Spencer Heath Archive

Item 483.

Winchester, Virginia

October 8, 1954

 

 

/THE CHRISTIAN WORLD AND THE HEATHEN/

 

There are two kinds of people in the world, those who eat and those who starve — the Christian and the heathen world. The Christians believe, nominally at least, in salvation by miracle, rewards in a transcendent life in a world to come. That is their Sunday religion, and it at least soothes their souls, even when it fails to inspire.

The heathen have a dream of nirvanic bliss in propor­tion as it is their fate again and again to sin and suffer here. This is their religion of every day and of worlds to come. To them virtue consists in not doing evil, in absten­tion from sin. And so they starve and die.

But the Christians, most of them, for six days at least and without religious pretense, practice a holy Golden Rule of here and now, even though unwitting and uninstructed of its Christian spirituality and with uneasy sense of sin and guilt. Their six-days’ virtue consists in what they do, not in what they believe or what they avoid. They are doers of the word and not hearers only. They little dream that even as a thief cometh in the night they are bringing to pass the Christian promise of a Heavenly Kingdom of life abundant on the earth. For as between man and man, the inspired word holds but one command — that ye shall do unto others in the same manner that ye would that others should do unto you — that each man should not serve himself or his alone but should serve others, and then, of necessity if he would continue, have others serve him likewise in return. This do and all things shall be added unto you.

In this divine relationship, impersonal and thereby universal, this creative and thereby spiritual Kingdom, maintained chiefly by them, the Christian peoples’ prime bless­ing and reward is food in plenty — and the like material needs. Their second has been life abundant and with increasing length of days. That is why the Christian eats while the heathen starves, why the Christian lives almost seventy against the heathen’s thirty years, why he conserves and creates while the heathen must procreate and breed like flies to keep alive at all.

To do unto others, not politically by worldly powers but in the new manner enjoined as divine because contractual and creative; and its reward is life ever more abundant, rich and free /sentence? check original/. To do otherwise — or not to do — is disobedience and sin. Its reward is lives unfree — mean, nasty and short — its wages is death.

The new and Christian dispensation of life was not of “the world” political — not the Roman or any other power of taxation and of war, but the creative power of love, practiced outwardly, impersonally, even unknowingly or unintended and with profit motive alone under the Golden Rule of Contract and Consent, with profit both material and spiritual for all who enter in. And the evil of “the world,” of the archaic and the Classical powers, is not to be resisted or destroyed. Human energy is too precious wherewith to create and build, that it should be in self-collisions canceled and destroyed.

In the day when men of vision owning basic realty shall act unitedly as the common landlord, and, seeking honorable profit, shall shield, serve and protect the inhabitants of their united properties as free men — in free enterprise — in that day the Kingdom of Heaven by its Golden Rule of ownership and reciprocal services, both public and private, by free contract and exchange, will outgrow the political powers by substituting for their evil good. For it is by expropria­tion and coercion only that men are taxed into want and war and untimely death. It is in the free and efficient use of property, by contracting and exchanging, by impersonal love, that men are divinely blessed and fed. — The stones most despised, long hated for their ancient tyrannies, are highest in the Kingdom when they become servants of the community — servants providing public service without public coercion and for none but legitimate profit — their market value at each location according as the service is supplied.

Man’s presumption, his arrogance and pride that by his legislative statutes he can arbitrate between good and evil, defy Heaven’s laws — make good into evil by legislation and turn into good that which is evil and which Heaven forbids. — This is his undoing unto death, if not his final doom. God’s laws, spiritual and creative, wherein alone man finds his life and length of days, these he must seek and seeing, DO.