Spencer Heath Archive

Item 379

Taping by Spencer MacCallum from conversation with Heath. Note that the generalization in the opening sentences was a more true in the decades in which Heath grew up, that many parts of the developing world are catching up by the spread of enterprise—which began largely in the Christian world. Although — much of the seeming prosperity in the non-Christian world is from tax based public works as of old, rather than creative, from the practice of productive capital. For publishing this item, I would delete the opening sentences as unnecessarily harsh as they stand. -Editor.

February 1955

     Fundamentally, as regards well-being, there are just two kinds of population in the world, those who eat well and live long and those who starve and die soon — the Christian and the heathen nations of the world, in the one life more abundant, in the other, “mean, nasty and short.”

     How comes it that the one is overflowing while the other starves and dies for want of daily bread and must breed like flies to keep its race alive? Bread is a product of behavior, not of belief. It comes from what men do, not from what they profess. The Christian ethic of man towards man is positive; /it is/ not to refrain or deny or desist, but to do, (facere) that it enjoins. Its one great and practical command is to do unto others.

     This, in itself, was far from being new, but it was qualified as to the manner of the doing. Not as others do, an eye for an eye, but as we would that they should do unto us, was the command. And the promise was life abundant in a new kind of kingdom, a non-coercive, non-political Kingdom of Heaven on the earth in which all men could be as brothers and the most great be he who most served.

     The old command was negative: Thou shalt not. Agreements were mere covenants to desist. They might be broken — and retaliated. Like treaties, they could be observed — for a while. But they could not be positively accomplished or performed. The new command was positive. It could be performed. For it was not to desist, but to do. It called for a special kind of performance, that ye love one another by serving one another and thereby enabling others to serve you. Mere covenants of mutual non-aggression would be transcended by undertakings to do mutual good. Contract would cure conflict as light dispels darkness.

     But doing good requires instruments. Contracts must have subject-matter, and this requires property — property in oneself and property in one’s possessions — else the contract as such cannot be performed.

     The /early/ Christians lived no better than the pagans of ancient times, for the great generality of men were slaves. The governing powers were pervasive and supreme. Hence few contracts could be made or performed. The crumbling world sovereignty engulfed the Spirit of Christ in pagan (and Christian) darkness for a thousand years before adventurous men of seas and coastal lands could learn to trade instead of raid, and thereby lay the ground for a new birth of life and freedom to the Western World.

     This creative Christian ethic, contractual instead of coercive, blossomed wide on sea and land. The riches it created gave wings to learning and the arts. Also it afforded to men of ambition and conquering arms a fertile field of taxation on which to erect the little sovereignties whose conflicts and alliances merged them into kingdoms, empires, and the so-called Christian modern states that maintain themselves by the contra-Christian practices of expropriating and seizing properties and persons for the purposes of both war and peace, under regulation by the iron rule of force whether it be democratically accepted or willy-nilly imposed.

     The kingdom of heaven suffereth violence and the violent take it by force, yet we call those powers Christian and to them we make our prayers, in them confide our hopes.