Spencer Heath Archive

Item 443

Taping by Spencer MacCallum from conversation with Heath about a Sermon Brief, “Civilization and Survival: Are They at War?”

November 13, 1955

     You’ve heard of Julian the Apostate, the Roman Emperor who tried to paganize the world and get rid of Christianity? Well, men like this minister bring him to my mind, because the pagan idea of well-being is the bucolic life in harmony with nature and so on at a somewhat primitive level of conception — after the manner of Rousseau, who wanted to get back to nature.

     So our present speaker wants us to go back to nature, to the land, and live more primitively, more simply and all that, like the noble savage /as far as/ possible. In this he is apostate from the entire spirit of Western civilization. He denigrates that spirit, calling attention to its negative aspects entirely, completely forgetting that the mission of Christ was to bring us a mode of life in which we would have life more and more abundantly, and that this mission of Christ is being carried out unconsciously by Western civilization because Western civilization has only one technology, the technology of doing unto others in the same manner as we would have others do unto us. This is being done unconsciously by our whole world of economic freedom, so far as we have that freedom, and it is to this that we owe our dominance in the world.

     This Christianity-in-action is exactly what it should be the mission of a spiritual leader to explain and make people understand consciously as well as acting unconsciously in the providence of God. He should be first and foremost to point out and to bring people into a knowledge and understanding of how, as the Old Testament said, “underneath are the everlasting arms.”

     God is prompting us in our unconscious minds and natures to carry out His will, and we are doing that, and that is why Western civilization can never fail — because those people who most nearly walk in the ways of God, and observing the laws of nature, are observing the laws of survival. God blesses with length of days and ultimately with immortality those who most completely obey His will.

     These people don’t know that science is religion, and that religion is science.