Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2906

Photostat of a published editorial regarding Heath’s Citadel, Market and Altar, and a book review of the same by Rev. C. John Westhof in Christian Economics, Vol.10 No.l, January 7,1958. At the end are two paragraphs from Heath also published in this number, but it is not clear from the photostat where they appeared.

Christian Economics

Howard E. Kershner, Editor

George H. Cless, Jr., Managing Editor

Published Fortnightly from September through June by

CHRISTIAN FREEDOM FOUNDATION. INC

A Non-Profit Organization

250 W. 57th ST., NEW YORK 19, N.Y.

 

 

 

VOICE OF THE EDITOR

 

Citadel, Market and Altar

 

IN THIS issue, we publish a review of Spencer Heath’s remarkable book Citadel, Market and Altar. It is a deep, philosophical, hard-to-read, but richly rewarding book. Its pages record the activity of a great and benevolent mind dealing with the problem of human existence. Spencer Heath sees the possibility of peace, plenty, and high spiritual development.

 

Standing in the way of this happy accomplishment are “The nationalized states (which penalize and paralyze their peoples’ exchange, both within and without. Impoverishment follows. They blindly destroy themselves and fall by each others’ hands.”

 

Condemning the use of force and coercion as distinguished from the voluntary cooperative activities of man, Spencer Heath says:

 

    “Standing now before the threshold of a social glory the realization of which will dwarf all poets’ dreams, men must again choose whether in their community affairs the practice of force shall cast them from the House of Life into outer darkness or the practice of public service by profitable exchange shall lift them into its awaiting freedom and fullness of life. The great social mutation that awaits and impends is the social-ization of public force into public service by exchange.

 

    “When the great business of community service is carried on as a business and not by depredation upon business, it will be magnificent above all other business in the world.”

 

This is one of the most eloquent condemnations of the use of force and violence to interfere with and control the activities of men that we have seen. It is, moreover, a most eloquent plea for the confinement of government to the protection of life and property, the restraining and punishing of predation and the practice of freedom in the marketplace. It properly assumes that these activities must be carried on by moral men who live in accordance with God’s Moral Law.

 

 A glimpse of the enormous advantages that will accrue to mankind as a result of setting up such institutions and conscientiously living under them, is beautifully stated by Spencer Heath in the following words:

 

     “Society, thus, will have a free and unrestrained economic system including a free, efficient and self-supporting system of public services. Each will exchange its wealth and services with, and thus enhance, the productivity of the other. Nature will have achieved a form of integrated life in which the component individuals will be circumstanced in completest freedom to give and to receive. The consequent abundance of economic goods will come to them almost as automatically as the filling of the lungs with air.

 

     “Emancipated alike from environmental compulsions that beset and enslave the whole primitive world, and from the political and governmental repressions and restriction that bind and burden the functioning of the social realm, the spirit of man will lea upward in the free practice and culture of all the artistic, esthetic and spiritual powers with which it is essentially endowed.”

 

  This book will richly reward the patient philosopher who wishes to delve to the depth in his analysis of society. We close by citing the following pertinent lines:

 

“In every age, so far as men have practiced the golden rule of service by mutual exchange, the creative power of God has blessed them with a measure of freedom, and with freedom, abundance.”

 

Exploring Social Organization

REV. C. JOHN WESTHOF  January 7, 1958

Minister, First Presbyterian Church, Edmond, Okla.

 

CITADEL, MARKET AND ALTAR

By Spencer Heath, Science of Society Foundation, Baltimore, 1957. 259 pp. $6.00.

 

THE OBJECTIVITY of a scientist, the appraisal of a businessman, the spirit of a mystical saint, the language of a poet — these are the elements which make this book an experience in reading. Above them all, however, is the breath-taking vision of this modern explorer in the realm of social organization.

 

  None of these elements appear by accident. They are the flowering of the author’s spirit. For Spencer Heath is scientist, businessman, mystic, saint and poet. A successful inventor who supplied most of the airplane propellers used in World War I, Heath retired to devote his time to the avocation of horticulture. This led to research into the natural sciences. From this has come his study of human relationships.

Energy Concept

Spencer Heath believes in the future of society which he regards as a crowning achievement of man. A few years ago this reviewer heard a physicist predict that in time man would measure social energy just as physical energy is now measured. The thought was greeted with a good deal of doubt in his mind. Now comes Heath with a dynamic “Energy Concept of Population.” The thesis is that the society in which individuals live long has more energy potential to devote to progress than the society in which lives are short. This thesis is buttressed with a portfolio of facts and arguments which should prove reassuring to the Western world.

   The author believes — and convincingly demonstrates — that only a free society can increase the life span and allow the standard of life to rise. He is a firm believer in the free-contractual system for the exchange of goods and services. He describes the democracy of the market as fundamental, and says of it, “This is democracy based on mutual service in mutual freedom — the right to serve in order to be served — the right of voluntary exchange.”

 

Three Fundamentals

Citadel, Market and Altar takes its name from the three fundamentals of the social organism, the functions of which are coercion, cooperation and consecration. The first is exercised by government, the second by the market, and the third in the areas of the arts and religion. As one reads this portion of the book he is reminded of the Master’s words to seek first the Kingdom of Heaven.

     Several chapters are devoted to a study of land and property management. Spencer Heath believes that private ownership of land is vital to freedom. This thesis has never been attacked, but still we witness the phenomenon of the constant whittling away of man’s right to ownership. Heath shows how this erosion of property right leads to “land communism without which no totalitarian power can be final or complete. This section of the book needs to be read and reread by every thinking person — and by some who have never stopped to think.

Old World Ways

Heath traces the rise of American prosperity in the century of freedom and mourns the departure from it in the present age. “But the twentieth century reintroduced the Old-World ways. Government came to be worshipped more than feared and confined and the constitutional barriers went down. Government began absorbing all liberty and property and is now itself so looked to for welfare and freedom that insecurity uncertainty and anxiety widely prevail.”

     This is a tremendous book, difficult to read in many spots, but doubly rewarding to the reader. It is mentally invigorating and spiritually stimulating. In this world with Sputnik jarring the nerves of free men, it is refreshing to remember the billions of stars God put in the heavens, and to remember that the universe is on the side of the society which will study His laws, His Spirit, and venture forth in the freedom He designed for mankind.

 

________________

 

 

/It is not clear from the photostat where in

this number of Christian Economics

the following paragraphs from Heath appeared:/

 

“When private persons put others under compulsion of force or deceit and thus get without giving, such actions are forbidden and punished as crimes. But precisely similar acts, systematized under governmental power, we morally approve and applaud or blindly accept and endure. Men acting as government, supposedly as servants of all, have no code of pro-social conduct such as there is for plain and private men, for those who are limited to the voluntary relationships of consent and exchange.

     “Every social perversion, every business depression and the downward trend of production and exchange that marks the social decline, can be traced to cumulative repressions of the social process by political authority. This dries the very springs of public revenue, bankrupts the productive economy and destroys all the values that society creates.”