . Professional responsibility is seen to consist largely in serving the wishes of the client fairly and in an efficient manner . But as conversation goes on , particularly among the realtors themselves , another image emerges , that of considerable power and influence in the community . Obviously , much more than customer expectation is determining the realtor 's role . Judgments are continually rendered regarding the potential buyers ' income , educational level and above all , racial extraction ; and whether these would qualify them for " congenial " , " happy " relations to other people in certain community areas .  A NARROW PROFESSIONALISM  How explicit such factors have been historically is evident in any chronology of restrictive covenant cases or in a review of NAREB 's Code of Ethics Article 34 in the Code , adopted in 1924 , states that " a Realtor should never be instrumental in introducing into a neighborhood a character of property or occupancy , members of any race or nationality , or any individuals whose presence will clearly be detrimental to property values in that neighborhood " . Though the reference to race was stricken by the association in 1950 , being an agent of such " detrimental " influences still appears as the cardinal sin realtors see themselves committed to avoid . 
The rationale for this avoidance was most frequently expressed in economic terms ; all feared the supposed stigma they believed would inevitably attach to any realtor who openly introduced non-white , particularly Negro , peoples into all-white , restricted areas . They would become tagged as men not interested in being purely real estate " professionals " but agitators for some kind of " cause " or " reform " , and this was no longer to be a " pro " . 
Obviously what we are confronted with here is the identification of " professional " with narrow skills and specialization , the effective servicing of a client , rather than responsiveness to the wider and deeper meaning and associations of one 's work . These men — for the most part educated in our " best " New England colleges , well established financially and socially in the community — under kindly but insistent probing , reveal little or no objective or explicit criteria or data for their generalizations about the interests and attitudes of the people they claim to serve , or about the public responses that actually follow their occasional breach of a " client-service relationship " . 
This narrow " professionalism " does not even fit the present realities of their situation , as the pressure of minorities and the power and respectability of the realtors increase . As our discussion continued , the inadequacy of the " client relationship " as an interpretation of their " way of operating " became evident . Realtors live in their communities as specialists in a given area of work , as members of social and professional organizations , as citizens and civic leaders , as church laymen , as university alumni , as newspaper readers , etc . From such communal roles the realtor finds the substance that shapes his moral understanding . 
It seems to us that choices exercised by realtors in moral situations center in at least three areas : ( 1 ) the various ways in which they interpret a particular social issue ; ( 2 ) their pattern of involvement in the regular legal and political processes ; and , most pervasively , ( 3 ) their interpretation of who is a " real pro " , of what it means to be a professional man in a technical , fragmented society . 
( 1 ) Most of the realtors minimized their own understanding of and role in the racial issue , pleading that they only reflect the attitudes and intentions of their society . There is some reality to this ; the Commission on Race and Housing concluded that " there is no reason to believe that real estate men are either more or less racially prejudiced , on the whole , than any other segment of the American population " . But such a reaction obscures the powerful efforts made in the past by both NAREB and its local boards for the maintenance of restrictive clauses and practices . Also , it does not recognize the elements of choice and judgment continually employed . 
Like business and university groups generally , these men had very limited knowledge of recent sociological and psychological studies and findings that might illumine the decisions they make . Realtors , both generally and in this group , have invariably equated residential integration with a decline in property values , a circumstance viewed with considerable apprehension . 
Recent studies by the Commission on Race and Housing and others , however , point to a vast complex of factors that often do not warrant this conclusion . There are increasing numbers of neighborhoods that are integrated residentially without great loss of property values , the white population having taken the initiative in preparing the areas for an appreciation of the Negroes ' desire for well-kept housing , privacy , etc . Data on the decline of property values in an area after a new racial group enters it has to be assessed in terms of the trends in property values before the group comes in . Often they are able to get in only because the area is declining economically . 
Significantly , no realtor and few of the faculty present were familiar with any of the six volumes ( published by the University of California Press ) that present the commission 's findings . No one anticipates any radical shift in this situation , but questions concerning reading habits , the availability of such data and the places where it is discussed must surely be raised . The role of both church and university as sources of information and settings within which the implications of such information may be explored needs consideration . 
Relevant " facts " , however , extend beyond considerations of property values and maintenance of " harmonious " neighborhoods . Discussion of minority housing necessarily involves such basic issues as the intensity of one 's democratic conviction and religious belief concerning equality of opportunity , the function and limitations of government in the securing of such equality , and the spotlight that world opinion plays upon local incidents of racial agitation and strife .  " AGAINST THE GRAIN OF CREATION "  ( 2 ) Realtors realize , of course , that they are involved in an increasingly complex legal and political system that is opening up opportunities for leverage on their relation to clients as well as opportunities for evasion of their responsibility for racial discrimination in housing . On the positive side , recent Federal action has largely undermined the legal sanction so long enjoyed by the segregationist position ; anti-discriminatory statutes in housing have now been adopted by thirteen states and , while specific provisions have varied , the tendency is clearly toward expanding coverage . 
Realtors in attendance at the colloquium expressed interest , for example , in Connecticut 's new housing law as setting standards of equity that they would like " to have to obey " , but in support of which none had been willing to go on public record . As far as they were aware , the Connecticut Association of Real Estate Boards had not officially opposed the bill 's passage or lobbied in its support . ( This has not been the case everywhere . In 1957 , the Real Estate Boards of New York City actively opposed the then pending private housing anti-discrimination law . Official reasoning : the bill was a " wanton invasion of basic property rights " . ) 
There are sins of omission as well as commission ; the attitude adopted by realtors and their associations , either negative or positive , plays a large part in the public acceptance of such measures and the degree to which they may be effectively enforced . Judicial opinion since the Supreme Court decision on Shelley v. Kraemer ( 1948 ) has rendered racial restrictive covenants unenforcible . Such a decision should have placed a powerful weapon in the hands of the entire housing industry , but there is little evidence that realtors , or at least their associations , have repudiated the principle in such clauses . 
In the states that have passed laws preventing discrimination in the sale or rental of housing , support by real estate associations for compliance and broadened coverage through additional legislation could help remove the label of " social reformism " that most realtors individually seem determined to avoid . But as yet , no real estate board has been willing officially to support such laws or to admit the permissibility of introducing minority buyers into all-white neighborhoods . 
One of the roles of the social scientist , ethicist or theologian in our discussions with the realtors became that of encouraging greater awareness of the opportunities offered by the legal and political processes for the exercise of broad social responsibilities in their work . But responsiveness to these opportunities presumes that all of us judge the good as a human good and not simply as a professional , white , American good . Such judgments are meaningful only in so far as persons are members of a world , let us say a community , that embraces Scarsdale or Yonkers , but is also infinitely richer since it is all-inclusive . 
That community of all creation is , then , the ultimate object of our loyalty and the concrete norm of all moral judgment . Racial discrimination is wrong , then , not because it goes against the grain of a faculty member trying to converse with a few realtors but because it goes against the grain of creation and against the will of the Creator . Thus , moral issues concerning the nature of the legal and political processes take on theological dimensions .  A FRAGMENTED SOCIETY  ( 3 ) Over the years , individuals engaged in the sale of real estate have developed remarkable unity in the methods and practices employed . Most realtors and real estate brokers talk of themselves as " professional people " with the cultural and moral values held by the traditional professions . But what significance attaches to " professional " , beyond the narrow sense of skillfulness in meeting a client 's stated needs as already noted ? Our faculty and students pressed this issue more than any other . 
As a theologian in the group pointed out , a professional was , before the modern period of technical specialization , one who " professed " to be a bearer and critic of his culture in the use of his particular skills .  
If we look about the world today , we can see clearly that there are two especially significant factors shaping the future of our civilization : science and religion . Science is placing in our hands the ultimate power of the universe , the power of the atom . Religion , or the lack of it , will decide whether we use this power to build a brave new world of peace and abundance for all mankind , or whether we misuse this power to leave a world utterly destroyed . How can we have the wisdom to meet such a new and difficult challenge ? 
We may feel pessimistic at the outlook . And yet there is a note of hope , because this same science that is giving us the power of the atom is also giving us atomic vision . We are looking inside the atom and seeing there a universe which is not material but something beyond the material , a universe that in a word is not matter but music . And it is in this new vision of the atom that we find an affirmation and an invigoration of our faith .  ATOMIC ENERGY  To see this vision in perspective , we need first of all a clear idea of the magnitude of this new power from the atom . You know that I could hold right here in my hand the little chunk of uranium metal that was the heart of the bomb that dropped on Hiroshima . It was only about the size of a baseball ; but packed in that metallic ball there was the explosive force of 20,000 tons of TNT . That is enough TNT to fill the tower of the Empire State Building ; and with the availability of bombs of that size , war became a new problem . 
Now we might have restricted the use of uranium bombs by controlling the sources of uranium because it is found in only a few places in the world . But we had hardly started to adjust our thinking to this new uranium weapon when we were faced with the hydrogen bomb . Hydrogen is just as plentiful as uranium is scarce . We know that we have hydrogen in water ; water is **f and the H stands for hydrogen ; there is also hydrogen in wood and hydrogen in our bodies . I have calculated that if I could snap my fingers in one magic gesture to release the power of all the hydrogen in my body , I would explode with the force of a hundred bombs of the kind that fell on Hiroshima . I wo n't try the experiment , but I think you can see that if we all knew the secret and we could all let ourselves go , there would be quite an explosion . And then think how little hydrogen we have in us compared with the hydrogen in Delaware Bay or in the ocean beyond . Salt water is still **f , the same hydrogen is there . And the size of the ocean shows us the magnitude of the destructive power we hold in our hands today . 
Of course , there is also an optimistic side to the picture . For if I knew the secret of letting this power in my body change directly into electricity , I could rent myself out to the electric companies and with just the power in my body I could light all the lights and run all the factories in the entire United States for some days . And think , if we all knew this secret and we could pool our power , what a wonderful public utility company we would make . With just the hydrogen of our bodies , we could run the world for years . Then think of Delaware Bay and the ocean and you see that we have a supply of power for millions of years to come . It is power with which we can literally rebuild the world , provide adequate housing , food , education , abundant living for everyone everywhere .  AN OCTILLION ATOMS  Now let us see where this power comes from . To grasp our new view of the atom , we have to appreciate first of all how small the atom is . I have been trying to make this clear to my own class in chemistry . One night there were some dried peas lying on our kitchen table , and these peas looked to me like a little group of atoms ; and I asked myself a question : Suppose I had the same number of peas as there are atoms in my body , how large an area would they cover ? 
I calculated first that there are about an octillion atoms in the average human body ; that is a figure one with 27 ciphers , quite a large number . Then I calculated that a million peas would just about fill a household refrigerator ; a billion peas would fill a small house from cellar to attic ; a trillion peas would fill all the houses in a town of about ten thousand people ; and a quadrillion peas would fill all the buildings in the city of Philadelphia . 
I saw that I would soon run out of buildings at this rate , so I decided to take another measure — the whole state of Pennsylvania . Imagine that there is a blizzard over Pennsylvania , but instead of snowing snow , it snows peas ; so we get the whole state covered with peas , about four feet deep . You can imagine what it would look like going out on the turnpike with the peas banked up against the houses and covering the cars ; Pennsylvania thus blanketed would contain about a quintillion peas . 
But we still have a long way to go . Next we imagine our blizzard raging over all the land areas of the entire globe — North America , South America , Europe , Asia , and Africa , all covered with peas four feet deep ; then we have sextillion peas . Next we freeze over the oceans and cover the whole earth with peas , then we go out among the neighboring stars , collect 250 planets each the size of the earth , and also cover each of these with peas four feet deep ; and then we have septillion . Finally we go into the farthest reaches of the Milky Way ; we get 250,000 planets ; we cover each of these with our blanket of peas and then at last we have octillion peas corresponding in number to the atoms in the body . So you see how small an atom is and how complicated you are .  A SPECK — AND SPACE  Now although an atom is small , we can still in imagination have a look at it . Let us focus on an atom of calcium from the tip of the bone of my finger and let us suppose that I swallow a magic Alice in Wonderland growing pill . I start growing rapidly and this calcium atom grows along with me . I shoot up through the roof , into the sky , past the clouds , through the stratosphere , out beyond the moon , out among the planets , until I am over a hundred and fifty million miles long . Then this atom of calcium will swell to something like a great balloon a hundred yards across , a balloon big enough to put a football field inside . And if you should step inside of such a magnified atom , according to the physics of forty years ago , you would see circulating over your head , down at the sides , and under your feet , some twenty luminous balls about the size of footballs . These balls are moving in great circles and ellipses , and are of course , the electrons , the particles of negative electricity which by their action create the forces that tie this atom of calcium to the neighboring atoms of oxygen and make up the solid structure of my finger bone . 
Since these electrons are moving like planets , you may wonder whether there is an atomic sun at the center of the atom . So you look down there and you see a tiny , whirling point about the size of the head of a pin . This is the atomic sun , the atomic nucleus . Even if the atom were big enough to hold a football field , this nucleus is still only about the size of a pinhead . It is this atomic nucleus that contains the positive charge of electricity holding these negatively charged electrons in their orbits ; it also contains nearly all the mass , and the atomic energy . 
You may ask what else there is , and the answer is nothing — nothing but empty space . And since you are made of atoms , you are nothing much but empty space , too . If I could put your body in an imaginary atomic press and squeeze you down , squeeze these holes out of you in the way we squeeze the holes out of a sponge , you would get smaller and smaller until finally when the last hole was gone , you would be smaller than the smallest speck of dust that you could see on this piece of paper . Someone has remarked that this is certainly the ultimate in reducing . At any rate , it shows us how immaterial we are .  MUSIC OF THE SPHERES  Now this 1920 view of the atom was on the whole a discouraging picture . For we believed that the electrons obeyed the law of mechanics and electrodynamics ; and therefore the atom was really just a little machine ; and in mechanics the whole is no more than the sum of the parts . So if you are made of atoms , you are just a big machine ; and since the universe is also made of atoms , it is just a supermachine . And this would mean that we live in a mechanistic universe , governed by the laws of cause and effect , bound in chains of determinism that hold the universe on a completely predetermined course in which there is not room for soul or spirit or human freedom . And this is why so many scientists a half a century ago were agnostics or atheists . 
Then came the scientific revolution in the late 1920 's . A suggestion from Louis de Broglie , a physicist in France , showed us that these electrons are not point particles but waves . And to see the meaning of this new picture , imagine that you can put on more powerful glasses and go back inside the atom and have a look at it in the way we view it today . Now as you step inside , instead of seeing particles orbiting around like planets , you see waves and ripples very much like the ripples that you get on the surface of a pond when you drop a stone into it . These ripples spread out in symmetrical patterns like the rose windows of a great cathedral . And as the waves flow back and forth and merge with the waves from the neighboring atoms , you can put on a magic hearing aid and you hear music . It is a music like the music from a great organ or a vast orchestra playing a symphony . Harmony , melody , counterpoint symphonic structure are there ; and as this music ebbs and flows , there is an antiphonal chorus from all the atoms outside , in fact from the atoms of the entire universe . And so today when we examine the structure of our knowledge of the atom and of the universe , we are forced to conclude that the best word to describe our universe is music . 
The Island of Nantucket , part of the State of Massachusetts , lies about thirty-one miles southeast of its mother State . Some of the Island is sand and is not suitable for living . The Island folk have their living almost entirely from summer visitors ; the rest is obtained from harbor scallops . During about three and a half months of the year , in the summer , there are three boats that run from the mainland to the Island carrying passengers , food , and cars ; but the rest of the year only one boat is needed , which ties up at the mainland nights and makes the trip down to Nantucket in the daytime . This is a fine trip , too , on a good day . With Martha 's Vineyard on one side and the open sea on the other , it makes an excellent trip of about three hours .  
TO WHAT extent and in what ways did Christianity affect the United States of America in the nineteenth century ? How far and in what fashion did it modify the new nation which was emerging in the midst of the forces shaping the revolutionary age ? To what extent did it mould the morals and the social , economic , and political life and institutions of the country ? 
A complete picture is impossible — partly because of the limitations of space , partly because for millions of individuals who professed allegiance to the Christian faith data are unobtainable . Even more of an obstacle is the difficulty of separating the influence of Christianity from other factors . 
Although a complete picture can not be given , we can indicate some aspects of life into which the Christian faith entered as at least one creative factor . At times we can say that it was the major factor . 
What in some ways was the most important aspect was the impact individually on the millions who constituted the nation . As we have seen , a growing proportion , although in 1914 still a minority , were members of churches . Presumably those who did not have a formal church connexion had also felt the influence of Christianity to a greater or less extent . Many of them had once been members of a church or at least had been given instruction in Christianity but for one or another reason had allowed the connexion to lapse . The form of Christianity to which they were exposed was for some the Protestantism of the older stock , for others the Protestantism of the nineteenth-century immigration ; for still others , mostly of the nineteenth-century immigration , it was Roman Catholicism , and for a small minority it was Eastern Orthodoxy . Upon all of them played the intellectual , social , political , and economic attitudes , institutions , and customs of the nation . Upon most of these Christianity had left an impress and through them had had a share in making the individual what he was . Yet to determine precisely to what extent and exactly in what ways any individual showed the effects of Christianity would be impossible . At best only an approximation could be arrived at . To generalize for the entire nation would be absurd . For instance , we can not know whether even for church members the degree of conformity to Christian standards of morality increased or declined as the proportion of church members in the population rose . The temptation is to say that , as the percentage of church members mounted , the degree of discipline exercised by the churches lessened and the trend was towards conformity to the general level . Yet this can not be proved . We know that in the early part of the century many Protestant congregations took positive action against members who transgressed the ethical codes to which the majority subscribed . Thus Baptist churches on the frontier took cognizance of charges against their members of drunkenness , fighting , malicious gossip , lying , cheating , sexual irregularities , gambling , horse racing , and failure to pay just debts . If guilty , the offender might be excluded from membership . As church membership burgeoned , such measures faded into desuetude . But whether this was accompanied by a general lowering of the moral life of the membership we do not know . 
What we can attempt with some hope of dependable conclusions is to point out the manner in which Christianity entered into particular aspects of the life of the nation . We have already hinted at the fashion in which Christianity contributed to education and so to intellectual life . We will now speak of the ways in which it helped shape the ideals of the country and of the manner in which it stimulated efforts to attain those ideals through reform movements , through programmes for bringing the collective life to the nation to conformity to Christian standards , and through leaders in the government . 
Throughout the nineteenth century Christianity exerted its influence on American society as a whole primarily through the Protestantism of the older stock . By the end of the century the Roman Catholic Church was beginning to make itself felt , mainly through such institutions as hospitals but also through its attitude towards organized labour . In the twentieth century its influence grew , as did that of the Protestantism of the nineteenth-century immigration .  THE AMERICAN DREAM  The ideals of the country were deeply indebted to the Protestantism of the older stock . Thus " America " , the most widely sung of the patriotic songs , was written by a New England Baptist clergyman , Samuel Francis Smith ( 1808-1895 ) , while a student in Andover Theological Seminary . With its zeal for liberty and its dependence on God it breathed the spirit which had been nourished on the Evangelical revivals . The great seal of the United States was obviously inspired by the Christian faith . Here was what was called the American dream , namely , the effort to build a structure which would be something new in history and to do so in such fashion that God could bless it . Later in the century the dream again found expression in the lines of Katherine Lee Bates ( 1859-1929 ) , daughter and granddaughter of New England Congregational ministers , in her widely sung hymn , written in 1893 , " America the Beautiful " , with the words " O beautiful for pilgrim feet whose stern impassioned stress a thoroughfare for freedom beat across the wilderness . America , America , God mend thy every flaw , confirm thy soul in self control , thy liberty in law … . O beautiful for patriot dream that sees beyond the years thine alabaster cities gleam undimmed by human tears . America , America , God shed His grace on thee , and crown thy good with brotherhood from sea to shining sea " . 
The American dream was compounded of many strains . Some were clearly of Christian origin , among them the Great Awakening and other revivals which helped to make Christian liberty , Christian equality , and Christian fraternity the passion of the land . Some have seen revivalism and the search for Christian perfection as the fountain-head of the American hope . Here , too , must be placed Unitarianism and , less obviously from Christian inspiration , Emerson , Transcendentalism , and the idealism of Walt Whitman . We must also remember those who reacted against the dream as a kind of myth — among them Melville , Hawthorne , and Henry James the elder , all of them out of a Christian background .  REFORM MOVEMENTS  With such a dream arising , at least in part , from the Protestant heritage of the United States and built into the foundations of the nation , it is not surprising that many efforts were made to give it concrete expression . A number were in the nature of movements to relieve or remove social ills . 
Significantly , the initiation and leadership of a major proportion of the reform movements , especially those in the first half of the nineteenth century , came from men and women of New England birth or parentage and from either Trinitarian or Unitarian Congregationalism . Several of the movements were given a marked impetus by revivalism . Quakers , some from New England , had a larger share than their proportionate numerical strength would have warranted . We do well to remind ourselves that from men and women of New England ancestry also issued the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints , the Seventh Day Adventists , Christian Science , the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions , the American Home Missionary Society , the American Bible Society , and New England theology . The atmosphere was one of optimism , of confidence in human progress , and of a determination to rid the world of its ills . The Hopkinsian universal disinterested benevolence , although holding to original sin and the doctrine of election , inspired its adherents to heroic endeavours for others , looked for the early coming of the Millennium , and was paralleled by the confidence in man 's ability cherished by the Unitarians , Emerson , and the Transcendentalists . 
We should recall the number of movements for the service of mankind which arose from the kindred Evangelicalism of the British Isles and the Pietism of the Continent of Europe — among them prison reform , anti-slavery measures , legislation for the alleviation of conditions of labour , the Inner Mission , and the Red Cross . 
We can not take the space to record all the efforts for the removal or alleviation of collective ills . A few of the more prominent must serve as examples of what a complete listing and description would disclose . Several were born in the early decades and persisted throughout the century . Others were ephemeral . Some disappeared with the attainment of their purpose . Still others sprang up late in the century to meet conditions which arose from fresh stages of the revolutionary age .  THE ANTI-SLAVERY MOVEMENT  The movement to end Negro slavery began before 1815 and mounted after that year until , as a result of the Civil War , emancipation was achieved . 
Long before 1815 the Christian conscience was leading some to declare slavery wrong and to act accordingly . For example , in 1693 the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of Friends declared that its members should emancipate their slaves and in 1776 it determined to exclude from membership all who did not comply . In the latter year Samuel Hopkins , from whom the Hopkinsian strain of New England theology took its name , asked the Continental Congress to abolish slavery . As we have seen , Methodism early took a stand against slavery . Beginning at least as far back as 1789 various Baptist bodies condemned slavery . 
After 1815 anti-slavery sentiment mounted , chiefly among Protestants and those of Protestant background of the older stock . The nineteenth-century immigration , whether Protestant or Roman Catholic , was not so much concerned , for very few if any among them held slaves : they were mostly in the Northern states where slavery had disappeared or was on the way out , or were too poverty-stricken to own slaves . 
The anti-slavery movement took many forms . Benjamin Lundy ( 1789-1839 ) , a Quaker , was a pioneer in preparing the way for anti-slavery societies . It was he who turned the attention of William Lloyd Garrison ( 1805-1879 ) to the subject . Garrison , Massachusetts born of Nova Scotian parentage , was by temperament and conviction a reformer . Chiefly remembered because of his incessant advocacy of " immediate and unconditional abolition " , he also espoused a great variety of other causes — among them women 's rights , prohibition , and justice to the Indians . Incurably optimistic , dogmatic , and utterly fearless , in his youth a devout Baptist , in spite of his friendship for the Quaker poet John Greenleaf Whittier ( 1807-1892 ) he eventually attacked the orthodox churches for what he deemed their cowardly compromising on the slavery issue and in his invariably ardent manner was emphatically unorthodox and denied the plenary inspiration of the Bible . 
A marked impulse came to the anti-slavery movement through the Finney revivals . Finney himself , while opposed to slavery , placed his chief emphasis on evangelism , but from his converts issued much of the leadership of the anti-slavery campaign . Theodore Dwight Weld ( 1803-1895 ) was especially active . Weld was the son and grandson of New England Congregational ministers . As a youth he became one of Finney 's band of evangelists and gave himself to winning young men . A strong temperance advocate , through the influence of a favorite teacher , Charles Stewart , another Finney convert , he devoted himself to the anti-slavery cause . A group of young men influenced by him enrolled in Lane Theological Seminary and had to leave because of their open anti-slavery position . The majority then went to the infant Oberlin . They and others employed some of Finney 's techniques as they sought to win adherents to the cause . Weld contributed to the anti-slavery convictions of such men as Joshua R. Giddings and Edwin M. Stanton , enlisted John Quincy Adams , and helped provide ideas which underlay Harriet Beecher Stowe 's Uncle Tom 's Cabin . He shunned publicity for himself and sought to avoid fame . 
Wendell Phillips ( 1811-1884 ) , from a prominent Massachusetts family , in his teens was converted under the preaching of Lyman Beecher . Although he later broke with the churches because he believed that they were insufficiently outspoken against social evils , he remained a devout Christian . He was remembered chiefly for his fearless advocacy of abolition , but he also stood for equal rights for women , for opportunity for the freedmen , and for prohibition . 
The anti-slavery movement and other contemporary reforms and philanthropies were given leadership and financial undergirding by Arthur Tappan ( 1786-1865 ) and his younger brother , Lewis Tappan ( 1788-1873 ) .  
Individuals possessing unusual gifts and great personal power were transmuted at death into awesome spirits ; they were almost immediately worshipped for these newer , even more terrible abilities . Their direct descendants inherited not only their worldly fortunes , but also the mandate of their newfound power as spirits in the other half of the universe . Royal lineages could be based on extraordinary worldly achievements translated into eternal otherworldly power . 
Thus , the emperor could draw on sources not available to those with less puissant ancestors . But this eminence was not without its weighty responsibilities . Since he possessed more power in an interdependent universe of living beings and dead spirits , the emperor had to use it for the benefit of the living . The royal ritual generated power into the other world : it also provided the living with a way to control the spirits , and bring their powers directly to bear on the everyday affairs of the world . Proper ritual observance at any level of society was capable of generating power for use in the spirit world ; but naturally , the royal ritual , which provided unusual control over already supremely powerful divine spirits , was held responsible for regulating the universe and insuring the welfare of the kingdom . 
This is the familiar system of " cosmic government " . The Chinese emperor , by proper observance of ritual , manifested divine powers . He regulated the dualities of light and darkness , Yang and Yin , which are locked in eternal struggle . By swaying the balance between them , he effected the alternation of the seasons . His power was so great that he even promoted and demoted gods according to whether they had given ear or been deaf to petitions . 
In this system , no man is exempt from obligations . Failure in daily moral and ethical duties to one 's family , outrages to community propriety , any departure from rigid standards of moral excellence were offenses against the dead . And to offend the dead meant to incur their wrath , and thus provoke the unleashing of countrywide disasters . The family home was , in fact , a temple ; and the daily duties of individuals were basically religious in nature . The dead spirits occupied a prominent place in every hope and in every fear . 
The common belief was that there existed one moral order , which included everything . The dead controlled the material prosperity of the living , and the living adhered to strict codes of conduct in order not to weaken that control . Men believed they could control nature by obeying a moral code . If the moral code were flouted , the proper balance of the universe would be upset , and the disastrous result could be floods , plague , or famine . 
Modern Westerners have difficulty comprehending this fusion of moral and material , largely because in the West the historical trend has been to deny the connection . Living in urban conditions , away from the deadweight of village constraint and the constrictions of a thatched-roof world view , the individual may find it possible , say , to commit adultery not only without personal misgivings , but also without suffering any adverse effects in his worldly fortunes . Basing action on the empirical determination of cause and effect provides a toughness and bravado that no powerful otherworldly ancestor could ever impart — plus the added liberation from the constraint of silent burial urns . 
In China , the magical system par excellence was Taoism . The Taoists were Quietist mystics , who saw an unchanging unity — the Tao — underlying all phenomena . It was this timeless unity that was all-important , and not its temporary manifestations in the world of reality . The Taoists believed the unity could be influenced by proper magical manipulation ; in other words , they were actually an organization of magicians . 
Mahayana Buddhism was no exception to these prevailing magical concepts . After this form of Indian Buddhism had been introduced into China , it underwent extensive changes . During its flowering in the sixth to the eighth centuries , Mahayana offered a supernatural package to the Chinese which bears no resemblance to the highly digested philosophical Zen morsels offered to the modern Western reader . Mahayana had gods , and magic , a pantheon , heavens and hells , and gorgeously appareled priests , monks , and nuns , all of whom wielded power over souls in the other world . The self-realized Mahayana saint possessed superhuman powers and magic . The Mahayana that developed in the north was a religion of idolatry and coarse magic , that made the world into a huge magical garden . In its monastic form , Mahayana was merely an organization of magic-practicing monks ( bonzes ) , who catered to the Chinese faith in the supernatural . 
Nonmagical Confucianism was a secular , rational philosophy , but even with this different orientation it could not escape from the ethos of a cosmic government . Confucianism had its own magic in the idea that virtue had power . If a man lived a classical life , he need not fear the spirits — for only lack of virtue gave the spirits power over him . But let us not be mistaken about Confucian " virtue " ; this was not virtue as we understand the word today , and it did not mean an abandonment of the belief in magic manipulation . To the Confucian , " virtue " simply meant mastery and correct observance of three hundred major rules of ritual and three thousand minor ones . Propriety was synonymous with ritual observance , the mark of a true gentleman . To live correctly in an interdependent moral and material universe of living and dead was decisive for man 's fate . 
This , in brief , was the historical background out of which Zen emerged . Promoters of Zen to the West record its ancestry , and recognize that Zen grew out of a combination of Taoism and Indian Mahayana Buddhism . But the " marvelous person " that is supposed to result from Zen exhibits more Chinese practicality than Indian speculation — he possesses magical powers , and can use them to order nature and to redeem souls . Proponents of Zen to the West emphasize disproportionately the amount of Mahayana Buddhism in Zen , probably in order to dignify the indisputably magical Taoist ideas with more respectable Buddhist metaphysic . But in the Chinese mind , there was little difference between the two — the bonzes were no more metaphysical than a magician has to be . 
Actually , Zen owes more to Chinese Quietism than it does to Mahayana Buddhism . The Ch'an ( Zen ) sect may have derived its metaphysic from Mahayana , but its psychology was pure early Taoist . This is well evidenced by the Quietist doctrines carried over in Zen : the idea of the inward turning of thought , the enjoinder to put aside desires and perturbations so that a return to purity , peace , and stillness — a union with the Infinite , with the Tao — could be effected . In fact , the antipathy to outward ceremonies hailed by modern exponents as so uniquely characteristic of the " direct thinking " Zennist was a feature of Taoism . So , too , was the insistence on the relativity of the external world , and the ideas that language and things perceived by consciousness were poor substitutes indeed for immediate perception by pure , indwelling spirit : the opposition of pure consciousness to ratiocinating consciousness . 
Zen maintains that cognitive things are only the surface of experience . One of its features attractive to the West is its irreverence for tradition and dogma and for sacred texts . One patriarch is supposed to have relegated sacred scriptures for use in an outhouse . But this is not the spirit of self-reliant freedom of action for which the Westerner mistakes it . It is simply that in Taoist tradition — as in all good mysticisms — books , words , or any other manifestations that belong to the normal state of consciousness are considered only the surface of experience . The truth — the Eternal Truth — is not transmittable by words . Reality is considered not only irrelevant to the acquisition of higher knowledge , but a positive handicap . The technique of reality confusion — the use of paradox and riddles to shake the mind 's grip on reality — originated with fourth and third century B.C. Chinese Quietism : the koan is not basically a new device . 
It is important for an understanding of Zen to realize that the esoteric preoccupations of the select few can not be the doctrine of the common man . In the supernatural atmosphere of cosmic government , only the ruling elite was ever concerned with a kingdom-wide ordering of nature : popular religion aimed at more personal benefits from magical powers . And this is only natural — witness the haste with which modern man gobbles the latest " wonder drug " . Early Chinese anchoritism was theoretically aimed at a mystic pantheist union with the divine , personal salvation being achieved when the mystical recluse united with divine essence . But this esoteric doctrine was lost in the shuffle to acquire special powers . The anchorite strove , in fact , to magically influence the world of spirits in the same way that the divine emperor manifested his power . Thus , the Mahayana metaphysic of mystical union for salvation was distilled down to a bare self-seeking , and for this reason , the mystic in Asia did not long remain in isolated contemplation . As the Zen literature reveals , as soon as an early Zen master attained fame in seclusion , he was called out into the world to exercise his powers . The early anchorite masters attracted disciples because of their presumed ability to perform miracles . 
Exponents of Zen often insist that very early Zen doctrine opposed the rampant supernaturalism of China , and proposed instead a more mature , less credulous view of the universe . In support of this , stories from the early literature are cited to show that Zen attacks the idea of supernatural power . But actually these accounts reveal the supernatural powers that the masters were in fact supposed to possess , as well as the extreme degree of popular credulity : " Hwang Pah ( O baku ) , one day going up Mount Tien Tai … which was believed to have been inhabited by Arhats with supernatural powers , met with a monk whose eyes emitted strange light . They went along the pass talking with each other for a short while until they came to a river roaring with torrent . There being no bridge , the master had to stop at the shore ; but his companion crossed the river walking on the water and beckoned to Hwang Pah to follow him . Thereupon Hwang Pah said : " If I knew thou art an Arhat , I would have doubled you up before thou got over there " ! The monk then understood the spiritual attainment of Hwang Pah , and praised him as a true Mahayanist. ( 1 ) " 
A second tale shows still more clearly the kind of powers a truly spiritual monk could possess : " On one occasion Yang Shan ( Kyo-zan ) saw a stranger monk flying through the air . When that monk came down and approached him with a respectful salutation , he asked : " Where art thou from " ? " Early this morning " , replied the other , " I set out from India " . " Why " , said the teacher , " art thou so late " ? " I stopped " , responded the man , " several times to look at beautiful sceneries " . " Thou mayst have supernatural powers " , exclaimed Yang Shan , " yet thou must give back the Spirit of Buddha to me " . Then the monk praised Yang Shan saying : " I have come over to China in order to worship Manjucri , and met unexpectedly with Minor Shakya " , and after giving the master some palm leaves he brought from India , went back through the air . ( 2 ) " 
In the popular Chinese mind , Ch'an ( Zen ) was no exception to the ideas of coarse magic that dominated . 
A closer look at modern Zen reveals many magical carryovers that are still part of popular Zen attitudes . To the Zen monk the universe is still populated with " spiritual beings " who have to be appeased . Part of the mealtime ritual in the Zendo consists in offerings of rice to the spiritual beings " . Modern Zen presentation to the West insists on the anti-authoritarian , highly pragmatic nature of the Zen belief — scriptures are burned to make fire , action is based on direct self-confidence , and so on . This picture of extreme self-reliant individuation is difficult to reconcile with such Zendo formulas as : " O you , demons and other spiritual beings , I now offer this to you , and may this food fill up the ten quarters of the world and all the demons and other spiritual beings be fed therewith . ( 3 ) "  
Pope Leo /13 , , on the 13th day of December 1898 , granted the following indulgences : " An indulgence of three hundred days is granted to all the Faithful who read the Holy Gospels at least a quarter of an hour . A Plenary Indulgence under the usual conditions is granted once a month for the daily reading " . Pope Pius the Sixth , at Rome , in april , 1778 , wrote the following : " The faithful should be excited to the reading of the Holy Scriptures : For these are the most abundant sources which ought to be left open to everyone , to draw from them purity of morals and of doctrine , to eradicate errors which are so widely disseminated in these corrupt times " . The American Bishops assembled at the Third Plenary Council of Baltimore urged the Catholic people to read the Holy Bible . " We hope " , they said , " that no family can be found amongst us without a correct version of the Holy Scriptures " . They recommended , also , that " at a fixed hour , let the entire family be assembled for night prayers , followed by a short reading of the Holy Scriptures " . 
Since the Catholic Church expresses such desire that the Sacred Scriptures be read , the following taken from the Holy Bible ( New Catholic Edition ) will prove a means of grace and a source of great spiritual blessing .  THE NEED OF THE NEW BIRTH  Do not wonder that I said to thee , " You must be born again " . St. John 3:7 .  THE NEW BIRTH IS NECESSARY BECAUSE GOD IS HOLY .  
But as the One who called you is holy , be you also holy in all your behavior ; for it is written , You shall be holy , because I am holy . /1 , St. Peter 1:15 , 16 . 
Holiness without which no man will see God . Hebrews 12:14 .  THE NEW BIRTH IS NECESSARY BECAUSE ALL HAVE SINNED .  
As it is written , There is not one just man ; there is none who understands ; there is none who seeks after God . All have gone astray together ; … All have sinned and have need of the glory of God . Romans 3:10-12 , 23 .  THE NEW BIRTH IS NECESSARY BECAUSE THE NATURAL MAN IS SPIRITUALLY DEAD AND BLIND .  
Therefore as through one man sin entered into the world and through sin death , and thus death has passed unto all men because all have sinned . Romans 5:12 . 
You also , when you were dead by reason of your offenses and sins . Ephesians 2:1 . 
And if our gospel also is veiled , it is veiled only to those who are perishing . In their case , the god of this world [ Satan ] has blinded their unbelieving minds , that they should not see the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ , who is the image of God . /2 , Corinthians 4:3 , 4 . 
For his workmanship we are , created in Christ Jesus . Ephesians 2:10 .  THE NEW BIRTH IS EFFECTED THROUGH THE WORD OF GOD  
For you have been reborn , not from corruptible seed but from incorruptible , through the word of God . /1 , St. Peter 1:23 . 
Of his own will he has begotten us by the word of truth . St. James 1:18 . 
Amen , amen , I say to thee , unless a man be born again of water [ symbol of the Word of God , see Ephesians 5:26 ] and the Spirit , he can not enter into the kingdom of God . That which is born of the flesh is flesh ; and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit . St. John 3:5 , 6 .  EVIDENCES OF THE NEW BIRTH   IF WE ARE BORN OF GOD WE HAVE FAITH IN CHRIST AS THE ONLY SAVIOUR .  
Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ is born of God . /1 , St. John 5:1 . 
As many as received him … were born … of God . St. John 1:12 , 13 .  IF WE ARE BORN OF GOD WE DO NOT PRACTICE SIN AS A HABIT .  
Whoever is born of God does not commit sin [ That is , he does not practice sin . Cf. /1 , St. John 2:1 ] . /1 , St. John 3:9 . 
We know that no one who is born of God commits sin . /1 , St. John 5:18 . [ The new nature , received at the time of regeneration , is divine and holy , and as the believer lives under the power of this new nature he does not practice sin . ]  IF WE ARE BORN OF GOD WE PRACTICE RIGHTEOUSNESS .  
If you know that he [ God ] is just [ righteous ] , know that everyone also who does what is just [ righteous ] has been born of him . /1 , St. John 2:29 .  IF WE ARE BORN OF GOD WE LOVE GOD .  
Everyone who loves is born of God , and knows God . /1 , St. John 4:7 .  IF WE ARE BORN OF GOD WE LOVE THE BRETHREN .  
We know that we have passed from death to life , because we love the brethren . He who does not love abides in death . /1 , St. John 3:14 .  IF WE ARE BORN OF GOD WE OVERCOME THE WORLD .  
All that is born of God overcomes the world ; and this is the victory that overcomes the world , our faith . /1 , St. John 5:4 .  IF WE ARE BORN OF GOD WE GROW IN [ NOT INTO , BUT IN ] GRACE .  
But grow in grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior , Jesus Christ . /2 , St. Peter 3:18 .  IF WE ARE BORN OF GOD WE PERSEVERE UNTO THE END .  
I am convinced of this , that he who has begun a good work in you will bring it to perfection until the day of Christ Jesus . Philippians 1:6 . 
Now to him who is able to preserve you without sin and to set you before the presence of his glory , without blemish , in gladness , to the only God our Savior , through Jesus Christ our Lord , belong glory and majesty , dominion and authority , before all time , and now , and forever . St. Jude 24 .  THE NEW BIRTH IS NECESSARY BECAUSE THE SPIRITUAL KINGDOM REQUIRES A SPIRITUAL NATURE .  
Jesus answered and said to him [ Nicodemus ] " Amen , amen , I say to thee , unless a man be born again , he can not see the kingdom of God " . … " Amen , amen , I say to thee , unless a man be born again of water and the Spirit , he can not enter into the kingdom of God . That which is born of the flesh is flesh ; and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit . Do not wonder that I said to thee , 'You must be born again' " . St. John 3:3 , 5-7 .  THE NATURE OF THE NEW BIRTH   THE NEW BIRTH IS A NEW CREATION .  
For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision but a new creation is of any account . Galatians 6:15 . 
If then any man is in Christ , he is a new creature [ literally , " He is a new creation " ] , the former things have passed away ; behold , they are made new ! /2 , Corinthians 5:17 . 
For by grace you have been saved through faith ; and that not from yourselves , for it is the gift of God ; not as the outcome of works , lest anyone may boast . For his workmanship we are , created in Christ Jesus . Ephesians 2:8-10 .  THE NEW BIRTH IS THE IMPLANTATION OF A NEW LIFE .  
I came that they may have life . St. John 10:10 . 
He who has the Son has the life . He who has not the Son has not the life . /1 , St. John 5:12 . 
He who believes in the Son [ Jesus Christ , the Son of God ] , has everlasting life . St. John 3:36 .  THE NEW BIRTH IS THE IMPARTATION OF THE DIVINE NATURE .  
Through which he has granted us the very great and precious promises , so that through them you may become partaker of the divine nature . /2 , St. Peter 1:4 .  THE NEW BIRTH IS CHRIST LIVING IN YOU BY FAITH .  
Christ in you , your hope of glory . Colossians 1:27 . 
It is now no longer I that live , but Christ lives in me . And the life that I now live in the flesh , I live in the faith of the Son of God , who loved me and gave himself up for me . Galatians 2:20 . 
To have Christ dwelling through faith in your hearts . Ephesians 3:17 .  THE NEW BIRTH IS MIRACULOUS AND MYSTERIOUS .  
The wind blows where it will , and thou hearest its sound but dost not know where it comes from or where it goes . So is everyone who is born of the Spirit . St. John 3:8 .  THE NEW BIRTH IS IMMEDIATE AND INSTANTANEOUS .  
Amen , amen , I say to you , he who hears my word , and believes him who sent me , has life everlasting , and does not come to judgment , but has passed from death to life . St. John 5:24 .  THE MEANS OF THE NEW BIRTH   THE NEW BIRTH IS A WORK OF GOD .  
But to as many as received him he gave the power of becoming sons of God ; to those who believe in his name : Who were born not of blood , nor of the will of the flesh , nor of the will of man , but of God . St. John 1:12 , 13 .  A FINAL WORD  You may be very religious , a good church member , an upright , honest and sincere person ; you may be baptized , confirmed , reverent and worshipful ; you may attend mass , do penance , say prayers and zealously keep all the sacraments and ceremonies of the church ; you may have the final and extreme unction but if you are not born again you are lost and headed for hell and eternal punishment . You can not be saved ; you can not go to heaven unless you are born again . Our blessed Lord Jesus Christ , the sinless Son of God , who could not lie , said , " Amen , amen , I say to thee , unless a man be born again , he can not see the kingdom of God " ( St. John 3:3 ) . " You must be born again " ( St. John 3:7 ) . 
Being convinced that salvation is alone by accepting Christ as Saviour , and being convicted by the Holy Spirit of my lost condition , I do repent of all effort to be saved by any form of good works , and just now receive Jesus as my personal Saviour and salvation as a free gift from Him . 
YOU MAY DO AS YOU PLEASE with God now . It is permitted . God placed Himself in men 's hands when He sent Jesus Christ into the world as perfect God and perfect Man in one Being . He was then in man 's hands . They cursed Him . It was permitted . Men spit on Him . God allowed it . They called Him a devil . God withheld His wrath . Finally men arrested Him , gave Him a mock trial , flogged Him , nailed Him on a cross and hung Him between earth and heaven ; and God allowed it . 
You can do likewise though Christ is not bodily present . You can ignore Him . You can ignore His Book , the Bible , and His church . You can laugh at His blood-bought salvation , curse His followers , and laugh at hell . It is permitted . The eternal Christ may knock at your soul 's door , calling you to give up sin and prepare for heaven . You may refuse Him , spit on Him , call Him a devil , curse Him . It is permitted . You may take His name upon your lips in oaths and curses if you so choose . He is in your hands — now . 
On the other hand , you may seek His favor , humble yourself before Him and beg His mercy , implore His forgiveness , forsake your sins , and abandon your whole life to Him . He has said , " Behold , I stand at the door , and knock : if any man hear my voice , and open the door , I will come in to him , and will sup with him , and he with me " ( Revelation 3:20 ) . The choice is up to you . The latch is on your side of the door . The choice is yours : the revellings and banquetings of this world or quiet communion with God ; the ever burning lusts of the flesh or the powerful victory of Holy Spirit discipline . The choice is yours : God is in your hands , now . 
God has already set the day when you will be in His hands . What He does with you then depends on what you do with Him now . Then it will be a " fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God " if you have abused Him in your hands .  I am a magazine ; my name is Guideposts ; this issue that you are reading marks my 15th anniversary . 
When I came into being , 15 years ago , I had one primary purpose : to help men and women everywhere to know God better , and through knowing Him better to become happier and more effective people . That purpose has never changed . 
When you read me , you are holding in your hands the product of many minds and hearts . Some of the people who speak through my pages are famous ; others unknown . Some work with their hands . Some have walked through pain and sorrow to bring you their message of hope . Some are so filled with gratitude , for the gift of life and the love of God , that their joy spills out on the paper and brightens the lives of thousands whom they have never known , and will never see . 
Fifteen years ago , there were no Guideposts at all . This month a million Guideposts will circulate all over the world . Experts in the publishing field consider this astounding . They do not understand how a small magazine with no advertising and no newsstand sale could have achieved such a following . 
To me , the explanation is very simple . I am not doing anything , of myself . I am merely a channel for … something . 
What is this something ? I can not define it fully . It is the force in the universe that makes men love goodness , even when they turn away from it . It is the power that holds the stars in their orbits , but allows the wind to bend a blade of grass . It is the whisper in the heart that urges each one to be better than he is . It is mankind 's wistful yearning for a world of justice and peace . 
All things are possible to God , but He chooses — usually — to work through people . Sometimes such people sense that they are being used ; sometimes not . 
Fifteen years ago , troubled by the rising tide of materialism in the post-war world , a businessman and a minister asked themselves if there might not be a place for a small magazine in which men and women , regardless of creed or color , could set forth boldly their religious convictions and bear witness to the power of faith to solve the endless problems of living . 
The businessman was Raymond Thornburg . The minister was Norman Vincent Peale . Neither had any publishing experience , but they had faith in their idea . They borrowed a typewriter , raised about $2,000 in contributions , hired a secretary , persuaded a couple of young men to join them for almost no pay … and began mailing out a collection of unstapled leaflets that they called Guideposts . 
Compared to the big , established magazines , my first efforts seemed feeble indeed . But from the start they had two important ingredients : sincerity and realism . The people who told the stories were sincere . And the stories they told were true . 
For example , early in my life , when one of my editorial workers wanted to find out how churches and philanthropic organizations met the needs of New York 's down-and-outers , he did n't just ask questions . Len LeSourd went and lived in the slums as a sidewalk derelict for ten days . 
That was nearly 13 years ago . Len LeSourd is my executive editor today . 
Many of you are familiar , I 'm sure , with the story of my early struggles : the fire in January , 1947 , that destroyed everything — even our precious list of subscribers . The help and sympathy that were forthcoming from everywhere . The crisis later on when debts seemed about to overwhelm me . 
That was when a remarkable woman , Teresa Durlach , came to my aid — not so much with money , as with wisdom and courage . " You 're not living up to your own principles " , she told my discouraged people . " You 're so preoccupied that you 've let your faith grow dim . What do you want — a hundred thousand subscribers ? Visualize them , then , believe you are getting them , and you will have them " ! 
And the 100,000 subscribers became a reality . And then 500,000 . And now a million January Guideposts are in circulation . 
With our growth came expansion into new fields of service . Today more than a thousand industries distribute me to their employees . They say all personnel have spiritual needs which Guideposts helps to meet . Hundreds of civic clubs , business firms and individuals make me available to school teachers throughout the land . They say it helps them bring back into schools the spiritual and moral values on which this country was built . 
Thousands of free copies are sent each month to chaplains in the Armed Forces , to prison libraries and to hospitals everywhere . Bedridden people say I am easy to hold — and read . Three years ago it became possible to finance a Braille edition for blind readers . 
Throughout these exciting years I have been fortunate for , although I have never offered great financial inducements , talent has found its way to me : William Boal who so ably organizes business operations ; John Beach who guides circulation ; Irving Granville and Nelson Rector who travel widely calling on business firms . 
Searching for the best in spiritual stories , my roving editors cover not only the country , but the whole world . Glenn Kittler has been twice to Africa , once spending a week with Dr. Albert Schweitzer . Last summer John and Elizabeth Sherrill were in Alaska . Van Varner recently returned from Russia . 
Twice a month the editorial staff meets in New York for an early supper , then a long evening of idea-exchange . Around the table sit Protestant , Catholic , and Jew . Each contributes something different , and something important : Ruth Peale , her wide experience in church work ; Sidney Fields , years of experience as a New York columnist ; Catherine Marshall LeSourd the insight that has made her books world-famous and Norm Mullendore , the keen perception of an advertising executive . 
There are people who travel long distances to assure my continued existence . Elaine St. Johns may fly in from the West Coast for the editorial staff meetings . Starr Jones gets up every morning at five o'clock , milks his family cow , attends to farm chores , and then takes a two-hour train trip to New York . Arthur Gordon comes once a month all the way from Georgia . 
We have also seen the power of faith at work among us . Rose Weiss , who handles all the prayer-requests that we receive , answering each letter personally , has the serene selflessness that comes from suffering : she has had many major operations , and now gets about in a limited way on braces and crutches . Recently , John Sherrill was stricken with one of the deadliest forms of cancer . We prayed for John , during surgery , we asked others to pray ; all over the country a massive shield of prayer was thrown around him . Today the cancer is gone . 
Perhaps it is not fair to mention some people without mentioning all . But , you see , those who are not mentioned will not resent it . That is the kind of people they are . 
Perhaps you think the editorial meetings are solemn affairs , a little sanctimonious ? Not so . Serious , yes , but also much laughter . Sharp division of opinion , too , and strenuous debate . There are brain-wracking searches for the right word , the best phrase , the most helpful idea . And there is also something intangible that hovers around the table . A good word for it is fellowship . A shorter word is love . 
Each meeting starts with a prayer , offered spontaneously by one member of the group . It takes many forms , this prayer , but in essence it is always a request for guidance , for open minds and gentle hearts , for honesty and sincerity , for the wisdom and the insights that will help Guideposts ' readers . 
For you , readers , are an all-important part of the spiritual experiment that is Guideposts . I need your support , your criticism , your encouragement , your prayers . 
I am a magazine ; my name is Guideposts . My message , today , is the same as it was 15 years ago : that there is goodness in people , and strength and love in God . 
May He bless you all . 
HAVANA was filled with an excitement which you could see in the brightness of men 's eyes and hear in the pitch of their voices . The hated dictator Batista had fled . Rumors flew from lip to lip that Fidel Castro was on his way to Havana , coming from the mountains where he had fought Batista for five years . Already the city was filled with Barbudos , the bearded , war-dirty Revolutionaries , carrying carbines , waving to the crowds that lined the Prado . 
And then Castro himself did come , bearded , smiling ; yet if you looked closely you 'd see that his eyes did not pick up the smile on his lips . 
At first I was happy to throw the support of our newspaper behind this man . I am sure that Castro was happy , too , about that support . Diario de la Marina was the oldest and most influential paper in Cuba , with a reputation for speaking out against tyranny . My grandfather had been stoned because of his editorials . My own earliest memories are of exiles : my three brothers and I were taken often to the United States " to visit relatives " while my father stayed on to fight the dictator Machado . 
When it was my turn , I , too , printed the truth as I knew it about Batista , and rejoiced to see his regime topple . None of us was aware that the biggest fight was still ahead . 
I was full of hope as Fidel Castro came into Havana . Within a week , however , I began to suspect that something was wrong . For Castro was bringing Cuba not freedom , but hatred . He spent long hours before the TV spitting out promises of revenge . He showed us how he dealt with his enemies : he executed them before TV cameras . On home sets children were watching the death throes of men who were shot before the paredon , the firing wall . 
Castro 's reforms ? He seemed bent on coupling them with vengeance . New schools were rising , but with this went a harsh proclamation : any academic degree earned during Batista 's regime was invalid . 
Economic aid ? He had promised cheaper housing : arbitrarily he cut all rents in half , whether the landlord was a millionaire speculator or a widow whose only income was the rental of a spare room . Under another law , hundreds of farms were seized . Farm workers had their wages cut almost in half . Of this , only 50 cents a day was paid in cash , the rest in script usable only in " People 's Stores " . 
A suspicion was growing that Fidel Castro was a Communist . In my mind , I began to review : his use of hate to gain support ; his People 's Courts ; his division of society into two classes , one the hero , the other the villain . But most disturbing of all were the advisers he called to sit with him in the Palace ; many came from Communist countries . 
What should I do about it , I asked myself ? I had watched Castro handling his enemies before the paredon . There was no doubt in my mind that if I crossed him , mobs would appear outside our windows shouting " Paredon ! Paredon ! … " 
What should I do ? I was proud of the new buildings which housed Diario now : the rotogravures , gleaming behind glass doors ; the thump and whir of our new presses . Here was a powerful , ready-made medium , but it could speak only if I told it to . 
Then one day , early in January , 1960 , I sat down at my desk , and suddenly I was aware of the crucifix . It was a simple ivory crucifix which my mother had given me . I had mounted it on velvet and hung it over my desk to remind me always to use the power of the paper in a Christian manner . Now it seemed almost as if Jesus were looking down at me with sadness in His eyes , saying : 
" You will lose the paper . You may lose your life . But do you have any choice " ? 
I knew in that moment that I did not have any choice . From that day on I began to write editorials about the things I did not think correct in Fidel Castro 's regime . text