Spencer Heath Archive

Item 3173

Typed transcription by Spencer MacCallum from conversation with Heath at Winchester Memorial Hospital, Winchester VA

June 22, 1955

I am realizing more and more as time goes on that society has its best support in the New Testament — that is, in the Gospels. I didn’t find it there originally; I took too much of the common ecclesiastical view. But in other sources, particularly physical and biolo­gical science and the historical data of social integration out of nomadism into community dwelling, germs of which are everywhere where there is no dominant, single sovereignty, and which reached a high state of development in Saxon England during the second half of the dark ages after the breakdown of the Roman sovereignty — all this as against the New Testament; I didn’t look for it in the New Testament at first.

There was another direction also from which the promptings came. My mind could not accept the reasonableness that through the voluntarism of contracts and the market, society could or would award unearned increments to anybody. The motive might be hidden and not consciously understood by those acting, but certainly society so acting without compulsion would not consistently and continuously place an unjust tribute in the hands of persons who exercise no coercive authority. What services these persons named landowners per­formed, was not understood even by them. But I was convinced that there must be a voluntary and salutary service behind their mostly gratuitous reward.