Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2240

Carbon typescript

 

Original is missing.

 

 

 

 

INTRODUCTORY

During the first five centuries of the long millennium that led to Bethlehem, with Asia still in slumber and Europe yet unknown, the Fertile Crescent was the seed bed and the battle ground of Semitic and related peoples, who were then the most virile races, even though the most enslaved of any in the world. They were but pawns in monolithic States under conquering dynasties and kings whose lust for spoil and fame consumed in destructive wars and in unproductive public works the transient millions that fed and bred short-lived upon the slowly fading richness of the soil. Thus the human vigor weakened. As in length so in numbers human life declined. But seats of empire moved northward to the Cretan Seas. Then southward came races bred in the hardihood of ruder lands and through the semi-millennium that remained, built out of their own barbaric freedom at last the glory that was Greece and that reached the apex of imperial power in the grandeur that was Rome — in the political unity of nations in which the world-imperial sway and peace of Rome began — and under stars that shone also in Bethlehem,

I

Jesus Christ came into a world of slavery and sin — the Sovereign and Imperial Roman world of taxation and enslavement, politics and war — to announce the coming of a new kind of Kingdom on the earth to consist in a new kind of action — co-operation in place of contra-operation — among men; a new relationship that would lead them out of political servitude and subjection into a life more abundant and eventually immortal in this new kind of world — and in the timeless great beyond, whence all came.

This pre-vision of world-wide reciprocal relations quietly growing and developing and eventually displacing and superseding the political and coercive relationships was too strange and distant from the prevailing thoughts of men. Only a few, among those of simple and unlearned minds could conceive so great a marvel. So it had to be told in stories that entertained and did not greatly challenge, yet for those who had eyes to see and ears to hear carried a profounder meaning than was ever known before. Among the Hebrews there was tradition of a better time to come, of a messiah who would give them victory and reign in righteous judgment — over them alone. Here was the story of a different kind, an unheard of kind of Kingdom, a Heavenly Kingdom on the earth — a Kingdom that would bless and serve not one family or tribe or single nation but all the nations of mankind. It would establish a larger, a universal brotherhood without regard to race or creed. It would transcend the biological love of the narrow family group and embrace all sorts and conditions of men in its mutual and reciprocal beneficence.

 That was the transcendent vision, unique in history, too remote from current and traditional thinking to be given any thought. If it meant merely the tribal Messiah, then perhaps well and good, to the tribal leaders, but if more, then it might supersede their local rule. Hence out of jealousy and fear it must be represented as subversive of the power of the world-wide tyranny of the ________ United Nations of that day.

This Kingdom of Heaven was not to come suddenly or with trumpets and acclaim but in the quiet and the dark like a seed in the earth (soil) or a tiny lump of leaven in the meal, nor would it tarry with any but virginal hearts of steadfast faith.

Under such circumstances and among people whose habitual speech was metaphor, small wonder that the Heavenly Kingdom potential among them — the Kingdom of power in a new kind of relationship without force — was pictured in language so obscure that even the most devoted required at times that its imagery be privately explained. The full and true meaning was hidden from the hard-hearted and blind-minded — revealed only according to the capacity of those who could see and could hear — as still it is, even today. And even more so today, for the magnificent meaning was necessarily diminished in the later narrative and commentary according to the lesser conceptions and limitations of those who long after retold and wrote it down. The Heavenly kind of Kingdom was to be understood only according to the capacity of the humble-minded — according as they could see and could hear. No councils of interpretation were established. To preach the Gospel as given was the command; let its meaning be as it fell on good or on hard and stony ground.

But the vision of the coming Kingdom was too far prophetic, too magnificent for the times. It had its meta­physical, its psychological aspect for the personal salvation and redemption for the few who could enter therein and become, as it were, born again and anew into the glory of understand­ing and thus inwardly experiencing the certainty of satisfac­tion — the potential divinity of mankind from its universal fatherhood in God. This was the Kingdom of Heaven for the individual — the kingdom within. This was the personal King­dom of Heaven within, for the individual, the rare and conse­crated individual in his spiritual (creative) vision of the Universal Kingdom potential in the midst of all and yet to come.

And for all men to grow into and achieve also the glory of this outer Heavenly Kingdom on the earth, among them as well as within, but one single and simple rule need be known and practiced among them. There was the old rule that men should make covenants or treaties of peace to refrain from trespassing against one another — and the penalty was retaliation, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. But the old law was not to be set aside merely; it was to be outgrown by practice of the New Rule “that ye love one another” by serving one another. This was no rule for resistance against evil, not even for mere abstention from it. The rule was positive, dynamic: That ye do each unto all others in a new manner — as ye would that others should do unto you. Under this rule the individual was to love others by serving them as he would have others love him by serving him in turn.

Covenant to refrain from mutual evil, with its concomitant of retaliation, was to be transcended and superseded by the rule of contract, a drawing together to perform mutual good. In so far as any practiced this new rule they were thus far in the Kingdom of Heaven for they thus became creators of good and thereby spiritual and divine, whether they understood it or not — and this irrespective of subjective or metaphysical considerations. And so far as men failed to practice that new Rule they remained unregenerate, uncreative, lost in the evil of their evil doing, given over to the dominance of destructive powers, of force and war. For like the laws of God in all the living and the physical world, even a blind obedience brings its blessings no less than its defiance brings the undoing of mankind. For under the new and Golden Rule of contract in place of coercion, when faithfully performed, there could be no dominance by force, only service by mutual accord, and any departure or violation would be ‘punished;’ for it would be a loss and privation to the group.

To early Christians /this/ was all too simple, too inclusive. They formed instead a membership society con­ditional upon membership lists, such as profession of faith, adherence to metaphysical doctrines and the like. The Kingdom of God was for the elect — those whom they elected to be of them. And it was to come quickly, as by a miracle and with great acclaim; not by slow and quiet development as the small seed grows or the little lump leavens the mass.

As the generations passed with no sign on the horizons,  leaders ceased to believe in the quick coming of a last judgment day for the quick and the dead and a literal and physical separation of the ^“sheep from the goats.” Nor did they permit men to be simply hearers and doers of the Word. They organized churches, East and West, militant and coercive with sole authority to interpret the gospel and to rule the bodies and the minds of men. They thus postponed the “second coming” into distant time and, to justify the practice of the iron rule of politics and war, they decreed that the Kingdom of the Golden Rule, so far as affairs of this world are concerned, has no such objective reality as the gospels taught. It must reside only in the hearts and minds of men who conformed to their decrees and conditions for the gift of immortal life in worlds to come. So the Christian gospel of a Kingdom of Peace on earth by the practice of non-coercive relationships among men was lost for a thousand years in tyrannies, persecutions and wars, amid promises of eternal life beyond the grave.

 

Yet the vision of the Kingdom of the Golden Rule was not wholly lost. From time to time dissident bodies arose . . These again proposed the transcendent life of peace and love for this world, but again and again as in the early days it was only for those who qualified metaphysically and emotionally for admission and membership in the group. Unlike their great preceptor, they depended on doctrine more than performance and so could not leaven either the orthodox or the schismatic masses of mankind.

As Imperial Rome impoverished to her own decline the nations united world-wide under her, the Western Church for a thousand years “took on the garments of the Empire” in a more temperate earthly rule throughout “an age of faith” for a half millennium virtually unchallenged in its temporal power. Then principalities grew to kingdoms and kings arose to take their crowns as Christian monarchs from the Papal power. Then, aided for the most part by the Church, great land barons arose and, warring, grew into kings to take their crowns from the Papal hand until by force of arms they could establish a divine right of their own while robber barons ruled servile men in local thrall /?/ and pirate navies ruled the seas.

Then some three hundred years from Calvary silently and unheralded came stirrings of the Heavenly kind of kingdom divinely prompted in the works and ways of restless men. The very spirit of the Golden Rule came all unrecognized like a thief at night, into the secular conduct but not the conscious minds or hearts of men. The device of oath bound covenants to refrain from evil was left to the ancient war­ring kings and sovereign powers that at last succeeded Rome and a new kind of compact that had no respect for persons but had power to unite in the peace of mutual service all the sons of men. The Church had taught the Western World that all men were created to be free, so that vast numbers no longer could be owned outright. Common men came to own themselves and therewith came their acknowledged right of property in the products of land and seas. A universal right of property as against the ancient right of expropriation, whether practiced by governments or by non-official men, came all unnoticed, and the Golden Rule of reciprocal service by contract without coercion could be practiced widely in the world_.

Thus came the new kind of Kingdom — a kingdom of recog­nized rights, both personal and property, the personal prerogative of property and contract as against the political practice of coercion and prerogative of ex-propriation. A new kind of jurisdiction under the juridical designation of “the Proprium” as against “the Imperium” was born and the golden Rule of service without coercion, the Kingdom of Heaven, could now begin widely to prevail — the hidden genius of civilization in the modern world.

This new kind of jurisdiction was confined to the properties and services that men could enjoy separately and exclusively of others. It did not, nor has it yet, evolved to include those properties and services that cannot be had separately from others but must be had in common as public services. Nevertheless, the practice of contract among persons who grant each to the other full and equal authority over their persons and possessions was marvelously and increasingly productive of profit for all. Drawing servile populations towards the cities and towns, it weakened the lesser barons while kings and dukes extended liberties and blackmail from the towns that evolved into the modern system of taxation after the manner of Rome. Nor could pirates of the seas withstand the call of wide and certain profits in the growth of trade as against the hazards of loot and booty with only lesser gains. In the Adriatic and the Baltic, finding it better to trade than to raid, they formed their own free systems, and practiced the laws of property and contract without legislative enactment or sovereign decrees.

As peaceful trade expanded on land and sea, the sovereign powers arose by kingly conquest and taxation laid on the new riches. This was the power whose expropriations out of the Golden Rule system of mutual exchange by direct seizure as taxation, by debasing the currency in its own interest, by injecting false money and compelling its use in payment of contractual obligations, by public debt that could never in the end be paid. Thus again was it re-enacted that “the King­dom of Heaven suffereth violence and the violent take it by force.” Here again was the anti-social political power, pretending to divine right, that by violence (coercively) unbalanced the normal distribution of services and goods (by the Golden Rule of equivalence in exchange) and thereby the continuous production of them, with consequent distress and unrest.

Thus with the development of this new world-system of Golden Rule exchange came also revival of the ancient sovereignties whose policies of aggression and defense had brought upon them world-unity and “peace” under the world-dominion of Imperial Rome. These new kingdoms and resurgent sovereignties based on the iron rule of worldly power, like­wise fomented international jealousies and wars.

Strangely, these successor sovereignties, prototyped in ancient Egypt and Babylonia, Greece and Rome, and flouting every Gospel precept, were unanimously esteemed as Christian governments. And the Church gave divine sanction not only to the heads it crowned but granted a Christian legitimacy in “secular” affairs to kings and governments even that defied all its Christian (?) claims to temporal power.

Even the Christian sects that professed to non-resistance as a Christian virtue seldom if ever failed to persecute and rule, once they gained that supposedly Christian power.

The Golden Rule practice of free and creative and thereby spiritual relationships has been for centuries far worse than simply ignored. This incipient non-coercive, but not wholly

non-resistant Kingdom of Heaven on the earth was scorned and defamed, its practice relegated to unhallowed and non-Christian men — especially to the race whence sprang the great Exemplar of souls and prophet of the coming Kingdom of the Golden Rule. In its new resurrection from an age of darkness, again its lowly practitioners suffered violence and contempt notwithstanding that it became the fountain of riches from which all the wealth of governments and kings was forcibly withdrawn and in their wars and rulerships destroyed.

(Reference to Burke on governments in his Vindication of Natural Society — and to Buckle on how, but for smugglers, trade could not have survived.)

The new kind of Kingdom well might have perished but for two new conditions that arose. The revival of trading brought with it revival of learning, freedom for the intellec­tual aspirations and ambitions and of the spirit of adventure among men. The result was a widening of all horizons, artistic, scientific and geographic. Whole new continents called to the spirit of freedom deep in the hearts of resolute and adventur­ous men. In large numbers they fled their tribute-taking tyrannies. They carried the seeds of the new Kingdom of property without expropriation, contract without coercion, founded proprietary jurisdictions intuitively without knowledge or traditions of how to practice and develop them, and insti­tuted coercive government at what seemed to them the least harmful, least likely to expand — the maximum of the proprium and the minimum of imperium that they could conceive. The truly Christian polity of property without expropriation, contract without coercion was only dimly conceived, and the Anglo-Saxon tradition of land-lords and free-men as the basis of free community organization had been completely lost. Free contract, even its secular significance, was limited to personal and private properties, or to what might remain of it after taxation. The active administration of community or public services and properties was relegated almost exclu­sively to political administration based on taxation instead of contract and the Golden Rule objectively employed.

But even so limited, and notwithstanding the vast expansions of twentieth-century political power, the system of contractual free enterprise has been the marvel of the world and yielded to society such good and to government such power of evil as never existed in all the ages of the world.

Science has given to mankind the impersonal power to create and to destroy. The same science that saves and serves life is no less powerful to destroy it.

In the hands of the proprium, of the system of ownership and property and thereby of free contract and exchange, knowledge, property and power are employed primarily in the service of others and only indirectly for the voluntary recompense of equal services in return. This process is creative and therefore spiritual on both sides for, irrespective of ulterior aims, each does to the other in the manner he would have others do unto him, and each supports and enhances the power of others to be more productive, more creative in return. It were as ungracious in spirit as it is false in reason — the devil’s logic — to decry the essential virtue of good works by importation of self-regarding motive, whether false or true.

But in the hands of the imperium, of the system of coercion of persons and the expropriation of the property by which alone it exists, the objects of ownership, of know­ledge and of power are employed not as requisites to social freedom and functioning in the process of contract but in support of special privileges, subsidies and doles with deliberate physical destruction in peace and in war. This is the power of the “world” in the New Testament sense, des­tructive and therefore anti-spiritual now as it was then, notwithstanding its sanctification and adoption by the militant-metaphysical Church, and ages of indoctrination of the divine right of governments and kings.

This is a condition from which there is escape as Society evolves and extends its proprietary and thereby Golden Rule kind of administration into the field of community protection and over the properties appurtenant to the com­munity itself and requisite in the conduct of public and com­mon affairs. For it is the incompleteness of the social evolution, of the Kingdom of Heaven on the earth, that leaves men beholden to the worldly powers.

Meanwhile men must divide their affections between the political State sanctioned by the militant Church and the modern Christian Dream of a Heavenly kind of Kingdom on the earth. The one is for salvation by legislation, force and war, the other by a kind of non-action, called non-resistance, and therefore of no positive action or effect.

So we have two “Christian” polities; the polity of politics and power — of the Church militant, and the policy of submission and subservience — the Church non-resistant. But since non-resistance of itself has no kind of objective practice, no positive force or effect and is without under­standing of the Golden Rule as the dynamic and creative tech­nology of property, contract and mutual or reciprocal exchange that has grown up modernly as the unheralded Kingdom of Heaven in our midst, the protagonists of /the/ New Testament Heavenly dream are thrown back upon the powers of the “world” for enforcement of their non-resistant and falsely equalitarian Christian ideal. For there is no Christian warrant for any rule but the non-coercive Golden Rule or any equality but the equality it enjoins — the equal authority of each over his person and his property wherewith he serves his fellow man. Small won­der, then, that the most fervently emotional and humanitarian and most falsely intellectual sections of the Christian clergy are so much deceived by the Utopian pretenses of the communist conspiracy completely to enslave the world.

We have, therefore the present day phenomenon of a militant Christian front, divided into two opposing camps, the Christian Right, the Church Militant whose ideology is, indeed, lip service to the gospels and the Golden Rule but whose instrument is the coercive State, and the Church non-resistant with its impossible ideology of equality of worldly goods without worldly aggression and whose instrument perforce is revolution or aid and comfort to an alien and professedly equalitarian power.

II

The doctrine of the gospels, the Christianity of Christ, was positive and creative, thereby spiritual and divine. It came not to destroy the old law of escape and survival through enforced obedience, through rulership and punishment either by God over man or of man unto man, but to proclaim a new law of freedom through love and life moving ever onward in cooperation between God and man, and man and man; not merely to survive the conflict called Good and Evil but to partake of the waters and the tree of the life abundant — and everlasting. It was a New Dispensation, not for any exclusive race or tribes or for the members alone of any special organization, but in its freedom, life and love to embrace the whole of mankind. It was the vision of a new relationship between God and man, and man and man, a new kind of kingdom, a Kingdom of Heaven in the life of all — not only in the hearts and minds of men — and a civilization whose glories would not be exclusive or divided but alike for one and all.