Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2026

An address by Heath before the annual meeting of the Christian Freedom Foundation, New York City, accompanied by his grandson, Spencer MacCallum

May 1, 1957

 

 

 

 

 

    THE PRACTICE OF CHRISTIAN FREEDOM[1]

 

Gentlemen of the Christian Freedom Foundation, Inc.:

 

     I am happy to stand before you today — grateful for the opportunity — for you are men who stand for something — for something that is so precious to the flowering of the human spirit it can never die. Be­cause you stand for that human freedom whose seeds were sown by the Christ on stony ground in Palestine, in the darkness of a United Nations — a super-sovereignty — of long ago. I can speak with confidence to you, as to no other kind of men.

 

     In speaking of human freedom, I would first of all and in grateful reverence, pay tribute to that sense of inner freedom of the spirit, to that mystical exaltation which is the authentic sign and seal of all truly re­ligious experience. This wonderful inner gospel to the mind and soul of man is without limitations; it is absolute and complete for all worlds and in this.

 

     For it extends to and includes the objective lives and the bodies of mankind as well. Not only is the spirit inspired from on high, but under­neath also are the everlasting arms. And it is of this outer and practical aspect of Christ’s Gospel — too little realized — that I would speak es­pecially today.

     The full significance of a true prophet’s words is seldom seen at once. The immediate is served; but there is also meaning in them that may lie latent perhaps for ages yet to come. So it was with the message of the Christ. It is like a fine poem. We can feel its healing power while of its full meaning and blessedness we are not yet aware.

 

     For example of this, let me cite to you the mood of a little poem by David Morton that I have entitled, THE TIMELESS HOUR.

O, perfect and complete, and like a flower,

Most shining and most sweet — most memorable hour!

What grave compelling chime, in what hid tower,

Called to the Heart of Time with such sweet power

As summoned Time to yield the Timeless Hour?

Unto the mortal field the immortal flower.

 

 

     The Christ came not merely to save men. He came to quicken their spirits and infuse them with consciousness of their own potential powers in a new and creative dominion, a new way of life in this present world. This was the new salvation — not a divine righting of wrongs, but a New Dispensation of the Creative Spirit in man. The key to this New Kingdom on the earth was the New Gospel. It lay in a single simple rule — in the divine com­mand that men enter into contractual relationships with one another and thereby do each unto others in like manner as he would have done unto him. Note that the word is DO — not refrain or desist. It is not a prohibition. It is a command, a call to action for all who would enter into the really secure, the creative, and thereby the spiritual and exalted mode of life. And the inauguration of this new kingdom was to be not any triumph over evil but in the practice of peace in place of war — in serving and in being served in return, and thereby loving and being loved in return. It would begin small, like the mustard seed and like leaven in the meal. It would steal upon the world softly and unannounced, like a thief coming in the night. And so it has come, in this modern world of ours — not by principalities and powers, but in all the widespread and world-wide, honest and value creating, non-political relationships of men.

     When the one-world power that crucified the Christ at last went down, out of this darkness a rude Barbarian freedom could then arise. Pirates, all unwittingly, could make the laws and rules in which the commerce of the modern world was born. Such were the seeds of the quiet kingdom of Free Enterprise whose fruits in Christian lands have become the wonder and the envy of mankind. Sanctioned by no worldly Authority, and without honor or acclaim, the enterprise of free men has practiced increasingly, albeit unknowingly, the Christian Golden Rule, and thereby blessed with peace and riches all the non-political interrelations of men. And so far as this enterprise is allowed to operate freely and in faithful observance of its own rules, it practices through credits and accounts a beautiful numerical rationality that we all too little value or seek to understand.

     The Christian Gospel is universal as none other is. It is for the body no less than for the spirit of man. The regenerative power it proclaims not only exalts his spirit and mind; it attends and presides in all his atoms and in the proliferation of his cells and in his vital functions, of which he is, for the most part, wholly unaware. And still more and more wonderful — it guides all those relations of freedom among men whereby the life of each is en­larged and advanced through his serving of others and thereby serving the whole in the like manner as they, in return, serve him. This serving and being served in reciprocal free relations, impersonally and without discrim­ination, be it conscious or unconscious, from low motive or high, is the veritable doing of God’s will through the mutual serving and thereby loving of fel­low men. It is finite and thus can be measured in the balanced exchanges of widely interfunctioning men. Being impersonal, it can become ever more universal and thus ever more inclusive and divine. Whether we realize it or not, in this universal loving by serving, to the extent that we practice it, the second Great Commandment is ever more and more fulfilled unto life more abundant and ever lengthening days.

    In this almost unwitting obedience to the divine command that we practice free contractual relationships, lies the whole foundation of that Heavenly Kingdom on the earth in which the Golden Rule of exchange is destined to replace the Iron Rule of force in the public as it does now in all honest private business and affairs. To this supposedly secular kingdom of mutual ser­vice on the earth we need only open our eyes and seek spiritual understand­ing of it. As its measured and balanced and thereby rational processes come to be better understood, we can learn more and more how the Infinite Intelligence, in the profit-yielding practices of our day, has prepared the way for its growth and extension into the field of our com­mon services, from local to world-wide, until we need no longer say, “the Kingdom of Heaven suffereth violence and the violent take it by force.” We must give to this Kingdom not only our hearts but also the rational understanding of our minds, as we have done for the atoms and the stars and in the plant and animal world. And surely the creative power won through understandings in these lesser realms will be a thousandfold exceeded when we have a like understanding of the freedom that is won and held only by the practicing of it in the realm of re-born men.

 

     It may be asked how Christ’s Golden Rule can come into the practice of our public as well as our private affairs.[2] As to this, there is much for us to learn. If we seek we can find; and it may be that the stone long despised shall become the corner and support. I would call your attention to how pro­perty in land affords a free market in which the sites and gifts of nature are distributed as other things are — by the process of contract instead of by force. This insures their going into possession of those who can make them most productive — for only such can produce the wherewithal to pay the high­est rent or price. We need a new orientation of mind with respect to the modern institution of non-political property in all things, and especially proper­ty in land. Only in quite recent times has this latter institution become social­ized, entirely separated from the tax-taking and war-making power. But so far, in its modern form, it only distributes the sites and lands — including all the advantages, public and private, with which they are served. May it not one day evolve to the point of not only distributing the public services — such as they now are — but also of creating and supplying them, precisely in the manner that private goods and services are now supplied — that is, through the free market, and thereby to those best qualified to make productive use of them? We need to think on these things.

     Jesus Christ held in fiery scorn the taxers and the tribute-takers and the money-cheaters of his day. His very first public resolve was re­jection of the enticements of political power. Not the mass destroyers of properties and of men, but those who conserved property and administered it productively, were honored by Him. Least of all would He have Caesar or the local City Hall take control over the gifts of nature and thereby over the livings and the very lives of men. The trend is now back towards the age-old slavery to the State. The kings of the Gentiles exercise authority over them, and they that exercise authority upon them are called benefactors. But, said Jesus, ye shall not be so. But we need not despair so long as private property in land, un-honored and but little understood, abides. It gives us a social instead of a governmental mode of access to the sources of life, and it is potential to carry its Gold­en Rule administration more and more into the public realm, where the Iron Rule has so long and tragically prevailed.

     All that we shall be does not yet appear; but of this we can be assured: the spirit of the living Christ, recognized or unrecognized, is working with us today, now and forevermore. It has brought us out of Dark Ages into a modern Promised Land where His Golden Rule can and eventually must pre­vail creatively without any force or fraud in our public no less than it does now in our non-political af­fairs, and with vast blessings to all.

     If I have any mission among those who bear witness of the creative spirit that lives in the teachings of the Christ, it is to draw their minds to­wards an understanding of his doctrine not only in the secret places of the heart and in worlds to come but in its actual and present operation in the world that now is. For it is in His word and in His freedom, in the degree that we practice it, that the Christian peoples of the world shall live and move and have their being, both private and public, towards ever more abundant life and length of days.

     May I give you a few lines in commemoration of Him?

 

 

Embosomed on the stream of time

The ancient hills of Palestine

Resplendent in the sinking sun

  Drowse golden when the day is done.

 

‘Twas here the old-time sages trod

  Communing intimate with God,

Prophetic of that Promised One

  Whom He would bless, Beloved Son.

 

Remembering stars now lambent gleam

          In Jordan’s dim baptismal stream,

And hills of Palestine still stand,

  Mementos in that Holy Land

And solemn, silent vigil hold

  O’er tragic turmoil as of old,

Yet on the brow of one of them

  Shines an Eternal Diadem.