Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1518

Letter to the Reverend Donald Harrington, 10 Park Avenue, New York, New York

July 15, 1954

Dear Rev. Harrington:

     Having just read for the first (but not the last) time your sermon brief, “Man Accepts All of His Universe,” we are impelled to write you our profound appreciation. Your acceptance of the precept of Spinoza, that the wise man’s preoccupation is with life and not with death, sets you apart among the fundamentally wise. We have been tasting of the fruit of the tree of death far too long, which makes it refreshing to know from your sermon brief that you sit beneath the tree of life and propose know­ledge of its vast beauty and beneficence.

     The knowledge of Good and evil which you deplore and which leads only to conflict and death seems to be the basis of all conflict and wars – the attempt to reconcile the irreconcilable which leads only to violence and to death. The ancient said, “With all thy gettings get understanding,” the knowledge that is power by which men can not merely live but can live as creators, as spiritual beings. To study nature, the works of God, and thereby partake of the mind of God as evidenced in his works, this is what has given men all the power they have to carry on the process of creation so notable in their power for transformation upon their natural world, thus linking them with the divine.

     Does not the present almost universal anxiety and unrest spring from our ignorance of the structure and functioning of our social organization as contrasted with the political – the sole agency of force and war? Does not our reliance upon this institution for creation and growth spring from our continued adhesion to the idea of evil which must somehow be destroyed?

     We believe that the ways of non-violence destroy evil by transcending it, just as Lincoln said, “We should destroy our enemies by making friends of them.” We are delighted to know that you are promulgating this positive point of view and to have opportunity of sending you one of our publications entitled, “The Inspiration of Beauty,” which we feel will be congenial to your thought as yours has been to ours.

     We are much preoccupied with the non-coercive rela­tionships among men, believing that in these alone life is advanced and divine purposes fulfilled. We look upon the contractual world of man as the creative and therefore as the effectively spiritual world of man. It is our purpose therefore to examine exclusively those human institutions which rest upon contract, in which the participating parties practice and enjoy the fundamental equality of equal authority over their respective persons and non-aggressively held or acquired possessions.

     We discover the institution of property in land as fundamental to our non-nomadic and community form of life and therefore of prime importance in our understand­ing of the diviner order into which we have emerged.

     To invite your mind and heart to an examination of this fundamental institution we enclose also a brief analysis of that institution in its positive and funda­mental aspect as an organ of Society performing a distributive function in the allocation of God’s or Nature’s gifts among mankind.

     We look forward to further contact with your own positive and creative thought.

Sincerely yours,

SH:sm

Enc:  “Inspiration of Beauty”

“Private Property in Land Explained”