Jerusalem + Judea + Samaria News: December 10, 1956

Report From Israel

The capitulation of the Egyptian forces in Gaza marked the culmination of eight long years of strife along the Israel-Egyptian border.

This tiny belt of land, home for 300,000 Arabs jammed cheek to jowl, extends inland as few as three miles in one place, with an over-all average of five.

The “strip” has been the training ground for the Egyptian fedayeen gangs which have been harassing and killing the civilian population of Israel since 1948. Israel’s roads have been mined under cover of darkness to claim the first victims who would drive by. Private cars and buses have been machine-gunned from the roadside. Grenades have been thrown through the windows of a synagogue while children were at prayer.

Neither the United Nations nor any combination of world powers have been able to prevent Egypt and brother Arab states from pursuing their undercover war against Israel.

In Colonel Nasser’s speeches, he has shouted to the world his intention of destroying Israel. He has successfully contravened United Nations’ rulings on the Suez Canal and, contrary to these rulings, has continued his blockade of Israeli shipping in the canal and the Gulf of Akaba. He has mortgaged the lifeblood of his people for a fantastic quantity of Russian arms—arms which he promised to use against Israel. Nasser’s propaganda machine has been oiled and operated by German Nazis since 1945. It is their desire to help Egypt finish in the Middle East what they failed to complete in Europe.

No country in the world can long endure under the tensions which the Arab states have caused to prevail in the Middle East. Israel has made appeal after appeal to talk peace with the Arabs. Such efforts have been consistently refused.

The United Nations truce supervision organization has been powerless to prevent the Arab raids into Israel. As a result of this impotence, Israel has been forced into the role of policeman. Her punishing attacks against the Arabs have always followed attacks against her own civilian population and have always been directed against military and not civilian establishments.

When it was made clear that Egypt would not stop her commando attacks against Israel, nor sit down at a peace table with her, Israel was compelled to eliminate the bases from which these attacks were made.

Israel is asking Egypt and the other Arab states for a final peace settlement in the Middle East. The world and the states concerned cannot afford to go back to the unworkable truce agreement which was neither a truce nor an agreement.

Israel must help in the resettlement of Arab refugees and compensate those Arabs whose lands have been expropriated. The Arabs, likewise, must cease their undeclared war and establish an era of peace and cooperation with Israel through which all of their peoples might have an abundant life—heretofore unknown in this part of the world.

D.C.O.

Report From Egypt

Egypt has tasted war before, but never in this same bitter way.

As a country bordering the combat area in World War I, she witnessed the comings and goings of Allied troops, warships and material. Red Cross trains brought in the wounded to be cared for in military hospitals established on her soil. World War II brought her still closer to the horrors and devastation of modern warfare. In addition to the same troop concentrations, Italian and German planes sent bombs thundering down on British bases. The chief annoyance was that many of the attacks spread far beyond strictly military objectives, resulting in much loss of Egyptian life and property. There was the consolation, however, that the Italians and Germans were striking primarily at Allied forces and had no particular quarrel with Egypt.

The population seemed devoid of apprehension over the consequences of a possible Allied defeat. To many, it made little real difference whether Britain, Italy or Germany held the upper hand in Egypt’s economy and politics.

When fighting with Israel broke out following the re-birth of that nation, there was a marked change of public feeling concerning this thing called “war.” Now it had become a matter of national concern. Fellow Arabs were being dispossessed. Their rich farmlands, orchards, businesses, bank accounts and homes were falling into the hands of an aggressive and ruthlessly efficient alien. Jubilation greeted the news of the Egyptian army’s first successes. A special postage stamp was issued to celebrate the victory at Gaza. National pride sky-rocketed. Subsequent failures and stalemates did little to diminish the new-found sense of “being.” After all, Egyptian soldiers had proved themselves.

The calamities which later befell them were attributed to traitors, who reportedly arranged the purchase of defective arms and ammunition. In the long truce which followed, there was implicit confidence in the revitalized army’s ability to handle any future encounter with Israel’s troops.

Then came November, 1956, and Egypt’s traditionally-bright skies and mild fall weather found little in common with the people’s mood. War had come in a horrible way. Normally complacent attitudes were cast into molds of bitterness, resentment and hatred. No longer was the war on some distant, hard-to-visualize battlefield. The issues had become real, near, vivid—thousands of refugees, the stinging presence of that Western implantation, “Israel,” the stubborn refusal of France and England to recognize the “facts of life” in Algeria and Cyprus, and the Suez Canal, admittedly due to be completely Egyptianized in 1968, becoming a casus belli because the event was pushed up to 1956.

The man-on-the-street began to realize what it means to have the enemy’s planes and panic propaganda directed at him. His understanding has taken in the meaning of the recently imposed defense tax, the frequent appeals for shock troops and guerrilla volunteers, the urgent pleas for blood-bank contributors. With every war news bulletin, with every crack of the heavy ack-ack guns and rumble of bombs, with each succeeding night of air-raid sirens and total blackout, his hatred of the Jews and scorn for the British and French has grown more deep-seated and bitter.

(Shocked by the sudden flight of many Americans, the Egyptians were quick to express their appreciation of those who chose to stay. Early suspicion that the United States must be secretly aiding and abetting the Anglo-French attack soon gave way to undisguised relief and satisfaction that such was not the case. Then came an evident feeling of impatience that America did not exert her authority to bring the aggressors to heel.)

“Israel, we can manage and understand,” was the remark of the average man. “They are congenital troublemakers; nevertheless, the combined power of the united Arab people can take care of them. But the British and French we did not consider so completely mad. Just what type of civilization do they think they represent? Founding members of United Nations, paragons of progress and culture, pace-setting exponents of Christianity, by what right or reason … or special privilege do they, as ‘great nations,’ sidestep the very U. N. laws and principles which they are so zealous to impose on the smaller nations?… Are these the superior types of humanity that we are supposed to emulate?… To us it is becoming more than ever evident that France and Britain are as bankrupt morally as they are politically and economically.

“They may eventually win this war and gain their evil, imperialistic objectives in Egypt, but they have utterly blasted every possibility of winning the trust and friendship of the people of the Middle East. What they are doing at this moment in history will never be forgotten, nor will the flame of hatred they have kindled in our hearts ever be extinguished.”

Reflecting upon words such as these, words heard and read daily, what can a western Christian think? Over a century of missionary work in this and neighboring lands has never, at the very best, been attended by large success among non-Christians. Quite apart from what they have done to help awaken and strengthen indigenous Christianity, foreign missionaries have rendered large service to the population as a whole through education, medical relief and social work. If nothing else, they have won a reputation for the West as humanitarians, kind-hearted servants of the public good, exporters of something more than the showy products of Detroit and Hollywood.

Western standards of fairplay and justice, Western concepts of honesty and integrity, Western crusades for human rights and freedoms, Western systems of equality and democratic processes—all these and more have won the respect of high and low. But that was true only until October. What was true in October was not necessarily true in November.

Have the labors, the dedication, the cost in human life and devotion been wiped out in an outbreak of violence over a 100-mile strip of waterway which happens to cut through Egyptian real estate? A full assessment cannot be made while jet planes zoom overhead and the fevers of patriotism and outraged pride still run high. But Western Christians will do well to keep right on thinking—deeply, searchingly. If the gains of a century, small though they be, are not to be irretrievably lost, what can be, what must be done?

Pray I must, and pray I will. But what more, under God, can I do to make Christ’s way the way of all mankind, and His spirit the motivating and regulating power in every heart?

W.A.M.

Marginal Notes on the Tragedy of Hungary

(This article was written for CHRISTIANITY TODAY by Bela Vassady, Th.D., formerly president of Reformed Theological Seminary, Dehrecan, Hungary, and now professor of Systematic Theology at the Theological Seminary of the Evangelical and Reformed Church, Lancaster, Pennsylvania.—ED.)

The recent tragedy of Hungary unfolded before our eyes. It would be foolish to think that it started only on October 23 of this year. Rather, its seeds were sown during World War II and its aftermath.

Caught In The Middle

The Hungarian nation, throughout its 1,000-year history, had been bound to the West by all cultural and spiritual ties. The Magyars even prided themselves on being “the easternmost rampart of the Christian West.” But during World War II they soon found themselves caught in the middle. First their Christianity was being attacked—in the form of Nazism—from precisely that Western area whose Christian civilization they had defended against Tartar and Turk. Then the tragic last year of the war plagued them. Their country and its capital city became a “no man’s land” between two fighting enemies: the German Nazis and the Russian Communists. And finally the whole nation was shut off from the West by a ruthlessly descending “iron curtain.”

At the end of 1945, though under Russian military occupation, the Magyars once more asserted their will to be free in a courageous political witness: they cast their ballots for the national democratic parties. The communist party received only a small percentage of the votes. But everything was in vain. Cut off from the West, they were reduced to the rank of another unwilling satellite.

Bread And Freedom

But even tyrants must die. They cannot endlessly detour around death and eternalize their dictatorship. Stalin’s death irresistibly gave rise to a “liberalization move,” which then was highly welcomed in Poland, and especially in Hungary. The students, the workers and the intellectuals started their peaceful demonstrations. Their demands could be summed up in three short words: bread and freedom. They wanted for themselves things which we in America simply take for granted: national independence and full sovereignty, free elections and a representative government, free press and free communication with all the countries of the world, a readjustment of wages and the assurance of the possibility of a decent human living; finally, the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Hungary in accordance with the peace treaty and “neutrality” in foreign politics.

If these demands were the promptings of a “reactionary spirit” (as now charged by the Soviet Union and its puppet Hungarian government) then the signers of the Declaration of Independence, and all of us who believe in the promotion of basic human rights must be, indeed, nothing more than narrow-minded reactionaries.

The Unfettered Word

We venture to state that behind all these demands there lay one ultimate fact which then became a factor that irresistibly prompts to action. It could best be described in the words of Paul: “The Word of God is not fettered.” It cannot be fettered. And it has not been fettered in Hungary either during the last decade. The Christian Churches of Hungary, in their enforced captivity, have learned to augment the question of Hamlet somewhat like this: “To be or not to be spiritual satellites, that is our question!” They resisted—though passively, yet with a passivity that actuated their whole existence against the domesticating efforts of a totalitarian communist government. And in the last days of October they used the short period of freedom at their disposal to effect far-reaching changes in their very lives. They immediately proposed to hold new and free elections for all church posts occupied by officials who had received their appointments since 1948. They anticipated that church institutions, which had been banned, would be reopened. Christian youth work organizations were started again. The publication of a new religious journal, Reformacio, was considered and planned. The newly established National Christian Youth Federation appealed to the Christians of the world on November 3. Some of their dramatic words read as follows: “May God, who is the God of history, bless the efforts of our nation to build up an independent, free and neutral Hungary and may He enable us all to serve for reconciliation, peace and friendship among the nations.”

Lost!?

Two days later, choosing a Sunday morning for their attack, the Russian tanks crushed the insurgence of the whole Hungarian nation. At least 20,000 men, women and children were reported to have been killed in Budapest itself. “The Queen of the Danube” lies in ruins again—much more so than ever before. There can hardly be a family that did not lose a father, a mother, a brother or a sister. How true are Thomas Jefferson’s words: “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots.…”

And now, those who survived are facing starvation, the freezing cold of winter and, perhaps worst of all, the possibility of deportation to Siberia. Many thousands, whole families, but especially young men and women, sought their refuge in the West. Once again the Hungarian nation is torn to pieces.

Torn to pieces—yet not lost. For the same thing that occurred in Hungary at the end of World War II will happen all over again: their physical survival will be followed by a new spiritual revival. Their churches will be packed much more than ever before (and according to reports of Western visitors, they were surely packed all the time); Bible study groups will continue to spring forth here, there and everywhere; the spiritual frontiers will be drawn in the very lives of the families; the communist indoctrination of the youth will be counterbalanced and weakened by the “faith of (their) fathers living still in spite of dungeon, fire and sword;” and they will be inspired much more than ever before by one great aspiration, expressed in the words of Prince Stephen Bocskay, their great liberty-fighter in the 17th century (whose sturdy figure can be seen together with the figures of great Reformers in Geneva on the Reformation Monument): “To live with God and unto God in a free country.”

Beachhead Or Bridge?

As neighbors of Soviet Russia, the Magyars have ventured to achieve the humanly impossible (at least for the time being): to secure political freedom and neutrality so that they could be a bridge linking the West to the East and the East to the West undisturbed. Now—at least temporarily—they are once more forced to be used as a beachhead by the communist world. But such a beachhead for the Soviets will again and anon prove to be even less reliable than quicksand.

The NBC television newsreel has recently shown some very moving pictures of the way in which Hungarian refugees managed to reach the Austrian border. One such case was especially dramatic.

At the very end of their exhausting flight the refugees came up against a deep, water-filled canal. There was no bridge any more. The Russians had long before dynamited it. With a swift and desperate ingenuity, the Hungarians pieced some treetrunks together so that they could serve as an improvised gangplank. But all this was good only to prop their feet against it; they could never have walked on it. Something more had to be done. Finally they stretched a wire over the “bridge,” and the breathtaking crossing began. Feeble old women and playfully agile children, while using the wobbling treetrunks as a foothold, grasped the wire with both hands and slowly but surely all reached the other side, the bank that meant haven and freedom to them.

The symbolism of this unique scene will certainly strike home to all of us. Churches in the communist East and the non-communist West must alike serve as bridges linking the East to the West and the West to the East. But such a linking is possible only if we all grasp the invisible wiring of faith, hope and love and again commit ourselves to God’s eternal Word, which alone has liberating power.

And so, too, the tragedy of Hungary can find its ultimate meaning only in this unfettered and liberating Word. To the Hungarian Christians, its very admonishment serves also as an encouraging word: “The Lord disciplines him whom He loves, and chastises every son whom He receives” (Heb. 12:6). And to us, Americans, Christians and non-Christians alike, who again were spared of any greater suffering, its fitly spoken message is something like this: “Do you think that these (Hungarians) were worse sinners … because they suffered thus? 1 tell you, no; but unless you repent you will likewise perish.”

Dali’s Place in Religious Art

In 1947 the Vatican spoke bluntly to modern artists presuming to handle medieval religious themes. In the encyclical Mediator Dei, Pope Pius XII warned that “he wanders from the right path … who commands that images of our Divine Redeemer on the Cross be so made that His body does not show the bitter wounds He suffered.”

Doubtless the Roman Catholic concern for the centrality of the sacrifice of Christ has a view to much more than the biblical doctrine of atonement; it has an eye also to the dogma of the mass. But, nonetheless, the encylical places an age of religious revival under aesthetic scrutiny. Such Christian criticism of aesthetics seems especially necessary in the fact of a rising mid-twentieth-century disposition to restore the figure of Jesus to contemporary art forms.

The Enigmatic Dali

At this point the consideration of Salvador Dali, the Spanish painter, and his work, becomes of special interest.

Dali’s painting is as enigmatic as his personality. Steeped in modern surrealism, he sought, like that movement’s originator, Andre Breton, the synthesis of all major problems not in logical processes but in a combination of dream and reality, in a “sort of absolute reality, surrealite.” As a skilled leader, Dali contributed to surrealism his own share of “double talk” picture puzzles, picture images at once symbolic and realistic, pictures speaking to the subconscious rather than to the rational and the moral.

Flight From Surrealism

By 1941 Dali was forsaking surrealism, even repudiating it, in the words of his biography, The Secret Life of Salvador Dali (Dial Press, 1942), as “an art of revolution.” It was the study of theology that led him to renounce revolution. Along with collective, atheist and neo-pagan utopias (Marx’s Communism and Rosenberg’s Neo-Socialism), he declared revolution to be bankrupt. All of these are destined to be vanquished, he wrote, “by the individualistic reactualization of the Catholic, European, Mediterranean tradition.”

While retaining several pronounced surrealist features, Dali in the next dozen years painted four or five religious themes. In 1954 he completed a crucifixion scene. The following year, Chester Dale, president of the board of trustees of the National Gallery of Art, commissioned Dali to paint his most recent and most controversial work, “The Sacrament of the Last Supper.”

Debate over the significance of Dali’s work has since spread over two continents. And since March 31 of this year, at least one hundred thousand persons have glimpsed Dali’s provocative canvas (105 by 65 inches) in Washington’s National Gallery. Multitudes have bought souvenir prints of the painting; in six months, information rooms have sold 17,000 color reproductions for framing, 21,000 postcards and 700 color slides. The painting is stirring more interest than almost any other National Gallery exhibition in recent years.

Yet confusion and division are rife over the “meaning” of Dali’s effort. Some disparage it as scribble and scrabble; others herald it as the triumphant genius of a gifted artist. Even more provocative is the question of its religious significance, and especially in what sense, if any, it is to be regarded as authentic Christian art.

The Renaissance Revolt

Since the Renaissance, modern religious art has loosed itself increasingly from medieval motifs. As a result, even the most sacred biblical themes came to reflect the spirit of a humanistic age. Representations of Jesus were no longer intended to send viewers to their knees, nor in fact did they. If retained at all, the wounds of the Crucified One no longer held redemptive significance; the sacred agony of atonement was gone. In modern religious painting the stigmata all but vanished. The pierced hands and side held only embarrassment for a theology that viewed the ugly suffering of the Cross as superfluous. Observers of the passion, who once prostrated themselves in devotion, now were lost rather in mere grief or pity. Prayer and worship, and any semblance of devotion in view of the shed blood, were gone.

A Model Of Suffering

An instructive article, “Traditional Religion and Modern Art,” by Edgar Wind, professor of art and philosophy at Smith College, significantly notes that modern religious art tends to display Jesus as “a human figure, a humble model of all earthly sufferings.… The devotion which these images arouse is closer to a moral meditation on human cruelty and divine meekness than to participation in a sacrament” (Art News, Vol. 52, No. 3, May, 1953, p. 62).

It is apparent that the medieval and the modern disclose two temperaments: the Roman Catholic pictures let Christ’s deity show through His humanity; the Protestant school exemplified by Rembrandt does not.

After the humanizing of Jesus, a feature of the idealistic and humanistic movements of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, comes the total repudiation of the Christ, a phenomenon confined as yet to the Soviet sphere. Instead of regarding Jesus merely as a good man who suffered colossal injustice, art takes the form of irreligious invective, and the agony of the Cross is mocked.

Dali’s “Last Supper”

Dali perfected “The Sacrament of the Last Supper” in Spain in 1954. The mountain-girded bay, remotely suggestive of the Sea of Galilee, is Port Lligat, seen from Dali’s home. Some observers see in the forms of these mountains a relation to Plato’s idea of the heavenly region. The dodecahedron, a segment of which floats in the sky above the communion table, since Pythagoras has symbolized the entire universe. Above this floating structure, two arms, partly real and partly transparent, seem to embrace the whole. They suggest a circle embracing the communing votaries, and perhaps are intended to draw observers to the feast.

Do those arms and the headless body represent the Roman Catholic church? Dali himself may suggest an affirmative reply in his biography: “If I am asked … where the real force of Europe is to be found … in spite of all immediate appearances it resides more than ever in … the open arms of the occident, the arms of St. Peter’s in Rome, the cupola of man, the Vatican” (op. cit., p. 395). Do the arms floating above the universe welcome the seeking pilgrim to enter the Roman Catholic church? Some Roman enthusiasts press this notion. Doubtless the painting is finding its best response among Roman Catholic viewers, although it appeals to persons of all faiths. Dali himself has been said to explain the headless body as a symbol of the Resurrection; yet no confirmation of this can be found in his writings, and why a headless body should symbolize the Resurrection is unclear. Be that as it may, Dali closed his Secret Life with little certainty of having found his quest in Rome: “Heaven is what I have been seeking all along … Where is it to be found?… Neither above nor below … (but) exactly in the center of the bosom of the man who has faith!… I do not yet have faith and I fear I shall die without heaven.”

Historical Or Subjective?

Curator of education at the National Gallery Raymond S. Stites has observed noteworthy peculiarities of Dali’s painting. For example, the heads bent in prayer at the communion table reveal, like the Spanish peasants and artists of today, hair both long and shorn. Moreover, Christ is depicted as beardless, yet with long hair. While there is a Christian tradition in Rome for a beardless Christ, such a representation is considered unusual. The bread used at the table is modern.

These may be secondary rather than primary features of the debate over Dali’s painting, yet they reflect an underlying question: does the canvas represent the Last Supper as an historical event? Are the figures around the table to be identified with the disciples? What do the headless body, the outstretched arms, represent? What significance has the brilliant coloring? What of the boats? What is the summary message of the painting?

Dali is alleged to have explained his dozen figures around the table by the magical significance of the number twelve. The figures, while perhaps intended to recall the disciples, are not to be individually identified. No rational explanation occurs for the boats, which may have some personal significance for Dali, or be simply surrealist elements intended to jolt conventional modes of thought. The intense color may bear some relation to ecstatic visions alleged in the Middle Ages and in the Counter Reformation.

Stress On Sacrament

Virtually all these questions mirror the tension between realistic content and surrealistic style. The new Dali aimed “to make of surrealism something as solid, complete and classic as the works of museums.” Has he given us here, as Dr. Stites suggests, classical realism of the type done by Spanish painters for four centuries, to be studied in the same manner as the traditional classical works of Poussin, Raphael or da Vinci?

Stites himself urges us to take seriously Dali’s own simple label: The Sacrament of the Last Supper. We see herein not an historical event of 2,000 years ago, no actualizing of Peter and Judas and the other disciples. We have simply a sacramental meal, the Holy Communion, albeit based on the Last Supper as a real event. In view is the eternal significance of the sacrament, more than the historical event itself.

Does the “Sacrament of the Last Supper” take us beyond a group of pious men partaking in a ritual? Does it reach beyond subjective impression to the historical realities at the center of Christian faith? Has the transition really been made from the subconscious and beyond the consciously subjective to the historical and rational, without which the central events and doctrines of the Christian revelation vanish into nebulous subjective mysticism? If the stress of Dali’s brush falls no longer on the irrational elements in the subconscious mind, does it on that account drive us to our knees with a confession that Jesus of Nazareth is Savior and Lord?

The Dramatic Center

Art in the mood of Dali’s painting lends itself better to the Roman Catholic than to the evangelical spirit. The Roman emphasis on miracle in the present and on the perpetual re-enactment of Christ’s sacrifice tends to conceal the dramatic axis of Christian truth as evangelical faith sees it. Evangelicalism rises first out of the crucial redemptive history of the past, and even its most sacred moments of meditation do not shroud that past with traces of a surrealistic technique.

Perhaps one thing is sure about Dali’s canvas. It does not say that the universe is irrational. Whether it says more—whether Dali as an artist has one foot securely in heaven, and whether his painting may be respected as authentic Christian art—is one of the controversies of the day.

Ideas

Red China and World Morality

Red China And World Morality

In the area of international relations, the greatest political and moral problem facing the American public is posed by the demand by interested parties that the United States grant formal recognition to Red China. The General Assembly of the United Nations has adopted a resolution not to consider during the current session proposals to seat Red China or to exclude Nationalist China. But the question of communist China in relation to the United Nations cannot be permanently evaded, and reflection on this theme is therefore timely and necessary. At stake is not merely an issue of politics and expediency but a moral and legal question.

The Central People’s Government of the People’s Republic of China is the de facto regime of that country. But such existence does not prove it worthy of recognition. On sound principles of international law the American government rightly holds that while Red China, or any other state, can exist independent of recognition, none is a member of the family of nations until recognition has been granted.

Each state determines for itself the principles upon which it will grant recognition. A glance into history shows that Russia did not recognize the new American republic until 1809, thirty-three years after the United States came into existence. The Russian delay during years when this new little government needed friends was due to disfavor for our democratic system of government.

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Communist governments today would have the world believe that recognition is the intrinsic right of every government. To the United States, recognition of a foreign government is more than a formality acknowledging the physical and political existence of a given foreign government. Recognition certifies moral as well as political acceptance and approbation. American presidents and secretaries of state have spoken clearly and cogently on this moral and legal basis for recognition. In 1919 President Wilson declared that

in the view of this government there can not be any common ground upon which it can stand with a Power whose conceptions of international relations are so entirely alien to its own, so utterly repugnant to its moral sense. There can be no mutual confidence or trust, no respect even, if pledges are to be given and agreements made with a cynical repudiation of their obligations already in the mind of one of the parties. We cannot recognize, hold relations with or give friendly reception to the agents of a government which is determined and bound to conspire against our institutions, whose diplomats will be the agitators of dangerous revolt, whose spokesmen say they sign agreements with no intention of keeping them.

President Coolidge stated in his message to Congress on December 6, 1923, that

Our government does not propose … to enter into relations with another regime which refuses to recognize the sanctity of international obligations. I do not propose to barter away for the privilege of trade any of the cherished rights of humanity. I do not propose to make merchandise of any American principles. These rights and principles must go wherever the sanctions of our government go.

In a letter to the late Samuel Gompers, then President of the American Federation of Labor, Secretary of State Hughes expressed his views:

Recognition is an invitation to intercourse. It is accompanied on the part of the new government by the clearly implied or expressed promise to fulfill the obligations of intercourse. These obligations include, among other things, the protection of the persons and property of the citizens of one country lawfully pursuing their business in the territory of the other, and abstention from hostile propaganda by one country in the territory of the other. In the case of the existing regime in Russia, there has not only been the tyrannical procedure to which you refer and which has caused the question of the submission or acquiescence of the Russian people to remain an open one but also a repudiation of the obligations inherent in international intercourse and a defiance of the principles upon which alone it can be conducted.

Thus the American definition makes good faith and faithfulness in the performance of international obligations equally as important as the fact of political existence. That position is defensible on sound moral principles, however expediency may scorn it. But principle always prevails over expediency in the long run.

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America’s earlier recognition of the Soviet regime in Russia should warn us that nothing is gained by recognizing a communist government. Presidents Wilson, Coolidge, and Hoover had maintained, correctly, that the unwillingness of the Soviet Union to fulfill its obligations constituted valid reason for withholding recognition. In his fascination for “good old Joe,” however, President Roosevelt recognized the USSR, which gave solemn promises to desist from further communistic propaganda designed to overthrow the United States government. These pledges were broken as soon as they were made. In return for all the advantages afforded by recognition, the Soviet government gave the Roosevelt administration only vague and vain promises.

The record to date shows that the Soviet government has kept 4 out of 1052 sacred obligations it has assumed in treaties with other governments.

That record must not be forgotten when the recognition of Communist China or any communist regime comes under consideration. Recognition of the USSR is a fait accompli, and it has brought only bitter frustration and disillusionment to the American people. The same is true elsewhere.

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Communism is intrinsically atheistic. Since an atheist recognizes no fixed principles of morality, one cannot have confidence in his word, integrity or intentions. Promises and pledges, however solemnly stated in international treaties, are suspended on something other than unchanging moral principles.

It is wishful thinking that recognition of Red China will eliminate the bamboo curtain and bring morality and a sense of honor to its communist government. No prophecy could be falser. Reflect upon the sobering words of Secretary Kellogg on April 14, 1928:

The experiences of various European governments which have recognized and entered into relations with the Soviet regime have demonstrated conclusively the wisdom of the policy to which the Government of the United States has consistently adhered. Recognition of the Soviet regime has not brought about any cessation of interference by the Bolshevik leaders in the internal affairs of any recognizing country, nor has it led to the acceptance by them of other fundamental obligations of international intercourse … Certain European states have endeavored by entering into discussions with representatives of the Soviet regime to reach a settlement of outstanding differences on the basis of accepted international practices. Such conferences and discussions have been entirely fruitless.

No state has been able to obtain the payment of debts contracted by Russia under the preceding governments or the indemnification of its citizens for confiscated property. Indeed, there is every reason to believe that the granting of recognition and the holding of discussions have served only to encourage the present rulers of Russia in the policy of repudiation and confiscation as well as in their hope that it is possible to establish a working basis, accepted by other nations, whereby they can continue their war on the existing political and social order in other countries.…

No result beneficial to the people of the United States or indeed to the people of Russia would be attained by entering into relations with the present regime in Russia so long as the present rulers of Russia have not abandoned these avowed aims and known purposes which are inconsistent with international friendship.…

How reads the record of Red China? It has flagrantly violated the basic rights of humanity and flaunted the standards of international law and comity. It has denied the legitimate rights of American citizens—business men, educators, missionaries—and has caused them to leave property and posts of duty, or has imprisoned them on charges palpably false. Contrary to the provisions of international law, it has held prisoners of war (both Japanese and American) for indefinite periods.

In Korea, the Chinese Communist government perpetrated open aggression by entering the conflict there. It was declared by the United Nations to be an aggressor. This Chinese aggression resulted in 140,000 American casualties, including 35,000 dead. It has perpetuated the division of Korea and has defiantly refused to abide by the terms of the truce agreement. Violations of the truce, by the increase of Chinese troops and air force, are well documented.

Red China continues its propaganda for the invasion of Formosa.

Moreover, it encourages subversion, insurrection and rebellion throughout southeast Asia. The Red Chinese claim the right of recognition by the United States and other governments, and therefore of entrance into the United Nations, despite the fact that they have deliberately and continually flaunted the principles of the UN charter, and that they sought to repudiate the United Nations at the Geneva Conference in 1954.

Our refusal to recognize the Red regime of China and therefore to permit its entry into the United Nations is the greatest factor in international morality today. The United Nations is based on moral forces. President Eisenhower reminded the American people, and the world as well, on July 7, 1954, that this government opposes the admission of Red China because of its continued international injustice and inequity. Nothing in the conduct of Red China, either internally nor internationally, remotely approximates the standards set forth in the Charter of the UNO.

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Recognition of the present regime in China would have disastrous results. It would favor our foes and fail our consistent friends, the Nationalist government of Free China. It would startle and frighten millions of Asiatics who are in the balance between the slave areas of the Soviet and the free world and very likely drive them to counsels of despair. It would destroy the will to resist on the part of those millions within China who long for release and who look to America for moral support at very least.

Recognition of a government need not imply approval of all its past acts. But while that government vaunts its vices and defends its injustices as moral, a moral nation can confer recognition upon it only by separating politics from ethics and thus losing its own moral courage and earnestness. Recognition would imply approval of Chinese aggression in Korea, hallowed to Americans by the sacrifice made there by our armed forces, and it would betray the trust of our heroic dead. It would lend support to the thesis that international organizations and international law are merely figments of fancy, by embracing those who prate that might alone makes right. Recognition would approbate the blood purges of the Chinese people, estimated conservatively by our Department of State as at least fifteen million deaths. Furthermore, it would approve subversion in Viet Nam, Malaya, Thailand and Indonesia. Likewise it would overlook international curtains—iron, bamboo and other types—with their slave labor camps, bondage and bloodshed.

*

Recognition would mean the triumph of cruel and cunning men who are plotting the destruction of human liberties everywhere. It would grant comfort and prestige to communists, and betray the dignity of free men.

Mongol tyrants of old like Ghengis Khan or Tamerlane were benevolent and moderate despots in contrast with the men of the Kremlin or Mao Tse Tung.

We respect the principles and practice of international law, and respect international government based on the principles of law and human welfare; but the communists recognize no law nor organization superior to their own nefarious program. The communists chant constant contumely against western “imperialists.” All the while, the world has never seen such colonialism as has appeared in Soviet satellites since the second world war. The American policy, meanwhile, has been consistently one of preparing a national entity for independence, in Cuba and in the Philippines.

Meeting the standards of admittance into the family of nations is a responsibility of the Chinese government itself. Recognition by others is not needed by the Chinese to set their own house in order. That principle was admirably stated by Secretary Hughes in 1923 when the USSR stated its desire to establish relations with the United States:

If the Soviet authorities are ready to restore the confiscated property of American citizens or make effective compensation, they can do so. If the Soviet authorities are ready to repeal their decree repudiating Russia’s obligations to this country and appropriately recognize them, they can do so. It requires no conference or negotiations to accomplish these results, which can and should be achieved at Moscow as evidence of good faith.

*

If Red China desires to deserve attention and confidence on the part of other nations, it can begin to show genuine good will and good faith. It can tear down its curtain of bamboo. It can banish its leaders who have subverted the cause of freedom. It can disavow its communistic brutality and bloodthirstiness and make the people of China free. It can acknowledge and make recompense for aggression in Korea, and can be honest and sincere in its dealings with other states. No recognition is needed to achieve these requirements. The burden of proof is on Red China, not on the rest of the world. Theirs is the problem of morality, national and international; and their successful solution of that problem alone can help dissolve their international difficulties. Then we can say of Red China as President Coolidge did of Soviet Russia:

… whenever the active spirit of enmity to our institutions is abated; whenever there appear works meet for repentance; our country ought to be the first to go to the economic and moral rescue of Russia. We have every desire to help and no desire to injure. We hope the time is near when we can act.

The Church’s One Way To Revitalize Christmas

The public celebration of Christmas raises deep concern in the Christian Church. Although instituted to commemorate the birth of Christ, Christmas has become an occasion for inexcusable excesses. Blatant commercialism has captured the season for unholy gains. Drunken orgies at office and home ascribe the day more fittingly to Bacchus, the god of wine. Santa Claus takes prominence over Christ as the process of secularization captures the day once dedicated to worship of the King of kings.

Efforts of the Church to counteract this wanton perversion are pitifully weak and inadequate. Gratefully the Church accepts an invitation from the Chamber of Commerce to display a religious float in the Christmas parade. She hopefully initiates slogans to keep Christ in Christmas. Her community caroling seeks to drown out the huckster’s clamor. She scolds and admonishes. Yet the Church’s effort to revitalize Christmas makes little impact on contemporary society. The spirit of the shepherds and the Magi does not pervade the present generation.

History vividly reveals the only adequate course by which the Church can restore true significance to Christmas. She must become engrossed with the nature of Christ and the Incarnation with the same passion evident in the life of fourth-century Christianity. The preoccupation of that age with the deity of Christ gave birth to the Christmas festival.

Previous to the fourth century the Church paid scant attention to the birth of Christ. The death and resurrection of the Lord engrossed the minds and hearts of the early believers. Their attention was deeply fixed on the wonder of the Atonement and the glory of the Resurrection. Thus, Good Friday and Easter were the prominent events of the Church year.

The fourth century witnessed a change in emphasis. Controversy concerning the nature of Christ focused attention on the Incarnation. Whether Christ was begotten or unbegotten, whether he was a finite creature or the eternal Creator, was hotly debated in the church and the market place. The controversy shook both Church and Empire. The first ecumenical council at Nicea (A.D. 325) rightly declared that Jesus Christ is very God of very God, of one substance with the Father and begotten of the Father from eternity.

The wonder of the glorious nature of Christ and the mystery of the Incarnation awakened a strong desire to praise and worship God and his Christ on a special day. Not altogether inappropriate was the choice of December 25, which was dedicated in the pagan Roman Empire to the worship of the sun. Homage to the natural sun was superseded by homage to the Sun of Righteousness. The Christian holy day supplanted the pagan holiday.

Only as the Church recognizes and proclaims with fervor that Jesus Christ is very God of very God, of one substance with the Father and begotten of the Father from eternity, will Christmas be revitalized. Only as men are awed by the majesty and glory of Christ will they bow down in adoration and reverence. The human Jesus created by Liberalism in the past several generations arouses no worship in the hearts of men. He has no power to draw men away from baubles and tinsel. That power is exercised only by the eternal Son of God, the Lord of glory, the King of kings.

Christian Criticism and Labor’s Big Stick

The Christian conscience must constantly bring the social order under prophetic judgment and Christian criticism. Big Business and Big Labor (and Little Business and Little Labor), and Big Government also, must be judged by spiritual and moral priorities.

For several generations, Management has been the major target of economic criticism. One would indeed be blind to fact to deny that the secular spirit, so prevalent in the twentieth century, found a ready expression in the sphere of Big Business. Devotion to the almighty dollar involved Management in evils. Economic injustices invaded the world of work. From them, the worker was properly set free, and the labor movement was an active force in securing some of these reforms.

Between 1900 and 1950 the impression was fostered by some that Big Business is greedy, corrupt, and immoral. Part of this impression was justified, part was the result of skillful propaganda against Big Business. Incessant publicity for some notorious acts of labor exploitation gave wide propaganda force to the notion that Management and greed are identical. But the arbitrary dogma that Capitalism is intrinsically wicked really had roots deeper than these graphic examples of injustice to employees. It was, in fact, vigorously propagandized by the supporters of Communism and Socialism alike. Among them were some of the most influential clergymen and divinity professors of the Western world. They gave organized labor credit for the cure of economic evils, but they quite disregarded the role of the growth of capital, which also made possible greater production with a margin for more leisure and cultural development. Labor was romanticized, Management depreciated. Walter Rauschenbush seems virtually alone to have reflected that the day might come when Labor, rather than Management, would need to be made the primary subject of economic criticism.

The emergence of Big Labor now forces the question whether in the present decade priority in prophetic judgment and Christian criticism should not be toward organized labor.

The fact that Big Labor readily exploited the 15 million members of the merged AFL-CIO as a political force, projecting a four-million-dollar campaign, qualifying or disqualifying candidates for the leading public offices, and perpetuating the myth of a fixed “labor class” distinguishable from the rest of American society, disturbs many leaders with an eye on the unity of national life. There is a growing feeling that Labor seeks coercive power over the citizenry as a whole, demanding and getting from government special privileges and hence unfair advantage because of its size as a pressure group.

The added fact that Big Labor has provided a framework for the economic as well as the political exploitation of the working man is a further concern. Some labor leaders popularized the use of adjectives like “corrupt” and “greedy” applied to Big Business, until the two became virtually synonymous to the unreflective worker. But the deployment of union welfare funds for private purposes (in which case money collected by the unions for benevolent purposes was grossly misused) and the continued association of racketeering and violence with the framework of organized labor ought to shake public faith in the notion that Big Labor is exempt from human depravity.

Christian interpretation must bring the social order under virile Christian criticism. The Old and the New Testaments contain passages of economic criticism so virile that nothing in the writings of Karl Marx surpasses them in power. Big Business and Big Labor alike, and the small businessman and individual worker also, must be judged by the abiding principles of the Christian revelation.

Not every criticism of Management, and not every criticism of Labor, is Christian in temper and content. The criticism that flows from the Russian collectivists has too often, even in Christian circles, been artificially equated with the criticism which flows from the Hebrew prophets and the Christian apostles. The literature of the Manifesto and the literature of the Bible both address a message of economic criticism to our day, but one does so from a pagan standpoint, the other from a theistic standpoint.

Doubtless the most provocative article in the current issue of CHRISTIANITY TODAY is that by Kermit Eby. One reason it is significant is that its trenchant criticisms of the labor movement come from the former research and educational director of the CIO.

We are not here concerned with the secondary thrust of the article, except by way of passing comment. In some of the minor emphases we heartily concur, e.g., that preparation for war is not necessary to maintain prosperity, and that spending for roads and other civilian needs would stimulate the economy as fully as does the armament industry. Some we might venture to debate, e.g., that all mass media today make light of increasing debt and advocate spending as the road to prosperity. From some we dissent, e.g., the plea for more foreign economic aid and for expanded welfare programs at home. Such programs have not been free of a coercive element, with relatively few people deciding what others should pay.

But the criticism Dr. Eby neglects to make, as well as the direction taken by those he ventures, reminds us that even a glass-top desk has two sides. And the side Dr. Eby overlooks needs now to be considered.

It may well be that labor unions have themselves been corrupted by some of the very evils they set out to banish from the economic world. We have suggested that the misuse of power and the selfish utilization of the individual worker provide conspicuous examples. Moreover, American labor is more and more so preoccupied with the single objectives of economic gain that it loses its ability to reply critically from within the sphere of work to the Communist thesis that all our problems are basically economic. But such criticisms of Big Labor are not the whole. The theme of Labor in its relation to the “mores” of modern society has deeper facets than this.

One of the dominant structures of the society of the post-Christian West is a capitalistic economy. Instead of absorbing the “mores” of Capitalism, and protesting only against its seamy side, the “reforms” at which the labor unions aimed encompassed the destruction of Capitalism, and in many respects continue to do so.

And at this point Christian criticism cannot keep silence. For, even if influential Protestant clergymen during the past generation tried to make collectivism out to be Christian, and Capitalism Satanic, they were false prophets. By their proclamations they revealed that they misunderstood Christianity, and that their devotion to the writings of Marx ran deeper than their fidelity to the Hebrew-Christian Scriptures. For Capitalism is biblical; it is particularly Protestant and Calvinistic. And a genuinely Christian critique of Labor must hope that the unions will absorb more of the capitalistic “mores.”

Not that Professor Eby’s criticisms are not often much to the point. The contempt for good music and the longing for violence, the profanity characteristic of some unions, the gulf between union leaders and union workers, the bureaucratic disposition to regiment the thinking and voting of the workers and to muffle opposition, the hunger for political power, the exaltation of economic gain above other considerations—these accusations need to be leveled. But the criticism needs to go much deeper. The most dangerous thrust in the modern labor movement is its ambiguous relationship to a capitalistic economy, and its constant support of programs that lead in the collectivistic direction. And it is with this feature of Big Labor that Professor Eby does not come to grips.

We are not charging that labor leaders, or workers, carry communist cards. If the definition of a communist is one who “carries a party card,” organized labor may well be free of a single member. But if sympathy for collectivism is to be measured by economic ideals and programs, the situation is quite different. And it should be clear enough why no congressional investigation is launched at this level. For the constant modification and weakening of capitalistic “mores” is an activity which both major political parties have shared with organized labor.

Professor Eby himself seems to share this revisionist stance. For a capitalistic economy may, and ought to, criticize an inordinate self-interest. But when Professor Eby argues that the nature of private interest is such that it cannot concern itself with the public interest, he seems to take the collectivist line, and apparently serves notice that his conflict with organized labor involves merely an intramural debate.

The Ten Commandments as a Religious Epic

The Ten Commandments is the twentieth century’s religious movie epic. The theatrical world is not likely to duplicate the grandeur of Cecil B. DeMille’s big scenes, nor the 13½-million dollar investment that escorts Israel safely through the Red Sea while deluging box offices with viewers.

Few can watch this screen spectacular for three and one half hours (a short depiction would be unworthy of the theme) without imbibing a deep sense of God’s restless righteousness in history, shaping the destinies of men and nations, and also an admiration of Moses his servant. Not only do the Egyptian plagues of Egypt and Israel’s rescue mirror God’s power; they become credible in view of his divine purpose. The modern spirit must be strangely stirred by this stupendous panorama.

Viewed as a religious achievement of the cinematic world, the film transcends the tawdry values intriguing to modern moviegoers, preoccupied with life’s secondaries. The producer of King of Kings had already showed an industry lusting after false gods, and neglectful of the spirit, its higher responsibility.

The Ten Commandments is no simon-pure biblical dramatization, however. It is flashy and often fleshy in its handling of the sacred story. This fleshy flank has even raised a question over the film’s propriety, since it adds to the Bible narrative a physical accent disturbing to some sensitive consciences. In filling in the “thirty silent years” of Moses’ life, the film needlessly detours into the legendary, enlarging on the erotic experiences of life and somewhat indulging a prominent interest in sex.

Virtually alone Time Magazine (Nov. 12), in contrast to the unqualified plaudits of leading churchmen, pictured the film as “in some respects perhaps the most vulgar movie ever made,” throwing “sex and sand into the moviegoer’s eyes for almost twice as long as anyone else has ever dared.” “The fine line between bad taste and sacrilege,” Time implies, is obscured in a professedly Bible epic whose “numerous, nubile and explicitly photographed” dancing girls at times flirt with the seventh commandment. Yet it must be remembered that the sensuous worship of the golden calf even by the Israelites is historically accurate. And it would be difficult to find a segment in the film which caters to the lustful look, even if chastity might now and then have been more carefully guarded (a notching down of the sex aspects would hardly have weakened the power of the film). Some scenes, moreover, refreshingly raise the concern for sex purity to a devout desire to avoid shame in the Lord’s eyes.

The important question, does the film convict the conscience?, requires a complex answer. Surely it casts its weight against the sins of idolatry and of ingratitude, and contrasts the ruthless totalitarian disregard of the worth of the individual with the biblical view of man as a bearer of the image of God. Yet the approach to the theme of liberty and bondage is one-sidedly modern rather than biblical. Inseparable though these themes be, it unjustifiably stresses political freedom from earthly tyrants above the freedom to worship the true and living God. The great themes of worship, prayer and sacrifice are marginal to the film. Indeed, the only significant reference to Hebrew sacrifice, the passover blood on the doorposts, ascribes the edict dooming the firstborn not to Jehovah but to the Egyptian Pharaoh (reflecting an uneasy view of the wrath of God). The handling of the Decalogue neglects the supreme fact that the Law is a schoolmaster to lead men to Christ.

This neglect arises from a failure to grasp the standpoint of divine grace. The film omits the Gospel, integral to the Old Testament as to the New. The Decalogue was no code for salvation by works; it was a rule of life published by the Redeemer-God.

Hollywood could hardly be expected to turn history back to a real meeting with God in Egypt and Sinai. Yet every dramatization of the sacred necessarily raises a question of personalities as well as of props. Doubtless Charlton Heston as Moses and the other film stars carry their roles with dignity and reverence. Heston, who spent three and a half hours daily in makeup and make-ready, reportedly is no drinker, and abandoned smoking because he “couldn’t, and be Moses.” This premium on externals is reflective not alone of The Ten Commandments, but is the real tragedy of modern culture. It is more difficult to be Moses than Hollywood thinks, and God’s commandments run deeper than it knows. Morality as an outward mask gave Christ an occasion to liken the Pharisees to play-actors. A culture in which the arts merely reflect the truth, rather than incarnate it, knows the form of true religion without its power. Jehovah wrote commandments on stone, so they could not be erased; he purposes to write them on the human heart. Hollywood has inscribed them on celluloid and sound tape, somewhat more brittle and breakable. When God speaks with a Hollywood accent, it is somehow easier to swarm the box office than to storm the altars of repentance.

Bible Book of the Month: The Acts of the Apostles

Christianity Today December 10, 1956

The Book of the Acts should need no commendation to Christian preachers. The minister who wants to be sure that he stands in the true apostolic succession will turn to this book time and again. What was the message that the apostles preached, and how did they preach it? How did they adapt their presentation of the message to their varying congregations—Jewish, God-fearing and Gentile? What part did their personal experience of Christ play in their preaching? The preacher who looks for the answers to such questions as these in this book will certainly find it, and if he tests his own preaching in the light of that answer, he will know how far he falls short of the apostolic example.

The Book of the Acts was clearly written as the sequel to the Third Gospel, which is the “former treatise” referred to in Acts 1:1. This conclusion is not based simply on the fact that both works are dedicated to Theophilus, but on wider considerations of style, language and outlook. They were intended to circulate as two parts of one historical work, tracing the beginnings of Christianity from the birth of John the Baptist to Paul’s imprisonment in Rome. It has been suggested that the author projected a third part, in which the story would be carried on possibly to the fall of Jerusalem in A.D. 70; but this cannot be proved.

When the four Gospels began to be bound up together and to circulate as one collection, early in the second century, the two parts of this historical work were separated from each other. Part I was henceforth part of the fourfold Gospel, and Part II had to pursue a career of its own, under the title The Acts of the Apostles, which it acquired soon after the middle of the second century.

Pivot Book Of New Testament

But the necessity of pursuing a career of its own did not reduce its importance. On the contrary, it occupied an influential position as the pivot book of the New Testament (to use Harnack’s term). It provided the link between the two chief collections of canonical Christian literature—the fourfold Gospel and the Pauline epistles. It supplied at once the sequel to the fourfold Gospel and the historical background to the Pauline epistles. Nor did it only supply the historical background; it supplied most cogent evidence of the reality of Paul’s apostolic commission. A reader of the Pauline letters might conclude that they were written by a man who was anxious to assert his independent apostleship in the face of others who denied it; but how could he assess the validity of the arguments on the one side and on the other? If his only other source of information was the fourfold Gospel, he would find not the slightest reference to Paul there; and he might well believe that the weight of the evidence favored the arguments for the superior authority of those who were companions and apostles of our Lord in the days of His flesh. But no one could read the Acts without realizing that Paul was a genuine apostle of Christ, independently commissioned by Him, and proving by the “signs of an apostle” which accompanied his ministry the truth of his claim that he came in no way behind “the very chiefest apostles” (2 Cor. 12:11).

On the other hand, the Acts served another useful purpose in the second century by showing that Peter and the rest of the twelve were as truly apostles as Paul. When Marcion issued his challenge to the apostolic churches and maintained that all the apostles had corrupted the pure gospel of Christ except Paul, and that even his letters had to be purified from judaizing interpolations, this further value of the Acts came to be appreciated as it could not have been before.

First Century Work

Yet the Book of the Acts is no second-century production, reflecting an age when the antitheses of Paulinism and Judaizing Christianity had been reconciled in a more comprehensive unity. This was the view of the Tubingen theologians of last century, and it has found some advocates in more recent years; but to the historian and archeologist Acts has all the marks of a first-century work. Sir William Ramsay’s studies in this field may have gone out of fashion in many quarters (but not in all, as their recent reissue by a well-known publishing house indicates); but the solid basis which he provided for the first-century dating and high historical value of Acts can hardly be overthrown.

The traditional account is that this book, along with the “former treatise” was not only the work of a first-century author, but of a friend and companion of Paul’s. This account is well founded. It is supported by the most natural explanation of the three “we” sections of Acts—the sections which begin at Chs. 16:10; 20:5, and 27:1, three points where the narrative suddenly changes from the third person “they” and “them” to the first person “we” and “us”. For the most natural explanation of the threefold transition is that the narrator is adopting this unobtrusive means of informing his readers: “At this point I joined the party and was present at the incidents which follow.”

The traditional account goes further, and names the author: he was Luke, referred to on a few occasions by Paul as one of his companions (cf.Philem. 24; 2 Tim. 4:11), and described by him once as “the beloved physician” (Col. 4:14). A careful examination of Col. 4:10–14 indicates that Luke was a Gentile Christian; and the general outlook of the narrative of Acts suggests a Greek author rather than a Jewish one. A document from the later part of the second century makes Luke a native of Antioch in Syria—a highly probable statement. Luke plays such an insignificant part by name in the New Testament that the ascription to him of the Third Gospel and Acts is not likely to have been invented. If the medical element in the vocabulary of the two books can no longer be used to prove that they were written by a physician, it certainly retains considerable illustrative value.

Major And Minor Themes

The author is specially interested in tracing the rise of Gentile Christianity: he tells first how the good news was brought from Jerusalem to Antioch, and then how the chief apostle to the Gentiles carried it throughout the chief provinces of the eastern Roman Empire; at last he brings him to Rome, and ends his narrative with the picture of Paul in the imperial city, a prisoner indeed, but carrying on his apostolic witness to all his visitors under the very eyes of the praetorian guard, without let or hindrance. This picture is the climax of his insistence throughout that Christianity is no threat to imperial law and order—that, in fact, responsible officials in various provinces of the Empire had acknowledged the legality of the Gospel itself and of its messengers. Acts was surely written at a time when this apologetic emphasis was necessary, and Theophilus was probably typical of the more thoughtful members of the Roman upper middle-class who could be trusted to give an unprejudiced hearing to an informed account of the rise and progress of Christianity, instead of accepting the popular misrepresentations.

But many would ask why the advance of Christianity had so regularly been attended by serious disorders, if it was such a law-abiding movement. Luke has his answer to this question: sometimes the Gospel threatened vested property interests, and therefore aroused the hostility of people like the owners of the fortune telling slave-girl at Philippi and the silversmiths of Ephesus; but more often the disorders were stirred up by the leaders of Jewish communities in the various places to which the Gospel came. They were unwilling to accept it themselves, and stirred up riots to try to prevent others from accepting too. So, alongside the major theme of the book, the progressive acceptance of the Gospel by Gentiles, there runs a minor theme, its progressive rejection by the bulk of the Jewish people. And if the major theme reaches its climax in Acts 28:30–31, the minor theme reaches its climax in the verses immediately preceding, where a prolonged disputation between Paul and the Roman Jews is concluded with his quotation of Isaiah 6:9–10 and his announcement that the Gentiles will receive the salvation which the Jews refuse.

The transition from the early days of the Jerusalem church to the Gospel’s forward movement is provided in Chs. 6 and 7 by the story of Stephen. Not only does this story introduce us for the first time to the young man Saul (Acts 7:58); not only did the persecution which followed Stephen’s death drive out many Christians from Jerusalem to carry the Gospel as far as Phoenicia and Cyprus and Antioch (Acts 11:19); but the very character of Stephen’s distinctive ministry and the terms of his defence foreshadow the church’s Gentile mission. It is remarkable how many of the dominant themes of the New Testament find incipient expression in Stephen’s speech.

Dr. A. T. Pierson wrote a series of studies in Acts which he entitled The Acts of the Holy Spirit. This might well have been the title of the book itself. For the emphasis on the person and activity of the Holy Spirit is even more basic to the book than its apologetic insistence. Right at the beginning of the book, the risen Lord promises the baptism of the Spirit to His followers (Ch. 1:5, 8), and this promise is fulfilled for Jewish believers in Ch. 2, and for Gentile believers in Ch. 10. The apostles and other Christian leaders (like Stephen and Philip) not only preach in the power of the Spirit, but their movements are under His direction; they are witnesses to Christ, but the Spirit is the primary Witness, whose testimony confirms theirs (Acts 5:32).

Thus, in the ministry of Paul in particular, we find a noteworthy combination of the Spirit’s guidance with long-range strategic planning. And there is no suggestion that the two are incompatible. Even if Paul was making for Ephesus when the Spirit diverted him in Acts 16:6–7, the route which he was obliged to take was vindicated from the standpoint of long-term Christian strategy, for it meant that he evangelized the circumference of a circle running through the lands east and west of the Aegean Sea before he settled down for nearly three years in Ephesus, at the centre of that circle, and carried on a more effective campaign of evangelization than would have been possible at the earlier date.

The book may be divided into six sections: (1) The Birth of the Church (Chs. 1–5); (2) Persecution leads to Expansion (Chs. 6:1–9:31); (3) The Acts of Peter and the Beginnings of the Gentile Mission (Chs. 9:32–12:25); (4) Antioch becomes a Missionary Church (Chs. 13:1–16:5); (5) The Evangelization of the Aegean Shores (Chs. 16:6–19:41); (6) How Paul realized his Hope of seeing Rome (Chs. 20:1–28:31).

Tool For Exposition

As I write this, I survey a lengthy array of commentaries on my shelves, many of which I have found of great use in my own attempts to expound the Book of the Acts. The five encyclopaedic volumes entitled The Beginnings of Christianity, edited by Foakes Jackson and Kirsopp Lake (Macmillan, 1920–33), are indispensable to the student, though the preacher who reads CHRISTIANITY TODAY will wish to replace its general liberal emphasis by something more positive. R. B. Rackham’s commentary, The Acts of the Apostles, published in the “Westminster Commentaries” in 1902, is still one of the best expositions of the English text. R. J. Knowling’s commentary on the Greek text in the “Expositor’s Greek Testament” (1900) remains a work of high value. A more homiletic treatment is provided in such works as The Preacher’s Homiletic Commentary: Acts, by Thomas Whitelaw (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1896), C. J. Vaughan, The Church of the First Days Lectures on the Acts of the Apostles (Macmillan, 1890), and G. Campbell Morgan, The Acts of the Apostles (recently reprinted). From another angle, the recent Lowell Lectures by Dr. Henry J. Cadbury, The Book of Acts in History (Harper, 1955), throw the light of the latest research on the historical worth of Acts, providing a worthy sequel to Sir William Ramsay’s St. Paul the Traveller (14th edition, London, 1920).

F. F. BRUCE

The Editors commend in addition to the commentaries mentioned above The Book of the Acts, by F. F. Bruce in the New International Commentary on the New Testament (1954). Not without cause the statement has been made: “The best major commentary on Acts that has appeared in the last fifty years.—EDS.

Cover Story

The Glass-Top Desk

Kermit Eby

After working for unions full time for twelve years and having studied them for an equal length of time, I have become convinced that the greatest threat unions face today is their corruption by the mores of the society that they once had expected to reform. May I hasten to add though, that there is nothing unique in labor’s defection. Organized religion is equally guilty of watering down its prophetic heritage.

Here illustration is better than argument. During the first weeks in June, I spent a day visiting my old union friends in the new A.F.L.-C.I.O. building in Washington, D. C. These were men with whom I had worked, employed and taught. When I entered their offices and the conversation had moved away from the conventional, each one in his own way apologized for the ostentation of the environment and ended by expressing a longing for the days of their youth when they marched and picketed and sang labor songs, instead of listening to the piped-in strains of the semiclassics.

Marks Of Distinction

And yet they are not seriously to be blamed. The workers in our culture who employ my friends, and elect their bosses, want it that way. Big offices, sleek secretaries, glass-topped desks, and black limousines are marks of success in our culture. And why, the workers ask, shouldn’t our men live as well as the bosses? “There is nothing too good for the workers the workers employ” may sound a bit cynical, but it is a deeply revealing statement. Perhaps there is no clearer statement of the point of view than that uttered by Delegate Andy Rapchok when he was arguing for a $40,000 a year salary for Walter Reuther (which incidentally was refused). “Now if we are going to be a bunch of cheapskates on this floor, how in h—do we expect the companies to give us concessions when we meet with them? The first thing they will throw back at us is ‘You don’t pay your leaders, but you want us to pay your men!’ If we are going to have leadership the same as the industrialists do, we should be men enough to pay as they do. I, too, say $40,000 spent right on down the line.” Incidentally, labor leaders are notoriously good speech makers!

Trend In Union And Church

But now, lest I seem too hard on the labor movement, may I hasten to add that I belong to a mortgage-free church that installed an air conditioner this summer at a total cost of $10,000 instead of hiring a director of religious education. The most charitable reason for the action is that the Board of Trustees wished to restore the atmosphere of the catacombs, which I understand were cool.

It is my unwillingness to accept this trend in unions and in churches which produces all the conflict in me. Perhaps because I am a sectarian, the son of generations of sectarians who were forever in tension with the mores of the world. Now it is my thesis that the labor movement and the church best serve their age when they are a transforming influence, when they are in tension with the political, economic, and moral values of their time, in tension, if you please, with both Republicans and Democrats, who, from my point of view, are so little different that to make a choice between them is of no significance.

Rise Of The Labor Giant

Now, from this point of view, let us look at one of the most significant events in labor’s recent history: the merger of the American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations. Consolidation is the order of the day. Corporations are consolidating, and in order to match corporation strength unions must do likewise. The rationale for weight and counterweight is understandable, but from my sectarian point of view there is real tragedy in the fact that labor unity was possible. A tragedy because the A.F.L. and the C.I.O. were so much alike. The C.I.O. in twelve short years had become like the A.F.L., a bureaucratic organization more interested in maintaining the status quo than in challenging either the state or the economic order.

Of course, one of the avowed aims of the united movement is the organization of the unorganized. (Incidentally, there has been no appreciable gain in organizing labor’s ranks since the early forties, and last year saw more workers reject unions in Labor Board elections than in any previous year.) To state it bluntly, $125 per week organizers with expense accounts and driving Buick Roadmasters are not doing as good a job as the itinerants with a vision did in the thirties. But to churchmen this should not be news, for churchmen know that churches grow when they have a lay ministry and a congregation that tithes, sings, and testifies. To put the proposition clearly, then, in labor we have the decline of the local union, the proliferation of the giant international, the rise of the monolithic power structure and the denial of any concept of a loyal opposition that suggests a compromise of personal power or of immediate political success.

The Tension In Our Midst

Recently, I participated in two strike situations, the one directly, the other vicariously. The first was a strike of workers, members of the Carpenters and Joiners Union, against the Peabody school furniture factory in North Manchester, Indiana. If ever a group of men were the victims of paternalism and exploitation, these men were it. Our son, a senior in Manchester College, helped organize the union because he had worked in the plant, knew the men, and sympathized with them. While the strike was in progress, the Carpenters Union leaders gave the local union president and vice-president a chance to earn a little money washing their Buicks. Actually, there was little difference in the way of life of the union’s professionals and the corporation head. And it wasn’t that difference which influenced me to join my son on the picket line. It was instead, my identification with the oppressed and browbeaten in this Brethren stronghold where students discuss the strategies of Christian love in East-West tensions and have no answer to the tensions in their midst.

Then there was the steel strike, a strike by agreement, where factories closed and workers stayed home; where decisions were made in the stratosphere of a New York air-conditioned office between the giants of industry and union. Here there was no drama, not even the drama of pathos that existed in the North Manchester strike. Everything was impersonal. No loves and no hates, except official ones. And there really couldn’t be, for both management and labor were the children of the depersonalization of bigness.

It is because of this and many other previous experiences that I have formulated the question which haunts me more than any other: “How can we give meaning to our Judeo-Christian ethic in a society that is increasingly complex, with decisions ever farther removed from the persons affected by them?” Translated it means, can we maintain personal values in the “great society”? There are times, I confess, that I doubt it. But I continue trying just the same.

Moral Economic Choice

And my emphasis is largely in the area of economic choice, for I believe that our most significant moral choices are budgetary, both governmental and personal.

To be specific, the moral choice is not in the amount we spend, but for what we spend. For example, inflation for military purposes, in my way of thinking, is one thing; relief for the suffering of the world is another. Personal debt for the education of one’s children seems to me more justifiable than for a newer and bigger car.

It is because of this conviction that I tend to disagree with the drives of the powerful pressure groups in our compensatory state. (A compensatory state is one that rewards or withholds rewards from pressure groups in proportion to their power or lack of it.)

Beyond The One And The Many

It is the confusion of the private good with the public good in these organizations which troubles me. Or as I tell my students who would become experts for big business, big labor, or agriculture, “Go ahead, but if you want to survive don’t insist that there may be larger interests involved than business, labor, or agriculture.” Business wants the free market, but it wants subsidy and protection; labor wants freedom to bargain but it wants to bargain protected by a friendly government; and the farmer, we all know, produces our indispensables, food and fiber.

Most of us inside and outside of pressure groups are the victims of the thesis that the best way to serve the public interest is to serve the private interest. This I do not believe! By the very nature of their privateness such interests do not and cannot concern themselves with the larger whole.

Nor, as important as economic security is—and I joined the Teachers Union because I wanted books as well as hamburgers—do I believe that more is always the answer. For example, there is no positive correlation between the quality of teaching and the pay of teachers or the public responsibility of elected officials and their salaries.

Is More Always Ideal?

Thus, I belong to the school of thinkers inclined to ask who won the victory in the recent steel strike. What happened in those 36 days that made them necessary? Why was there such a general acceptance of the inevitable inflation that is the aftermath of all such strikes? (The price of steel is being raised $8.50 per ton as I write.) Perhaps it is an indication of my age, but I remember the days when people used to seriously suggest that the wage-price profit line should be held and that there were profoundly moral arguments for so doing. But now the escalator only goes up! I wish I could be convinced! Unconvinced, I ask, was the larger interest served? Were the steel workers’ interests served? For they will get a small share of the increased cost in wages, and the lion’s share will go to the corporation in increased profits. More, in other words, isn’t always the answer, even if Samuel Gompers affirmed it as labor’s goal.

The mood of America, however, is not a questioning one. We have peace and prosperity for practically everyone but farmers and automobile salesmen. All the mass media in America proclaim that paradise is just around the corner and will be attained when we all spend not only what we earn but a little bit more. The other day I read that 75 per cent of our spendable income, that in the $4,500 to $7,500 per year bracket, was all spent in the month it was earned, except for 21/2 per cent. The article didn’t say but implied that 100 per cent might be more ideal. Now as an unreconstructed individualist, I wonder what happens to a man who hasn’t enough of a reserve (say about one month’s wages) to walk into his boss’s office and tell him to drop dead.

Life By Monthly Installments

Here almost all Americans are in the same predicament, for they are all in debt—$36,000,000,000 in short-term loans. About $16,000,000,000 in automobiles alone. Averaged out, this is about $800 per family. Hence, Americans no longer think of saving to buy. Such thinking is obsolete. The question now is “Can I meet the payments?”

The worker is no different from all other Americans. His culture emphasizes the relation between “things” and happiness, and he wants to be happy. Furthermore, the American worker is not class-conscious. He believes that the middle-class way is his way, too.

At this point, I want to re-emphasize my thesis. The American labor movement has been (and is being) corrupted by the mores of the society it once would reform. And my conclusion is that society’s values will win, for there are not enough influences in our society to produce the counteracting trends.

Nevertheless, it is my ambition to continue working as if there were a possibility. In season and out of season, I challenge the labor movement to find alternatives to the stabilization of our production short of war and preparation for war. Here again I reflect my sectarian bias (Brethren-Mennonite) and am troubled when I read in the labor press that the Hudson-Packard workers have petitioned for defense orders to keep their jobs intact. And in the public press that Curtiss-Wright will stabilize Studebaker and South Bend with $100,000,000 of airplane (military) contracts. Somehow I wanted the labor movement to come up with alternative suggestions.

But why should they? The Democratic platform calls for more of the same. And the churches aren’t far behind

It is here that I finally left C.I.O. I could no longer accept the idea that I was contributing to the stabilization of employment through means that were so anachronistic. For example, arguing that the moral choices we make in economic decisions are centered in what the funds are used for, I persisted in asking why we couldn’t get more for foreign aid, for the hungry of the world, not to mention our own. Or more for slum clearance and parks and playgrounds. Even those who would debate these specific uses of money, or suggest alternatives, must feel the force of the argument.

I asked these questions always conscious that although certain Americans were poor compared to those above them in income, compared to their counterparts in the world they were rich. The Jericho road, I am told, is a tortuous one; it is a long one as well.

Leaven In The Lineup

Likewise, I persist in challenging the movement in every way I know on how to involve in it people who are idealistic enough to survive the resulting buffeting. And in season and out, I stress the structural and constitutional changes that would facilitate participation by union’s rank and file. At present, I have between thirty and forty students active in the labor movement. I don’t know if they will maintain the idealism I tried to indoctrinate them with, but even if they lost most of it, they will be a leaven in an increasingly secularized lineup. Frankly, I think democracy in a trade union is impossible without the tensions precipitated by ideological conflict, caucus, and party. (It is ironical indeed that only two international unions have contested elections, the one by constitutional provision, the other by ideological factions.) Likewise, I would place constitutional limitations on officeholders, and return all union officials to the ranks from which they rose. I believe that workers under such circumstances would be more inclined to participate, for they would be more consciously determining their destiny.

When I was Research and Educational Director of the C.I.O., our offices at C.I.O. were constantly being renovated. On one occasion all department heads were given glass-top desks. For some perverse reason I liked my old leather-topped one and insisted on keeping it, only to upset the building management. Their instructions were to increase the status of all department heads by one glass-topped desk. “It is awful to have an extra glass-topped desk,” I was informed, and didn’t I realize that my refusal to give up my old desk reflected on the entire C.I.O.? I didn’t and I don’t!

But from that day I was out of step!

Kermit Eby is Professor in the Division of Social Sciences, University of Chicago. After acquiring the A.B. degree from Manchester College, Mr. Eby, then a high school principal, pursued graduate studies at the University of Chicago from 1929 to 1931. A minister in the Church of the Brethren, he served from 1945 to 1948 as Director of Education and Research for the C.I.O. He is a frequent contributor to national religious and labor publications

Cover Story

Preaching on the Edge of Desperation

Cary N. Weisiger Iii

Today’s busy minister is caught in an intense tug of war. He is stretched wire-taut. Forces at one end pull him into perpetual activity. He is a slave to the telephone, office appointment, committee meetings, workshop conferences, speaking engagements, and such parish obligations as weddings, funerals and church-night affairs. At the other end, often losing the battle, but retaining undeniable attraction, are his ideals for study, meditation, and pulpit work. He wants to preach well. He likes to preach. But when he steps into his pulpit, he feels woefully unprepared.

It may console the harassed prophet to remember that effective ministers have always been torn between clamant people and the need for quiet hours. Human hands were always clutching at Jesus. Cries of need were constantly coming to His ears. Our Lord had little seclusion.

A later century than the first affords similar witness. Augustine, in his Confessions (Book VI, Chapter III), recalls his vehement desire to speak with Ambrose. The prophet of Milan was so busy, however, with crowds of people and their infirmities that Augustine restrained himself from intruding upon Ambrose’s time for study. The young seeker marveled at the power of concentration in Ambrose who read to himself while people came and went in his study; Augustine therefore contented himself to hear the eloquent preacher on the Lord’s day. Evidently the fourth-century pastorate was no sinecure. Ambrose protected a small part of his time and energy, not by secretarial guardians nor by retreat to a dimly lit cubicle, but by sheer intentness in reading in the presence of people. Augustine does not say whether Ambrose ever knew urges of despair. This much we know: he managed somehow amid heavy pastoral burdens to maintain a distinguished pulpit ministry.

The Alternatives

What is a man to do?

Some men surrender their pulpit ideals. Preaching gets the leftovers. It is so easy to use someone else’s outline and to cull a few good illustrations from printed sermons. The sins of these men will find them out. Can a joyless parrot deceive anyone? Slovenly efforts will breed slovenly effects. A congregation may tolerate an amiable pastor but will have little respect for his utterances. From then on the refrain will be reiterated, “He is good as a pastor but he can’t preach.” Well, he could preach. But he has stopped trying.

A few men become pulpit specialists. Their people may resent it or may graciously make provision for it. These men have a firm “no” in their make-up. They refuse to be distracted from their one specialty. They may visit the sick when compelled to and may assume some rare committee obligation, but they are essentially lecturers and preachers.

The majority of ministers feel that they must be both men of activity and preachers with a message. They accept their fair share of parish, denominational, and civic chores. It’s part of the price. Besides, there is drudgery in every worthy occupation. But they fiercely refuse to compromise their pulpit standards. So they commit themselves to unending struggle and try, as Henry Ward Beecher once said, to “make an average.”

Interruptions Incessant

Ambrose never had a telephone.

What of this instrument—this blessed curse—and of the integrity of the parsonage and the church office? Should the minister’s wife follow the example of the woman who sweetly lied to protect her doctor husband when he needed rest? Perish the thought. If the minister is in, he is in. Of course, there are adroit protective devices. In a cathedral-like edifice in one of our cities, the minister has two sumptuous rooms. A former incumbent designated one his office and one his study. When he wished to be undisturbed, he went into the study. Telephone demands were then handled by his secretary: “I am sorry, Dr.—— is not in his office now. May I take a message?” Was this justifiable? Let each man work out his own salvation and be fully persuaded in his own mind.

Some congregations learn to be considerate.

Members call the church office and spare the parsonage unless the message is urgent. Most ministers will pray devoutly for an increase of their tribe.

There are times when God is clearly in the interruption. The neat plan for the day is not God’s plan. “As Jesus passed by, he saw a man which was blind from his birth” (John 9:1). The casual chance! The unexpected opportunity! Men of God should be sensitive to the leadings of God. If God is Sovereign of our time, we must grant Him the right to break in when He wants to. As for trivial intrusion, we can only assign it to God’s permissive will for the development of patience.

Human Constants And Variables

However men may differ in their endowment, most of them need three meals a day and eight hours of rest. All require time for exercise and recreation and for their families. All will do better in the long run with some break in the weekly routine and a proper annual vacation. Those who cannot “sleep fast” and so manage on six hours of rest; those who claim no extraordinary gifts of facile mind, retentive memory, or exuberant energy can still aim at a balanced work day.

What remains is to redeem the “golden moments,” overcome the leakages of wasted effort, and in general have disciplined effort. Prompt early rising pays large dividends for the person who means to study and to carry to his pulpit the fruits of respectable toil.

When John Wesley sailed for Georgia, he and his companions adopted a work schedule that challenges us today. Although Wesley was still a child of the law and knew not the deliverance of the Gospel, he carried this discipline through life. His diary for Tuesday, October 21, 1735, records:

“We now began to be a little regular. Our common way of living was this:—From four in the morning till five, each of us used private prayer. From five to seven we read the Bible together, carefully comparing it (that we might not lean to our understandings) with the writings of the earliest ages. At seven we breakfasted. At eight were the public prayers. From nine to twelve I usually learned German, and Mr. Delamotte, Greek. My brother writ sermons, and Mr. Ingham instructed the children. At twelve we met to give an account to one another what we had done since our last meeting, and what we designed to do before our next. About one we dined. The time from dinner to four, we spent in reading to those whom each of us had taken in charge, or in speaking to them severally, as need required. At four were the Evening Prayers; when either the Second Lesson was explained, (as it always was in the morning) or the children were catechised, and instructed before the congregation. From five to six we again used private prayer. From six to seven I read in our cabin to two or three of the passengers, (of whom there were about eighty English on board) and each of my brethren to a few more in theirs. At seven I joined with the Germans in their public service, while Mr. Ingham was reading between the decks to as many as desired to hear. At eight we met again, to exhort and instruct one another. Between nine and ten we went to bed, where neither the roaring of the sea, nor the motion of the ship, could take away the refreshing sleep which God gave us.”

Dividing ministerial time into three parts for preaching, pastoring, and administering affairs, and making preaching the first among equals, should enable a man to have three to four hours a day somehow, somewhere, for study. Five or six days of this will give him about twenty golden hours a week.

The Resolve Invincible

Unless a seminary graduate expects to be a specialist in education, administration, or visitation in large churches, he must determine that his preaching be foundational in his ministry. Upon the declared word of God he stands and builds. If he thinks otherwise, let him re-examine his commission or if that will not convince him, let him listen to the conversations of pulpit Committees who are looking for a new man. Yes, they want a man who organizes, who visits, and who is “good with the young people.” But they also want strength and freshness and inspiration in the pulpit.

This means strenuous resolve to be the best preacher he can be. It means getting through many a hectic week and yet contriving to have a message from the Lord on Sunday that is thoughtful, interesting, and practical with some passion in it.

So he launches out into the deep, week after week. His venture is often desperate. Saturday night, unfortunately, may find him catching up. Early Sabbath morning a light may burn in his study. He may even go into the service with the ink wet upon his manuscript. But he is doing his best and trusting the Lord.

John Ellis Large, rector of the Church of the Heavenly Rest, New York City, in his Harper’s Lenten Book for 1954, Think on These Things, records this presermon petition given him by Canon B. I. Bell:

Dear Lord, this sermon of mine isn’t much good. But I’ve worked honestly on it and it’s the best I can do—at least at the moment. I know that any good that comes from my sermon will be Your doing, not mine. Please help me so live, that I may become an increasingly uncluttered channel of Your grace. To that end, may I think Your own thoughts after You, and speak Your own Word. I love You and I love these people, among whom I’ve been called. That’s that, God. Amen. So the preacher stands up to preach.

His very inadequacy is dedicated. His desperation makes him terribly in earnest. Somehow his message has unction. God’s Spirit moves speaker and listeners with power. There is conviction. Then when it is all over and the last person has left the sanctuary and the custodian is closing the doors and the spent servant of the Lord goes back to take off his garments of sacred office, he says to himself, “The Lord helped me, and next week I’ll do better.”

The Rev. Cary N. Weisiger III, D.D., is Minister of Mt. Lebanon United Presbyterian Church in Mt. Lebanon, Pittsburgh. In a pastorate of 2,900 members, he carries the principal administrative responsibility, visits and counsels 20 to 35 people a week, and prepares three new messages weekly. He has four assistants: in evangelism, education, visitation and music.

Good Will Is No Mean Virtue

Eugenia Price

As long as Jesus Christ remained to me a legendary figure (or at best, a great man), the inevitable greeting on all white embossed Christmas cards with wisemen left me quite cold:

“Peace on earth … good will toward men!”

It sounded like a nice idea. But so vague and uninteresting to me that I marked off my list for next year every person who sent me a white embossed card with wisemen and the “good will” greeting. I marked them off because good will bored me. And so did the cards. I am not merely free to admit this now that I am a Christian and understand about Christmas. I would have told you then too, with no embarrassment whatever, that good will interested me not at all.

At least not a general good will toward all men.

Toward women either, for that matter.

From A Business Standpoint

I was an extremely “natural” minded individual before the year 1949 when I became a believer in Jesus Christ, and as far as I can see, general good will is just not a “natural” virtue. It is an excellent idea from a business standpoint and it is necessary for the few close friendships we care to protect. But for me (B.C.) good will was something as uninteresting and pale as those who sent the pale blue Christmas cards with white embossed “good will” and wisemen.

Mr. Webster defines the word virtue as a particular moral excellence. In my teens I learned that Plato identified what he called the four cardinal virtues and they bored me too. As I remember, Plato’s four cardinal virtues were: prudence, fortitude, temperance and justice.

Just words.

Words that I could well leave alone, except to make use of them when trying to raise the listener rating on one of the “soap opera classics” I happened to be writing script for at the time. Housewives, I soon learned, waxed adoring if the heroine had any one of Plato’s four cardinal virtues. Their adoration increased—raising my rating still another notch—if heroine Geraldine Graciousness possessed all four of Plato’s cardinal virtues plus a husband who had a mistress and a failing business!

Soap Flakes And Scripture

I made frequent use not only of Plato’s four virtues, but the twenty-third Psalm as well—quoted slowly and with courage (and an occasional mistake) by the actress playing Geraldine Graciousness for a little above union scale. Either extreme virtue or free use of the Scriptures caused the listener to listen and feel righteous along with Geraldine. I found that housewives loved to hear Scripture and to overhear “filter mike” telephone conversations intended only for the ears of Geraldine’s wayward husband and a hoped-for fifty million women who would buy some brand of soap flakes on the weekend shopping trip.

But virtues that appealed to Plato were merely tools to me as a writer of radio drama. So were the Scriptures. All words were merely tools and I used them with the callous abandon of a spoiled child. The spoiled child nor I cared little that the scars we made would last. Only that the tools were sharp and we had them to use.

If the words I used raised my listener rating and my paycheck, nothing else mattered. I had finished weeping over the adolescent longing to write greatly for a “posterity” I would never know and for which I cared not at all, and so I used words and virtues and hearts and Holy Scripture and broken homes to any advantage I pleased.

And of course, at Christmas time I incorporated in the “sponsors’ message” (which always had a “spiritual twist” and a “religious gimmick” at the close) all the Platonic virtues I could scrape up along with the old stand-by wisemen greeting about “good will.”

ANNOUNCER: (Using Most Poignant Pear-Shaped Tones) And now … to your house, at this Holy time of year … when all human hearts are turned toward Bethlehem, the native city of all virtue … comes the heart-deep wish from all of us here in the Geraldine Graciousness studio … and from our beloved sponsor, the makers of the original sparkling, sudsing, seething DOUBLE BUBBLE, the soap that loves your face … from all of us and from our sponsor, here is that heart-deep wish I started forty-seven seconds ago—(up) to all of you everywhere … “Peace on earth, good will toward men!”

MUSIC: Organ Up on “Hark the Herald Angels” On Phrase “God and sinners reconciled, etc.”

Words For Good Or Ill

You are reading this article in a Christian magazine. I am writing it with the same medium I employed for years to whet appetites for overrich foods, alcoholic beverages, illicit romance and gossip. I am writing it with the same medium I used to break hearts and damage reputations and avenge and amuse myself. The same words, being used by the same writer who piled them up for twelve years and then knocked them over into broken homes and innocent lives and was amused and gratified if the tears fell and the sparks flew and the hearts broke.

Characterization was always a dear delight to me. The more “realistic” the more I loved doing it. I knew, for example, that certain Christians back home listened to my day-time serials and I also suspected that they were praying for me. This infuriated me into one of my most “successful” characterizations. A middle-aged country woman, whose “fictitious” first name in my script was the same as one of the praying churchgoers at home, prayed ungrammatical prayers designed to leave the housewife first in tears and then laughter, because immediately following the “prayer” my character inevitably did something to make a donkey of herself socially.

The woman back home with the same first name kept listening and continued to pray for me, for which I thank God.

Some eleven years ago as I write this, in a West Coast city, another “fan” of mine did not know that I knew she listened regularly to the opus we are calling Geraldine Graciousness. And of course she didn’t know her niece in Chicago had told me that Auntie’s husband was not at all interested in being Auntie’s husband any longer. Personally I had always thought marriage very foolish and unwise and expensive to escape, so it amused me to build an entire sequence around this woman’s tragedy. Her home was broken up forever.

“Good will toward men.”

It bored me.

It was strange to me. I hadn’t much of it. Neither did many of the people I liked. Certainly we didn’t have it toward any but a very few who pleased us. I still believe this is true of most of the people in the world in whom Christ does not live. I didn’t know it was there then, but one fact in the Bible I did believe before I was converted to Jesus Christ. Now I know the Bible says “there is none righteous, no not one” simply because there is none righteous.

Invasion Of The Divine

And so, I wasn’t very unique in my old life. I was “natural.” And good will toward all men is a result of the invasion of the super-natural! A state of good intention with “heartiness and cheerful consent” toward all mankind, if Webster is correct. A state of heart so extraordinary as to be unheard of, except by those who have been hurled out into the place of joyful, utter despair with themselves where they are finally allowing Jesus Christ to be Himself in them!

I did not sit at my typewriter in the old days fancying myself as an evil woman with sole intent to wound. I was merely “natural” and therefore uninterested in good will. Except when it encouraged or abetted or entertained me in some way.

Even the dictionary calls Plato’s virtues “natural” and the Christian virtues “virtues infused by God.” To infuse means to pour into. God pours His own virtue and righteousness and love into us when we receive Christ. When He comes, He comes not just delivering a “spirit of good will” in a package, but He begins the very real process of forming His own wall in us!

When I received Him, He came being my good will. He came being my faith whereby I can lay hold of the stunning and glorious fact that when He died on Calvary the “old girl,” who drove word splinters into the hearts of unsuspecting people for the sheer fun of it, died too! My need to wound died when He died of His wounds crying loudly as He died, “It is finished! It is finished!” My need to hurt died with Him. My desire to hurt died with Him. And up from the grave of that co-crucifixion sprang a new and unfamiliar woman at whom I have come to wonder. A woman with my name who no longer wants to hurt. A woman who can do nothing of herself, but who has fallen under the influence of the One who did it all for her on a very rough, real Cross. Who has fallen under the transforming influence of this same One who has come to live His Life in her, since she received Him seven years ago.

The One who has become my righteousness. My virtue. My good will.

Good will is no mean virtue.

Good will pours out love and concern toward every lovely and unlovely person on earth. Good will is no Platonic virtue! It is “infused by God” when the Man-God Christ comes to live within.

I reach toward you with the same old words and great new good will at this Christmas time of year.

I can now.

Because Jesus Christ Himself is my good will.

For eleven years before her conversion to Christ in 1949, Eugenia Price wrote for network radio in both Chicago and New York. She closed her own production office to write and direct the Christian dramatic program Unshackled in 1950, then resigned in 1955 to release the transcribed radio series Visit with Genie. Miss Price is author of four books, Discoveries, The Burden Is Light, Never a Dull Moment and Early Will I Seek Thee.

Cover Story

Has England’s Glory Faded?

J. C. Pollock

Sixty years ago next summer Queen Victoria was celebrating her Diamond Jubilee. In the sixty years of her reign, England had risen to the height of glory and her influence was predominant in the world. “The Kings must come down an’ the Emperors frown When the Widow at Windsor says ‘Stop’!” wrote Kipling, and it was true.

Take’old o’ the Wings o’ the Mornin’,
An’ flop round the earth till you’re dead;
But you won’t get away from the tune that they play
To the bloomin’ old rag over’ead.

Kipling’s soldier might be saddened to-day. Almost every year sees the Union, Jack hauled down as yet another territory, with the fullest good will and cooperation of Britain, secures independence. Nor may the Queen say “Stop!” to Emperors or Kings (or their successors) without the consent of great powers to the West or even to the East.

Does this mean that England is no longer a great power herself? Five or six years ago, when the country was emerging from the aftermath of war, many in Britain and abroad supposed our day to be done. The Golden Century of England had followed the Napoleonic glories of France and the Golden Century of Spain into the dead pages of history books. Today, however, many realize that our greatest days can lie ahead. England may still be a world leader; and her leadership will be a moral leadership.

Center Of The Commonwealth

Britain remains the center of the Commonwealth of Nations. She is not the political leader of the Commonwealth any more than the Queen is the Sovereign of every member; Britain’s leadership is no longer by virtue of superior wealth or talent. But the free nations of the Commonwealth still look to England as the moral head of their community. British traditions—the British conception of justice, her parliamentary system, the ideal of integrity in government service, the sense of stewardship for minorities or dependents—are so ingrained in the Commonwealth countries that Britain continues the uniting factor; her moral leadership is unquestioned. And because of these things also British prestige throughout the world remains out of all proportion to her wealth or strength.

Whether this will endure is in the balance. If we are living on the moral capital of the past, our leadership will decline. But if England preserves and extends its right to be known as a repository of all that is best in ideals and character, our influence may yet expand to its greatest extent, to the blessing of the world.

State Of Moral Flux

Whether we shall grow or decline depends on England’s own moral outlook. And this is in a state of flux.

On the one hand we have the Welfare State, an unselfish structure that has almost eradicated poverty. On the other we have the Wages Grab, a selfish and short-sighted trend rooted in the doctrine of every man (or group) for himself. Again, the qualities that made England great—faith, honesty, loyalty—which in the nineteen-thirties were laughed at as archaic, are now respected. Yet dishonesty is rife. Sunday is secularized. The divorce rate is high. Voluntary service in leisure time is more the exception than the rule.

The key to our moral progress or decline, on which so much depends, is in the national attitude to Christianity. And that attitude is also in a state of flux. England may be on the verge of a national revival of religion; or this revival may bypass us.

Progress Of Christianity

There can be no doubt that Christianity has made great progress in England during the past eleven years. The signs of a widespread swing back to faith are too obvious to ignore.

The First World War did more harm to religion than any other episode of modern times. It broke down the structure of churchgoing and Christian ethics, which looked so imposing but beneath the surface had been slowly eaten away. In the twenties and thirties religion was at a discount; to believe was old fashioned; to adhere to Christian principles was prudish. The Second World War jolted us back from the paganism into which we were slipping. But it left thousands in a vacuum. They had not been sent to Sunday School and they were not accustomed to churchgoing. Few of them had heard the Christian Gospel preached with assurance. They were seeking security and a satisfying faith but knew not where to find it.

Since 1945 the theologians have returned to the Bible. By and large, they once again gauge and mould their theories by the Scriptures instead of trimming the Scriptures to fit their theories. These words “sin,” “atonement,” “conversion,” “evangelism,” so unfashionable twenty years ago, are now on every cleric’s lips, though not always with the same meanings. The churches are filling and young people especially are in the pews in great numbers. Children’s work is extending rapidly, while in the universities religion is one of the foremost loyalties among students, whose elder brothers before the war would have been almost ashamed to be seen inside a church.

Harringay A Turning Point

The coming of Dr. Billy Graham to London in 1954 marked a turning point. The great response proved the hunger among all classes for a firm presentation of a gospel which had the ring of truth and which transformed lives. Harringay made the Christian faith once more a topic of conversation, and brought the whole subject out of sentimental and respectable seclusion into the glare of publicity and the arena of common life. None would have believed, a few months earlier, that twelve thousand people each night would listen to a forty-minute sermon, or that London tube trains could be filled with reverent, unembarrassed hymn singing.

The Crusades gave Great Britain a new vision of the place of the laity in Christian work. The counseling system was new. It has now become part of the life of every vigorous, evangelistically minded church. We have seen that the laymen, who used largely to be limited to distributing hymnbooks in church or organizing sales of work, must be the rank and file of evangelizing. They are ready to submit to training and, once trained, can undertake, proportionately, as effective a service in prayer or personal work as any fulltime minister.

Secondly, we have for the first time realized that mass evangelism must mesh with the ministry of the local churches. In the bleak days between the wars evangelism was related to the continuing life of the churches so loosely that the impact of a campaign was negligible. The Crusade movement—introduced from America but now made our own—has moved the climax of mission work from the appeal to the counseling room, and from the counseling room to the pastoral contact of the local church. Thus, when a church has known how to use its opportunities there have been corporate growth and mature individual faith for many who in a secularized society were searching blindly for the truth.

Tawdry Disparagement

If this were all, national revival might be round the corner. Unfortunately, however, in England we like to snap at the heels of our saviours, whether in politics, war or religion. Certain religious leaders have gone out of their way to denigrate the evangelistic forces on which so much depends. In particular they have resurrected the label “Fundamentalist.” In England “Fundamentalist” is commonly held to denote a man or movement whose Christian outlook may be worthy but is intellectually dangerous. To call a man a fundamentalist is to brand him obscurantist or puerile—the cheapest way to dismiss him. This label, scarcely heard for twenty years, is now fastened on any, however scholarly or discriminating, who whole-heartedly and reverently accept the Bible as God’s Word and use it authoritatively as “the sword of the Spirit.”

This labeling (Americans might call it a smear campaign) is a hindrance to the furtherance of the Gospel. It can stifle serious study among men and women within the churches and exasperate and deflect those without. If the return to Christ is to gather momentum and become nation-wide, all leaders in the Church of England and the Free Churches, whatever their own cherished views on the Bible, on the Atonement and on conversion, must let the evangelistic movements of our time have fullest scope. They already owe them a great deal.

Important Tasks Ahead

Much remains to be done. Though the swing back to faith touches every class there are areas where little progress has been made. In certain regions of heavy industry, for instance, the material prosperity of the workers has increased greatly, but the attitude to Christianity is conditioned by the cheap popular science of the early thirties. At the opposite end of the scale, many rural districts also live in the past, seeking to hold church and parson to a traditional (and now rather sub-Christian) role in the life of the parish. Indeed, it is not too much to say that the whole organization of the Church in rural districts needs reconstruction. Not until the rising tide of faith flows into these areas, the heart of England, may revival be said to have truly arrived.

Advance must continue on lines already shown since the war. The layman, the ordinary humdrum Christian of any denomination, must be the spearhead of advance, passing on his discovery of personal faith and, like John the Baptist in John 1, awakening a sense of need, pointing out Christ as the Sinbearer and introducing his acquaintances to Christ’s personal friendship.

Secret Of Christian Unity

Co-operation between the churches must continue to increase, not by seeking common formulas, or, as yet in England, formal union, but as it has done in recent years—by devotion to a common evangelistic cause in the power of the Holy Spirit. True unity will not arise from an attempt to further it but from a mutual passion for the lost.

Missionary consciousness is lacking on a wide scale, and as a nation we are deficient in a sense of the stewardship of money. Not until men and supplies are flowing out from our shores as freely as seventy years ago can we talk of revival as a reality. And we must again become a people of the Book. Bible knowledge, which was a national characteristic two generations ago, is only slowly being recovered. Our grandfathers were steeped in the Scriptures, which shaped their characters and moulded their outlook and made the British character what it was.

At the root of it all England must take her stand squarely on the basic doctrines of her faith—God’s revelation, man’s need as a sinner, Christ’s death as a Savior, the new birth, and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. The heart of the matter is the personal friendship of the ordinary man or woman with Jesus Christ.

New Prestige And Glory

And what, if personal faith once again becomes a normal and expected feature of English life, will be the result? A new morality—without the little hypocrisies and pharisaisms that too often marred the Christianity of the Victorians. A new prestige, as a nation standing for the highest and best. And glory.

At the time of the Diamond Jubilee, England sent, year by year, many of her sons across the seas. They could be found wherever “our banner of England flew.” They drained swamps and turned deserts into cultivated fields. They administered justice under Indian trees and in African kraals with the hot sun overhead. Unarmed young men made warring tribes lay aside their weapons and trade in peace. Roads were driven across the wilderness and rivers dredged. Those whom they served often abused them, but at heart loved them; and they knew it and were content.

The day of the Empire builder is gone. His task is done and the free nations of the Commonwealth take their place beside us. But we may still send our sons from our shores—not as Empire builders but as World Church builders, in humble partnership with national Christians in Asia and Africa, serving the younger churches in their need.

And if we do, then England’s glory will be enhanced, with the light of the glorious Gospel of Christ.

The Rev. J. C. Pollock, M.A., is Rector of Horsington, Somerset, England, and Editor of The Churchman, a quarterly journal of Anglican theology. Born in 1923, he was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge. During World War II he served in the Coldstream Guards. He is author of The Cambridge Seven and three other books; his next, The Road to Glory, the story of the distinguished Christian general Havelock of Lucknow, will be published in 1957.

We Quote:

STANLEY HIGH

Senior Editor, READER’S DIGEST; Currently Author of his Ninth Book

Whether or not Billy Graham proves to be the human instrument of revival in our time, one thing, I think, is certain: such a revival will come from the preaching of no other or no lesser Gospel .—Billy Graham (published September, 1956).

Cover Story

Nativity Theme in English Poetry

Calvin D. Linton

It is not reasonable to suppose that man will ever, in his highest artistic striving, approach the divine harmony, the majestic melody, which burst from the night sky upon the awestruck shepherds that night two thousand years ago. But probably no other religious theme has so often inspired artistic creation as this eternal one of the First Advent of the mighty Son of God. It is the golden thread among the browns and crimsons, the blues and greens of the merely earthly scene, a thread which, in English letters, runs from the earliest expression of Anglo-Saxon religious fervor to the intellectually taut, dry lines of W. H. Auden’s After Christmas. In between these two artistic and chronological extremes lies a great bulk of lyrics, dramas, epics, odes, each reflecting the temper and spirit of its own day.

Light in the Gloom

For the pagan Anglo-Saxon, the chief significance of the Christian message was that it shed light in the stern and gloomy atmosphere of pagan ignorance. Many readers will no doubt recall the famous passage in Bede’s eighth-century Latin Ecclesiastical History, in which he describes the introduction of Christianity into Northumbria. King Edwin had called a council of the chief men of the kingdom to hear the strange news, and one of the eldest spoke: “The present life of man, O king, seems to me, in comparison of that time which is unknown to us, like the swift flight of a sparrow through the room wherein you sit at supper in winter, with your commanders and retainers, and a good fire in the midst, whilst storms of rain and snow prevail abroad; the sparrow, I say, flying in at one door, and immediately out at another, whilst he is within, is safe from the wintry storm; but after a short space of fair weather, he immediately vanishes out of your sight, into the dark winter from which he had emerged. So this life of man appears for a short space, but of what went before, or what is to follow, we are utterly ignorant. If, therefore, this new doctrine contains something more certain, it seems justly to deserve to be followed.”

The instinctive reverence in the Anglo-Saxon temperament for the Hero, the Conqueror, found its perfect outlet in the story of the Divine Victor over the powers of darkness and hell. As the Beowulf poet records with solemn triumph: “The truth is made known, that the mighty God has always wielded the affairs of mankind. The Holy God, the Wise Lord, decided war victory; the ruler of the heavens decided it aright.”

Even the more melodic and more sensuous poem called Christ, believed by many to be the creation of the great poet Cynewulf, has a tone of dignity and high seriousness. The fragment is incomplete, and the first words are the last of an incomplete sentence: “… to the king. Thou art the cornerstone, which the builders rejected from the work. It befits thee well that thou shouldst be head of the glorious temple, and frame the wide walls, the unbreakable flint, with firm joint, so that all things with gazing eyes … may marvel forever at the Lord of Glory.”

And he puts words of vision and grandeur, not merely those of gentle, maternal care, in the mouth of Mary, who is made to say: “What is the amazement with which ye wonder, and sorrowing lament with grief? Ask ye in curiosity how I have kept my maidenhood and yet become the mother of the glorious Son of God? Wherefore that hidden thing is not revealed to men, but Christ made known in David’s dear kinswoman that Eve’s sin is all done away, the curse cast off and womanhood exalted. O rising Sun, most radiant of beings sent to men upon earth and true beam of the sun bright beyond the stars … the mighty Child of the Lord doth dwell together in concord among men. Wherefore we can ever utter thanks to the Lord of victory for his deeds, because he was pleased to send us himself.”

The Intimate and Tender

Turning to the Middle Ages, we are overwhelmed by the sheer bulk of religious works, including numberless treatments of the Nativity story. Although the Norman invasion snuffed out the unique, stark grandeur of Old English literature for several centuries, there was available all the richness and subtlety of the French tongue and of European culture to draw upon.

Outstandingly, one finds that medieval Nativity poems deal with the more intimate and tender aspects of the Bethlehem scene. The Infant King is more the Babe in his mother’s arms now, less the Mighty Conqueror of the dark powers. From among hundreds of lyrics, one may be selected to give a hint of the gentle simplicity and the artful directness of the best poems. One must not be deceived by what seems to be naivete, for it is rather a directness of vision which transcends the clutter of the fragmentary and has fixed its gaze upon the One who embraces the many. I quote only a fragment; and, at a loss of some of the original flavor, I have modernized some of the vocabulary. The poem dates about 1450, and is usually titled “I Sing of a Maiden.”

I sing of a maiden that is matchless. King of kings as her Son she chose.
He came as still where His Mother was as dew in April that falleth on the grass.
He came as still to His Mother’s bower as dew in April that falleth upon the flower.
He came as still where His Mother lay as dew in April that falleth on the spray.
Mother and Maiden was never—none but she; well may such a lady God’s Mother be.

Redirected Ardor

As we get into the sweep of the Renaissance, religious verse diminishes in quantity, though not in quality. But the ardor which had been devoted to Mary is redirected toward more mundane ladies, and the spirit of classical paganism bursts out in the Elizabethan splendor of such works as Marlowe’s Hero and Leonder and Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis. (Indeed, in the next century, the saintly George Herbert asks whether the poet has forever resolved to devote his verse to mere earthly love; is there no more “heat toward God”?) Again, from among endless profusion, I pick one poem, this time a very strange and powerful one: “The Burning Babe,” by Robert Southwell, written about 1593.

As I in winter’s night stood shivering in the snow
Surprised I was by sudden heat which made my heart to glow;
And lifting up a fearful eye to view what fire was near,
A pretty babe all burning bright did in the air appear.
“Alas,” quoth he, “but newly born, in fiery heats I lie,
Yet none approach to warm their hearts or feel my fire but I!
My fauldless breast the furnace is, the fuel, wounding thorns;
Love is the fire, and sights the smoke, the ashes shame and scorns;
The fuel justice layeth on, and mercy blows the coals,
The metal in this furnace wrought are men’s defiled souls.”
With this he vanished out of sight and swiftly shrank away—
And straight, I called unto mind that it was Christmas Day.

Then the youthful exuberance of the Renaissance passed into the maturity of the 17th century, and the Puritan movement built a great, gaunt cathedral of religious verse, scores of poems celebrating the Nativity, now viewed with renewed faith and with renewed emphasis on the Babe rather than His mother. The variety is endless, both within and without the Puritan impulse. There is Ben Jonson’s tender, classically polished lyric called “A Hymn on the Nativity of My Saviour”; Crashaw’s charged, hotly passionate and sensuous poem, “In the Holy Nativity of Our Lord God,” with its lovely quatrain:

Gloomy night embraced the place
Where the noble Infant lay;
The Babe looked up and showed His face—
In spite of darkness, it was day!

Grandeur and Sweep

But set apart from all other efforts in the 17th century is the grandeur and sweep of Milton’s mighty “Ode on the Morning of Christ’s Nativity,” probably (almost undoubtedly) the greatest of all English poems on the subject. Again, only an illustrative fragment—but if you have not recently re-read the entire poem, by all means do so. Listen at least to the organ roll of the beginning:

This is the Month, and this the happy morn
Wherein the Son of Heav’ns eternal King,
Of wedded Maid, and Virgin Mother born,
Our great redemption from above did bring;
For so the holy sages once did sing,
That He our deadly forfeit should release,
And with His Father work us a perpetual peace.

That glorious Form, that Light unsufferable,
And that far-beaming blaze of Majesty,
Wherewith He wont at Heav’ns high Council-table
To sit the midst of Trinal Unity,
He laid aside; and here with us to be,
Forsook the Courts of everlasting Day,
And chose with us a darksome house of mortal clay.

Once more, notice, the emphasis is on the majesty and kingliness of the Babe, and the poem ends, you will recall, with awed eyes raised to the encompassing circle of the night sky, where, unseen by men, there stand rank on rank of glorious angels mounting watch over their King.

The Modern Temper

Turning to the modern period, we may choose almost at random for an illustration of the 20th-century temper. Because W. H. Auden so skillfully sets the tone of modern coldness and skepticism over against the titanic implications of the Nativity, I have chosen to use a few lines from his ironic poem, “After Christmas.”

In a deliberately colloquial, under-charged tone, Auden sets the smallness of modern Christmas celebrations, with their commercialism, their raucous songs and their vulgarity side by side with hints of the real and lost meaning of the event. It begins:

Well, so that is that. Now we must dismantle the tree,
Putting the decorations back into their cardboard boxes—
Some have got broken—and carrying them up to the attic.
As in previous years we have seen the actual Vision and failed once again
To do more than entertain it as an agreeable
Possibility, once again we have sent Him away,
Begging though to remain His disobedient servant,
The promising child who cannot keep His word for long.

The indirectness, the studied casualness of Auden’s poem stands in marked contrast to Eliot’s abstract, subtle, philosophical handling of the great theme of Incarnation in The Four Quartets. And both are utterly different from Edith Sitwell’s booming, powerful music.

But we end where we began: no words composed by men have the magic simplicity, the innate grandeur of those lines which begin: “And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night.…”

Calvin D. Linton, A.M., Ph.D., is associate dean of Columbian College and professor of English Literature at George Washington University in the District of Columbia. He has written numerous articles in the literary field, particularly in the area of Elizabethan drama. In February he leaves to visit the libraries of Great Britain for research in 17th century Puritan concepts of freedom.

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