Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1115

Random taping by Spencer MacCallum from conversation with Heath at Elkridge, Maryland

January 7, 1957

 

 

 

 

 

Work, for the animal man, the unregenerate man, is a necessity in order to keep alive. This requires a great deal of work to support a small amount of life. For most primitives, it is “Root, hog, or die,” and necessity is the only spur. Where nature is kind, and little work is required, there men organize governments by force, and the many are by few enslaved. Under conditions less mild, there is more stimulation, more voluntary cooperation, and the winning of livelihood — the work — in the village community becomes ritualized and in some degree a means of social and individual self-expression and fulfillment.

 

     As political government increases, through conquest without and subversion within, work becomes more and more compulsory, first to maintain the political power, second, to subsist. Pageantry is transferred from community arts to an appendage of political power, as with the Greeks. Meantime, religious teachings bear upon work. It takes the form of service and sacrifice to God as a religious duty, counterbalanced by promised rewards.

 

     Finally, it is discovered that work is necessary for the exercise of the human faculties. It becomes a satisfaction in itself as well as in its results, and at last, in the New Testament, it is discovered that men best serve themselves by serving their fellow men and being served in turn — under the golden instead of the iron rule.

     In obedience to the command to enter into reciprocal relations, the men of modern times have found vast efficiency in providing for their needs and creating a world fashioned to their desires and dreams. In this, work has become spiritualized. The spirit is wrought into the material, and man becomes a creator of a new world in the image of his dreams as God created the world and man in the image that He dreamed of him.

     In all this burgeoning glory, he is still beset with organized power and destruction. The animal in man, the Cain in his nature, is still abroad. But the creative power in man gives him the more gracious, the more abundant and thereby more enduring life. Those who most practice this spiritual power through the peaceful serving and thereby loving of their fellow men, for them the dice of destiny are heavily loaded. They and their kind alone must inherit the earth and the lesser lives of unspiritual men pass away.