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{word} = hard to understand, might be this

...and I think it's a good -- must -- would you kindly listen to me? I had a question put to me last time: why, if the story of the Christian era is so simple, is the answer to the separation of the created qualities of antiquity, why i- -- aren't we told this more clearly in our own time? And there is a very good reason for this.

During the last 150 years, gentlemen, people have tried to explain Christianity and the coming of Christ by concentrating, as you know, on the life of Jesus, and trying desperately to find in the Gospel a way of coming to know this mortal man, how He was born, educated, and did His various things. Now this idea, that the life of Jesus can be explained out of His own time, is of course in contradiction to everything I have tried to tell you: that the problem of history is to connect the times.

If Jesus is the hinge by which all times remain one, from the beginning to the end, you cannot learn anything by concentrating on His own life. And the Gospel writers knew this, and so they concentrated, as you know, on His death. The only meaningful act of Jesus is that He died, all His life, out of His own time. He was not a contemporary of Pontius Pilate, or of the high priest. He defied them. He went out of His own time, gentlemen. Nobody can be a Christian who is only a slave of the spirit of his own time. The modern myth, into which you all are bewitched, is that you have -- think you have to be a contemporary of your contemporaries. Nobody can lead a good life if he is a contemporary. Because that's a mythical situation in which the fashions and the modes of the day, and the electoral -- election slogans try to convince you that that's all that matters.

The myth of our own t- -- moment, gentlemen, today is not a local myth--as in Egypt, where the -- Horus was connecting the empire--but you live in the naive idea that you -- it is enough to be a good contemporary of your own time. You read the New York Times, and Time, and all these names--Time, Fortune, Life--are insinuating that at this moment you can lead a good life, if you concentrate on the moment. You cannot. Christianity means that you have the freedom to leave your own time behind, or to -- stick to something in loyalty which is older than this moment. We are perfectly free at one time to concentrate on family loyalties, and do something which in this family is -- has been done always, although it's against the grain of the moment; or to prepare something for the future, which isn't the fashion today at all. As long as you cannot do this, gentlemen, you certainly are not free. You are all today slaves of the spirit of your own time. And I prefer to--frankly--to call the spirit of your own time, which you worship, a myth. It's a myth. It's a -- because anything is a myth,

gentlemen, that puts a little part -- a fragment of reality forward as being the whole.

Now you can say -- you can have the myth of Podunk, or the myth of Washington, D.C., or the myth -- myth of the United States--as an isolationist--or you can have the myth of your own time, that you are Class of '59 at this college, and therefore, what matters is only that you are -- conform to the spirit of the Class of '4- -- '59. You can do so, but you will become silly, and you will become the toy of a myth. Because what is said and known in '59 is too little for a good life.

And so the deepest reason why I give this course, and why I try to reestablish the balance is that Jesus obviously came at the end of one era, and began a new era. He was the first Christian, gentlemen, and the last Jew. And the Jews came at the end of antiquity. And also He was, as it has been said, the last genius of the Greek -- dispensation. He was a real genius. And yet He ended the rule of genius, and He founded the dynasty of the saints.

You can only understand the meaning of Christianity if you connect it with the whole beginnings that preceded Him, of which He is the fulfillment, and if you put Him as the seed, the famous seed of grain that falls into the ground and must die in order to bear fruit. And you can only therefore do justice to Jesus if you admit that in His own time He was inconspicuous, that He died in a corner, that nobody paid any attention to Him--of the powerful people of His day--because He had to wait for His resurrection. And He has to -- still waiting. And you have -- you all live a pre-Christian life as soon as you concentrate on the myth of your own time. That's breaking the connection; that's breaking the whole action which Christianity tried to begin and to continue. We all are called to persevere--that's the Christian expression--to persevere in the course that started 1957 years ago.

As you well know, I don't have to tell you this. The -- "perseverance" is a word that has died out at this moment, as much as "adolescent," and many other--"virgin"--and many other stra- -- words that today are -- in this jocose, contemporary society are not appreciated. "Virginity," people laugh. "Chastity of the mind," you prostitute yourself for any short story which you can sell.

A young lady of my acquaintance was in dire straits, and came out of it. And then went -- on to Radcliffe. And she was asked there to write her autobiography. So she did a very good job. And she got it back, gentlemen, this paper, with the infamous remark, "Saleable." You don't write your -- your autobiography in order to sell it, you see. It's a stepping stone for your next life. You write your autobiography to go on from there to the second half of your life, if you

write it at that age. And therefore the problem of this girl was of course that she wrote herself free into her future. And that cannot be compared to anything you can sell. That means it kills it.

That's a typical example of the spirit of the times, today. This teacher of English who gave her this mark, "Saleable," is a devil. That's called the devil, gentlemen. The devil sells you short. The -- you see -- it's a very -- the necessary thing perhaps for you to understand is today not God so much as the devil. The devil is anybody who tries to convince you--or the devil speaks through anybody--who tries to convince you that you can take a shortcut. That instead of living, for example, the whole life of--as this girl--of 70 years, and write your autobiography so that you may now find a way of living another 50 years--she was 20 when she wrote this--you are in the same pos- -- position, that you only try to make hay out of what you have lived in 20 years by selling the article. And where are you, then? You are naked; you are dead; you have nothing to live for. That's the devil.

Mr. Hitler is a very good case in point, gentlemen. He promised a thousand-year kingdom, and it ended in 12 years. So he -- he ravaged Europe, and destroyed all the cities of Europe, and so on -- in 12 years. Otherwise he would have been right. If -- if he could have governed 1,000 years, there would have been no distinction between God and the devil. Because God's times are that long. They are a thousand years long. With God, thousand years are like one day, you see. But -- with -- with Mr. Hitler, thousand -- 12 years were, you see, like one day. That's too short.

Most things, gen- -- you know this very well; if you get drunk, and if you indulge in all -- all your passions immediately, you are just sold short. That is, you do something which would bear fruit in a long life, or perhaps in centuries, you see, for -- on the spur of the moment. And there it is, wasted. And then Mr. Eliot comes and writes, quite rightly, Waste Land, because it's just all -- everything is going to waste. Nothing bears fruit.

So the first problem of the Lord was, gentlemen, to show what it means to be fruitful, and to have faith in the rotation of crops. And therefore, He could not bear fruit in His own time. Jesus, compared to the contemporaries like Pontius Pilate or even Judas Iscariot is a total failure in His own time. And if you cannot see the necessity for His being a failure in His own time, you see, you cannot understand why He could become the founder of the Church. Can you see this? It's connected, you see. He's the most unsuccessful man in His own lifetime, and He's the most successful man if you take an overall view of the times.

Without this negation of success in His own time, the whole story of Jesus

is absolutely unmentionable. It's just stupid. And you would ask yourself, "How could people for 1957 years always refer to Him as the Final Man?" Because that is the best -- perhaps the best expression for the beginner of our era, that He came as the Final man. He did not care to be a king, or a prophet, or a poet, or a -- priest, because He wanted to be the Final Man, the man who could reproduce at any given time: kingship, prophecy, priesthood, and poetry, or acts of genius.

And we will now turn to this simple fact, gentlemen, that if you have 1, 2, 3, 4 achievements in antiquity, it isn't the life of Jesus that is of any interest. And you'd better step out of this 19th century phantom of a life of Jesus. There is no life of Jesus. We know nothing of His life. We only know th- -- those steps in His life which led Him outside His own time. That's called His death, His passion, His way out -- Calvary. However you call it, all the expressions, which the Church uses to incite you to understand what had happened there, is that everything He could have taken advantage of, He turned to an advantage for His future disciples, or His apostolic church, and did not take advantage of it Himself.

Therefore, extrapolate this, gentlemen, and begin with His crucifixion. And then you can see that all of these offices--kingship, priesthood, prophecy, and po- -- genius--perhaps "genius" is clearer to you than "poet." It's too -- you think of Mr. Eberhart, when I say "poet." But I mean genius, all around--genius in any field. Sculptor, painter -- just genius. That is, this -- the outbreak of a new flash of insight, you see, in the -- human nature, something that hasn't existed before, is unique.

If you turn to the expressions used for the Lord in the Bible, they are very simple. First of all, He is the "King of Israel." That is, He inherits the dignity of David's kingship. And Herod, his contemporary ruler, is called specially, the King of Judea. He's not the King of Israel, not the King of the People of Prophecy, but he's just a chieftain of Judea, a tyrant, put in by the Romans. He's not even a Jew, as you know, Herod. It's quite important to know that the only king in Jesus' time who could claim to be King of Israel was Himself, because the tyrant under which he lived was only a regional despot of Judea, not of Israel, not of the 12 tribes.

The second thing is: He is the high priest. That's also an expression that goes through the Old -- New Testament. Le- -- Letter to the Hebrews says, "We have a high priest, now," because He went outside the city and became Himself the living sacrifice. We'll s- -- turn to this in a moment.

I do not have to tell you that in the New Testament, is -- is explicitly stated that Jesus is not a prophet, simply, but that John the Baptist is the last prophet.

One of the ways in which the life of Jesus has made you blind to the reality of the foundations of Christianity is of course this -- that you say Jesus was a teacher. For Heaven's sake, He was not a teacher. If you call Him a teacher, you blind yourself to what He was. A teacher is a man in his own time. I'm here. I'm not stepping outside my time by teaching you, you see. Jesus is the topic of prophecy. He is the Messiah of which the prophets have spoken.

And the fourth thing--genius, gentlemen: certainly if there ever has lived a genius, gentlemen, it was Jesus. But He showed His -- and He was a different kind of Jesus -- of genius by not writing any books. The greatest feat, perhaps, most un-understandable for us today is that Jesus forwent the opportunity of publishing books with Schu- -- Simon & Schuster in the Inner Sanctum.

The blasphemy today just abounds. You see, the -- Simon & Schuster only sells bestsellers, call this the Inner Sanctum. The inner sanctum is a genius who says, "I don't have to write books. Others will testify of my genius." That's more difficult.

This opened the eyes--these two things, these two negations--that Jesus is not a genius, gentlemen, but He's a poem, He's a work of genius. His own life is -- you see, that what geniuses have tried to think out, so to speak. St. John calls therefore Jesus Himself a "poem." He is the poem. And we are poems, if we live right, if we are Christians, you see. We are not poets. God is the poet, and we are His poem. We are not prophets, gentlemen, but we are sent. Jesus is not a priest, but He is the victim, He is the sacrifice which the priests offered on the altar to God. And He is not a king, gentlemen, but He's a servant. That's why He washed -- washed the feet of the Apostles.

That is, gentlemen, in order to show that kingship, and priesthood, and prophecy, and genius now had to come to terms with each other, and that nobody could be either one, but that you were all free from the -- now on to be anyone as the opportunity and the duty arises, what the country needs at this moment--He had to change around these four connotations. Yes, King of Israel, but the suffering servant of Isaiah--the prophet Isaiah, in chapter 53, He had to be. And the servant; He's the one who obeys the king, is he not? And the victim, or the sacrifice is the one slaughtered by the priest. And the Messiah is the one prophesied by the prophets. And the saint is that genius whose life will be written up by others, because it is a free -- creation.

I still prefer the life of St. Paul to Hamlet, because one is a poem written by a poet, and Paul's poem is still waiting by any one of us to be rewritten, because it is a great poem, let alone the passion of our Lord Himself. That is a poem.

It's very simple, but it is so simple that you, in your liberal arts college, always think that a poet must be measured by his poems. No, gentlemen. Aeschylus and Homer must be taken to task by the man who was more than a poet, who dared to live His own life as a poem. You feel this when you read the story of St. Francis, for example, that his own life was poetic. You must have heard of St. Francis something, he -- who went in imitation of the Lord, like a -- himself like a great poem. And that has been the Christian ambition ever since, gentlemen: to have the courage to turn the tables on man, in his pride of kingship, of priesthood, of prophet, and genius, and to say, "It may be better to be the servant, it may be better to be the sacrifice, it may be better to be the one on whom the prophesies have told," because the word "Messiah" I think is very hard on us today. It means "the sent," "the man is sent," and -- or "the anointed one" in the { }. And a poem. Our own life is a drama, an incomplete drama, written to our last day.

If we turn now to the -- to the human beings that ever since have arisen, you will find that instead of the individual Greek genius--Aristotle, Plato, Aeschylus, Homer--you get a whole cloud of saints. The saints, gentlemen, of the first thousand years of our era--St. Augustine, and St. Jerome, and all the others--this -- company of saints--they are, you may say, a -- a team of geniuses. Every saint is only finished on his dying day. The Church calls the death day of a saint the birthday for Heaven. That's a deep reason, you see, because if he doesn't persevere, if he is not a new creation to the last day, if he isn't original to the last moment, he is not a saint. You cannot fabricate a saint at the age of 20. Let him pass an examination, and say, "From now on, for 50 years, you will be a saint." You know that's ridiculous, you see. The question whether you are a saint will stand revealed after you have lived, you see. Before, nobody knows whether you have really, you see, been written as a poem by your creator of an original character.

What I'm driving -- at, gentlemen, that out of the prophet came the Apostles. That is, in the -- in our Church, today, in Christianity, there are no prophets, but there are apostles. And apostles are people who have learned from the Final Man -- to expect His return. An apostle is somebody sent, like the Messiah, you see, in remembering and reminding us that the final man has already appeared. Prophets become apostles, gentlemen; geniuses become saints; priests become martyrs--that is, victims. The word "mar-" -- term "martyr" just means a man who instead of sacrificing others, sacrifices himself. The pope calls himself, as you know, in the succession of St. Peter, the servus -- servant of the servant. That has the reason that the king, you see, has to be replaced by the servant.

And this may clear up your misunderstanding as if Jesus could be called a "prophet," or a "teacher," or anything of these ancient terms. If He hadn't given

up all of these dignities of antiquity, by fulfilling them, and by, so to speak, going overboard, and doing more than just be the King of Israel, or a genius, you see, He couldn't have been the man of a new eon. He couldn't have united these four types by being the Final Man who was free at one time to act royally, and the other, to act as a servant. At one time to prophesy the downfall of Jerusalem, and the other already to install the new Church.

In the life of Jesus, you find therefore--which is His deepest secret--the overlapping of two eons, gentlemen. He belongs to two times. And that's -- I think is the ideal of every fruitful man. And we all are heirs and ancestors. We all are beg- -- enders and beginning -- beginners. You must end what you have inherited. And you must start what shall take its beginning in you. And therefore Jesus is, all the time, both. And you never are sure what in His -- answer He'll tell you. And He's incalculable, and that's why He is the Final Man, gentlemen. The Final Man will be incalculable. You are free as long as you are incalculable.

For example, gentlemen, 10 times when you offend me, and you say, "Excuse me," you expect that I say, "Of course, it doesn't matter. Don't mention it." But if I am a real, free man, gentlemen, there must be an 11th time where I slap you in the face and say, "I won't stand for it. I will not excuse it."

As soon as your formula, "Please excuse me, I didn't mean it," becomes an automatic thing, and you can rely on your being forgiven, gentlemen, the whole thing has become slavery. The whole thing has become unfree. This is the terrible thing in your society. You always think you can offend anybody else, and if you then say, "I'm sorry," that's enough. That isn't true. It isn't true at all. Five times out of six, you may be -- right. The man is too lazy to take up the cudgels with you and to say, "I'm -- will not forgive you." But you have to fear that, as -- if you don't dread it, that Monday he -- it might turn out otherwise. Your whole -- your asking for -- for forgiveness of course is just absolutely untrue. And that's how you live. You have a kind of -- magic formulas, and you always think that you are modern man and have no magic, and don't believe in -- in witchcraft. Gentlemen, you are all given to black magic. You all think that your formula, when you come home to your mother and say, "I'm sorry, I didn't write," she'll say, "Oh, it doesn't matter." She shouldn't. At one time or other, she should make you see that this is nothing automatic, that each time, you have to fight for it, and you have to dread that it doesn't work. Otherwise you live just like the Tibetan -- Tibetan superstitious monks, who think when they turn the wheel of their prayer mill 10,000 times, then all -- they can't go to hell.

We are not in such safe ground. Christ is incalculable. And a living Christian, gentlemen, must remain incalculable. As soon as you think that the actions of your -- parents and your teachers are predictable, that I'll always smile, and

say, "It doesn't matter," I can't be a teacher. I can't be a human being. I'm just your -- slave of your superstition. You have made me into a mechanism. That is, it functions, you see. You -- you put in the nickel, of your nice phrase, "Excuse me," and I nod and say, "Of course."

And that's -- the -- the -- the -- the -- I think the {through-gehend} superstition of -- of our time, gentlemen, that there are a number of stock phrases which will always work. And you have many others, I mean. Take the -- take the slow education of the white people in the South for seg- -- desegregation, you see. When the -- the Supreme Court gives such a verdict, then the people in the South say, "Let us do it by ourselves," you see. That's such a magic formula, you see. They never do anything by themselves. But they say, "For a hundred years we haven't done anything by ourself, but we always -- leave us alone; these people from the North, they shouldn't interfere." The only thing the people of the North should do that the -- is of course that they should interfere. They didn't interfere enough in 1865, obviously, in 1876. They didn't settle anything. So the whole North went home, just as they went home after the First and Second World War, and did nothing about it. The whole bloodshed was for nothing. Because now you have these automatic formulae, you see, "Oh, we can burn -- crosses; and we can murder Negroes, because the North mustn't interfere." It's like "Excuse me," you see. They don't even say, "I'm sorry." They just said -- say, "Leave us alone." But it has the same magic character, the formula; and it works. You all leave the same people alone there.

So we don't live in a -- in an incalculable, unpredictable, free society, where every human being can be expected to do something unexpected, free. It's all calculated. It's not a calculated risk, gentlemen, but a calculated mechanism in which you -- most of you live. You're quite sure that nothing will ever happen. The South will never be taken to task by the North, for example. Your mother will never break away from you, because you are brute, and so on. And your teachers will never flunk you, because you can always beg it off and say, "Well, I can -- can bring -- bring in another paper," or something.

I had a case, a very intelligent boy, 10 years ago. He really couldn't understand why the history department flunked him. He hadn't given in his paper in time. I never understood. He was intelligent boy, but he thought he had it -- he had a privilege. If he talked long enough, they had to come down and -- and weaken, and -- and say, "He's a good boy; we mustn't hurt him." Well, why must they not, my dear people? I don't see it. You deserve to be hurt. I mean, the only thing that hasn't happened enough in the last 50 years is spanking. So it's high time that it is introduced. I -- I mean, of course, I do wrong, too. Half of you should have gotten a D in this paper. But it -- it's my last term, and I have given up. But that means that I am not longer good for teaching young men, be- --

gentlemen, because I am no longer unexpected. I'm no long- -- I'm predictable. That's called a pipe course. And a pipe course is something despicable.

[tape interruption]

So please, wake up to the fact, gentlemen, that you are as benighted as any superstitious group in the center of Africa. We have our own witchcraft and our own magic, just as much as these people have. But it is very difficult for you to discover them. But what is witchcraft, gentlemen? When the free action of human souls is replaced by predictability, when you can predict tomorrow, then you can figure out that all these people have been reduced to mechanisms, who -- when certain magic formulas are spoken, you see, will elect this-and-this president, or what-not, whatever it is. Most of you, you -- you know very well how our parliamentary procedure has been degraded to mechanisms, I mean. "Motion, second the motion, unanimously carried," because three-quarters of the people are asleep.

The important thing is, gentlemen, that the Final Man is free to be active or passive. That's the meaning of the word "passion" in this story of Christ, that wherever Judas Iscariot and the others expected action, He said "No. I will suffer." And whenever they expected suffering, He took action. Always unexpected.

The -- the story of the four Gospels, gentlemen, is written around this one point, that the 12 disciples were constantly surprised and amazed. And everybody else was amazed, because He never did the expected thing. When they expected Him to rule -- ride in as king of Israel, He took an ass and He went to the Cross, instead. He was the king of Israel. The people -- made into it, didn't they? Didn't they say, "Hosanna, King of Israel"? claimed Him?

And He said, "That's not my business, to be anything of the -- of this ancient dispensation of kingship. I must show them that you can -- I can abandon kingship. There is a greater thing at stake: human freedom."

Of course you have one great handicap, and I must warn you against it, that is your idea of freedom. You think that Christ was not free, because He--well, there are many terrible slogans today, "Jesus committed suicide," and such terrible words--and you are free. Gentlemen, as long as you think that you are free and He is not, of course I have no voice to tell you eloquently enough, what Christianity is, what freedom is, because you do not believe that if we do not do something about it, we fall into patterns that are pre-established, that expect us as heredity.

I have tried to show you that we acquire faculties which our ancestors have given us. You become the son of your father, which means that you are a candidate for fatherhood. Can't help it, you see. Anybody who is called a "son," knows that one day somebody will call him "Father." That's just given in the title, "Son," you see. That's a dialectical title that must lead to fatherhood. You cannot remain a son for the rest of your life.

The same is true where -- with priests and laity. You must become an expert one day, and look down at the layman in your own field. That is, in antiquity, and as far as we are still ancient people of old--pre-Christians--we all serve up to these types. There is -- we are citizens, and one day we want to become president. That is, we want to tell the citizens what to do, and to lead them. And one day we are laymen. And one day we must become the expert -- and that's priesthood and -- and laity. And one day we are expecting things. And one day we must act it out ourselves, what we have decried. We cannot only wait for the other man to do it. One day you have to be the first to do it, and to pay the penalty of having known that somebody should do this.

When Mr. Truman read the -- history of the Civil War, he read the story of McClellan and how Lincoln had to fire McClellan, because McClellan was a rebellious general. And -- when he wrote -- read this book, he says he was 15 years of age, and it was a prophecy, that this could happen to any president of the United States. And certainly Mr. Truman at that time had no idea that he ever would be president. When he became president, he had to fire MacArthur for political -- purely political reasons. That is, the policy of the country could not be made in Tokyo. It had to be made in Washington, right or wrong. And so he fired MacArthur -- knowing that this had been done. And the prophecy came true. He certainly was -- all against his expectations, you see, not the man prophesied -- not the pr- -- prophet, who knew this as a possibility, but the man who had to do it. And he was blamed for it, of course, just as Lincoln was in his own days. Don't think that Lincoln was liked in his own time. He wasn't. It took Mr. Booth to make him popular. Lincoln was a minority president.

This fact, gentlemen, that Jesus came to fulfill antiquity and to free it from its petrifaction and its one-sidedness is expressed in the fact that we have four Gospels. The four Gospels are not one book. They are four ways of telling the truth about the new eon, the new times. They are written to the Jews, to the Israelites; to the empire-dwellers under priestly domination; to the tribes; and to the Greeks. The whole last 150 years, as you know -- as I already told you, have concentrated on a life of Jesus, and on this strange attempt to filter the four Gospels into one life story, and to juggle the facts of the four Gospels in such a way that you could have one text, you see, giving you the life of Jesus. Most of you have never read the four Gospels as different books, but you say, "How --

what a pity. If we had one clear statement, then we would know." So you all are hunting for some biography of Jesus. I think that is the expression of the inanity of the endeavor of the last 150 years to treat Jesus as a contemporary of His contemporaries, and not as the bridge from Adam to the Last Judgment. Not as the uniter of the times.

The four Gospels were very conscious of the fact that something had happened that was much bigger than the moment. Do you think that these Apostles would have given their whole life if it only had been that the life of Jesus in His own time was significant? They would have been just utter fools. Obviously, they stayed 12 years in Jerusalem, and prepared themselves for a worldwide mission which is still going on. That is, they had in mind the next 3,000 years, and -- just as Jesus, of course.

And so they first wrote in Jerusalem the Gospel of Matthew in Hebrew. The Gospel of Matthew as we have it is in Greek. But we know that the prem- -- primeval text was written in the Hebrew language. And it deals with the great problem of Israel with the prophets. And Matthew is a kind of -- prophetical lawyer, or a legal prophet, who tries to prove from the prophecy of the Old Testament that Jesus is the fulfillment of the prophet. And therefore, Matthew is written in this sense as a Hebrew document: fulfillment of the Old Testament by the New. And you can see this, when you open Matthew; it is written as the five books of Moses. The first chapter is the Book of Genesis, all over. The first word of the first chapter of Matthew is Genesis, and he says, "Genesis means the creation of the world, you see, in the Old Testament. And now I tell you the creation of the Final Man. Finally God has come around to show us what Adam -- what He meant to do when He created men."

Mark--to give you another example -- I don't want to go deeply into this, because it is more important that you see the -- the relationship in these things--Mark is written in Rome. Peter went to Rome, and took with him Mark. And Mark is the disciple, or the apprentice of Mark -- of Mo- -- of Peter. And what Peter preached, Mark put down. Now in Mark, as you open it, everything about the relation of the Old Testament to the New is omitted, because the Romans, of course, the Egyptians, the -- the Babylonians, the people in the empires had no interest in the Old Testament. Prophecy didn't -- you see, didn't oblige them. What they had to know is the relation of the sky and the heavens to this new man, of the Caesars, of the popes, or emperor-popes, or the -- the big empires. And for this, Mark is -- is fundamental, cutting out the relation between the old Israel and the new, and giving the relation between a Roman Caesar and his new Lord of lords.

The most interesting thing that has happened in this strange century in

which you have been brought up without any insight into Christianity is -- is the Gospel of St. John. John lived later in Ephesus; that's the first city of the Greek spirit in antiquity, where the great Heraclitus taught, and many other philosophers. And Paul has written to the Ephesians, as you know, and John lived there, around this region. And he tries to prove that Jesus is the divine poem, that God is the writer of this poem, and that Jesus therefore was not a poet, but a poem.

And so John has given much headache to the critics, the biblical critics. And when you read the life of Jesus, it's usually composed of -- out of Luke, and Mark, and Matthew; and John is left aside as -- as too enthusiastic, or too poetical, or too -- too deep, or too pro- -- it's just too profound. They are, so to speak, out of their depth when they have to deal with John. And so most modern theologians concentrate on the three synoptics, as they are called, you see. Because it seemed possible to write one life out of the three Gospels, the first three Gospels. John just doesn't fit into their prosaic approach. Of course, John had to be poetical. If you want to say that is the drama, that is a poet -- that is a poem of God that's -- excels all tragedies of the Greeks, and all poetry, and -- you cannot write in the pedestrian style of a reporter of the last au- -- car accident in White River Junction. So John isn't written that way.

And John therefore in Ephesus overcame the Greek prejudice. And that again is -- was inaccessible, so to speak, to the modern, secular mind who thought that a man had to try to make this man, Jesus, understandable. However, John gives you -- us a clue where himself the -- the key to his whole undertaking. At the end he said, "This man Jesus has done so won- -- miraculous things that all the books -- all the world could not contain the library of books that would have to be written about Him in order to explain His mission, or His -- the meaning of His life."

When you come to the commentators today about this strange verse, that all the world could not contain the libraries of books which have -- should be written about Him, they say that is a -- exaggeration, and they are sorry for John that he has made such a -- an unmeasured -- unmeasured statement. But gentlemen, isn't it simply true that more books have been written about Jesus than about anything else in the world? It is simply true. John knew it already in the year 70--or 80, whenever he wrote this--that it was so. And this -- the sober truth which he stated there, that the world wouldn't contain the books that cou- -- should be written about Him is still true. Still people make a lot of money by writing cheap books on Jesus. They are mostly wrong, I think. But that doesn't matter. They take advantage of the wonderful topic. It's the -- still the most poetic topic there is, His walk in l- -- on this earth.

And so you see again the Gospel writer still speaks the sober truth. But the modern commentator just doesn't -- don't -- doesn't want to see it. He says, "That's an exaggeration," you see. It's a simple truth. For 2,000 years, people write books on Jesus. Has never happened before, about anything, I mean. There will be -- I don't know how many books will be written about you, but I don't think more than five.

So the Gospels, gentlemen, are of a great sobriety. They have a task, every one of them, to connect Jesus--and now come -- I come to I think a fruitful statement--with one of the four myths of antiquity, one of the four limited regions of the ancient mind. One is written to the Jews. One is written to the Romans. One is written to the Greeks. And one is written to the tribes. I won't go into -- that's complicated about Luke and Matthew, why one is written to the -- to the prophets, and the other is written to the 12 tribes. But I think I could prove this to your satisfaction. Perhaps at the end of the course, there will still be a quarter of an hour to enlarge on this. I only want -- don't want to do it at this moment.

The -- the -- the important thing is, gentlemen, that the Gospel had to develop organs to connect the partial myth with the universal truth of the Final Man. And if you hear today that the New Testament is "mythical," it is really very infamous. I think that's one of the all-time lows. It's just as -- as Hitler -- Hitlerlike a sentence as that Jesus has committed suicide. There are certain centers in this country who do spread this poison. It is very refined. And one of the ways of spreading the poison is to say that the Bible is a mythical book.

Gentlemen, you already know that the Old Testament is written against the myth of the Egyptians and of the tribes. And that therefore seven and 12 was changed; that therefore, there were 12 tribes and not one tribe; and that therefore the -- Jews had to go into the desert in order to leave the -- the fleshpots of Egypt behind; and that therefore, the -- Moses did not enter the Promised Land, lest it become an empire again; and that the temple of Solomon was only built 400 years after the taking of the land, so that the temple could never be again like an Egyptian temple. Now every- -- all these things are known, and yet you are surrounded by the worst kind of denigration and deviltry. They try to tell you that the Bible is the seat of myth.

To give you one example to show you the -- the truth. In the Egyptians religion, which was in the Roman empire widely spread, in Palestine as well as in -- in Italy and -- or Greece, and the cult of Isis and Osiris was a very fashionable thing for the educated people in the Ro- -- at times of Jesus, and outside Egypt as well as at home. In the -- mysteries of Osiris, every year, the coffin of Osiris is searched. In the -- in the lower depths of the -- the so-called grave of Osiris has to be found at the bottom of the temple. First in Abydos, that's the

center of the Osiris worship, in Egypt, and then in Memphis. And then in every place--for example, Pompei -- Pompeii, near Naples, which we have excavated, there is an Isis temple, you see. And there would be the temple -- the -- at -- at -- in the basement of the temple, there would be a crypt, and in this crypt would be a coffin of Osiris. And once a year there would be a solemn procession of the priests, who had { } the stars, and was a New Year Day, and Osiris -- the coffin of Osiris had to be found, and he had to be transfigured by some {rules} and sent up to the sky as the father of the sun, as I tried to -- to show you.

And so the great exclamation mark in the Egyptian mysteries was: the coffin of Osiris has been found, and his corpse has been found. And here we have the { }. And now we can deify him, send him up to the sky, put in the eye of Horus, and dismiss him, so to speak, on his journey into the sky.

The search in Jerusalem, gentlemen, which the Ethiopian Church to this day celebrates at Easter, is in- -- superseded the Osirian worship. They go there, the Christian priests of this dis- -- of the Abyssinian Church, and search for the corpse of Jesus, and the great triumphant cry is -- means: "It's empty. We have not found Him. Osi- -- He is not an Osiris. It's not a superstition. It's not a -- a human body, that is then up to -- you see, mummified, and then bewitched, and filled with the eye of Horus."

So that's just a little -- one thing to show you, that the empty grave in Jerusalem was one attempt to supersede myth, the myth of the empires.

So the -- all the four Gospels, gentlemen, are anti-mythical organs of our faith developed to c- -- overcome the myth.

Another example. Very much is anti-Egyptian, or anti-empire. Also quite a telling story. When a priest today baptizes a child in the Catholic or the Episcopal Church, he puts his fingers into the nose and to the ear, spreads his fingers this way, and then puts some spittle on the -- on the mo- -- on the tongue of the newly baptized, to give him eternal life. That's a very strange custom for you, and in -- of course, in these Unitarian, modern branches of Christianity, that's all omitted.

It has a very deep reason, gentlemen, why this is done. In Egypt, when the phar- -- phar- -- Pharaoh built his pyramid, and his temple, he had himself hewn out in granite, cyanite -- one of the hardest stones there is, or in ma- -- no, not marble; it wasn't used in Egypt. Sometimes limestone. But usually granite. And this statue of his was endowed with eternal life. There was a famous ceremony of opening the mouth of the statue; and the priest had to climb up on this statue and use a -- instrument and put some spittle on this tongue of the -- of the

statue, and create eternal life for Pharaoh. But of course, a joke of an eternal life. Stone, as you know, and gold were worshiped in Egypt, because they didn't die. They were imperishable metals. I have talked to you about this, this worship of the imperishable in Egypt. And for this reason, the statues were supposed to be able to receive eternal life, to be vivified, too. They had to have their mouth open so that they could breathe then. And the attempt of opening the mouth and making it breathe is the ceremony imitated in baptism. Because if you do something to a child, to endow it with the human speech in the community, you see, you do something real. You give him that breath of life that is real. The child does the -- receive in baptism eternal life, participation in the community. To receive this name, receive this first word, that's no superstition. And just as the empty coffin, you see, in -- in Jerusalem means the same -- or this means the replacing of the myth of Osiris in the { } -- in our baptismal ceremony is very carefully adapted to -- you see, to oppose--or "to supersede" perhaps is the best word--to supersede the superstition of the statue-makers of antiquity who thought that the statue could, you see -- made to live, although it was dead stone and an idol.

These two examples may show you how the whole action of the Church, from the first day has been one of extreme precision. Every one, partial superstition of one of these four orders has had to be superseded. And it has been superseded by endowing the weak and the perishable with the eternal life, for example. You see, the suckling, the babe in the cradle has his lip opened, because the human word spoken this side of the grave, in our life, that is -- is full of eternal life, you see. We don't receive eternal life after we are dead. If we hadn't had it in our -- in our soul before, we're just going to hell. We can only go to Heaven if we have lived the good life here, before.

Now I warned you -- I -- gave you these -- I think two very important and very drastic examples: one at the beginning of life for the christened child, and one at the end of life for the burial, to show you that the Gospel is an instrument of combating myth. That's perhaps the shortest definition which may help you in this modern discussion of myth and Christianity. De-mythologizing and what all these people who -- who don't know how myth- -- mythical they themselves are, have invented to denigrate the straight road of the last 2,000 years out of myth into the freedom of the children of God.

You are surrounded by these -- by these imposters. And their line of resistance, gentlemen, their line of retreat--of all these modern scientists and so--is that they themselves cannot recognize their own myth. If you want to round out this picture of the fight of Christianity against myth, you must take one more step in our own time and say that what is called the spirit of our -- the times, gentlemen, is our myth. If you would -- could understand that the spirit of one

time is mythical--because it's perfectly arbitrary and accidental, and it vanishes very soon--then you would be free to recognize what is myth, and what is freedom. The free- -- you -- what you call the spirit of your own time, gentlemen, that is called in the Old -- New Testament, in its fight against -- against superstition or idolatry, the "myth." And modern man has a very careful separation. Other people live in a myth, and he lives as a contemporary with the latest headlines, and the broadcaster. And that's not a myth, he says. But what is a myth, gentlemen? Anything that is unverified, that is just of -- of the moment, or of one space -- one place. That's a myth. A partial truth sold for the whole truth. Something very simple.

So I think it is of eminent, practical value that you see the fight of the Church against myth. That's its lifeblood. The whole Bible is written against the myth, and you cannot understand the meaning of the Bible, if you think that it is on the side of myth. Since Moses is the first man who protested myth, who did everything, as you know, to free us from graven images, or taboos, or whatever. Think of circumcision, think of the Exodus from Egypt, think of the tearing down of the temple worship, and what- -- else it is. All the myth had to go. There's only one God for all peoples and for all tribes. And that broke of course -- the -- the origin of every tribe by its -- from its own ancestor, you see. And I told you, the myth of -- is exploded in the Bible, because all men have one pedigree, and there is no -- no Romulus and no Remus, and no first beginner of any one group. No Hengist and Horsa, and -- as in the Anglo-Saxon myth.

The four Gospels, gentlemen, have then found expression in four types of men: humanity after Christ, of course, had to develop, as I told you, servants, deacons; martyrs; apostles; and saints. And -- the first thousand years of our own era, gentlemen, are filled with the production of these new people that had never existed before. The most difficult for -- thing for you I think to understand is the distinction between a prophet and an apostle. The distinction is, of course, the coming of the Final Man in between. The prophet speaks of the Messiah as the blind speaks of color, you see; he hasn't seen it. But the apostle has still the prophetic vision about the future of the human race, the Apostles still say what's to come, but in the light of the Final Man. They have seen it. He has appeared. That's the meaning of the Epiphany. "Epiphany" means -- making His apparition, which we celebrate on January 6th, still -- especially in the Eastern churches. It's a great event, you see, the Epiphany, that the Final Man is -- has become known, and so His penetration, His return, His expanse, His mission, His conquest can now be understood in the light of His first appearance.

So if you understand the distinction between prophet and apostle, gentlemen, you, with one--I think--stroke of your imagination are free from the worst superstition of today, that Jesus was a prophet, or that there is no distinc-

tion between the Old Testament and the New Testament. It's all just "religion" or some such nonsense, you see. The Old Testament is the promise, and the New Testament is the fulfillment. And the Apostles are the answers to the prophets. It is not enough for -- yes?

({ }.)

You are too late, Mr. Amlicke. So -- come on, five minutes.

[tape interruption]

Gentlemen, I hope I have made room in your own mind now for the real facts about the history of our era. It is cluttered with your idea that every man belongs to -- the myth of his own time. And I have tried to open your vision to the fact that there have always been, for the last 2,000 -- 3,000 years, people like the prophets of Israel first, and then the Apostles and -- who have not belonged to their own time, and for this reason were able to save the times from destruction.

We have to found today a new prophetic and apostolic order. The churches no longer function in this way. The churches are not apostolic anymore, because they don't prophesy the coming of Christ. Pentecostal sects do it, and it's all split.

A hundred years ago, a very wise Italian said, "First the prophets went out of their own time; then the popes and the priests went out of their own time. But now in"--he wrote in 1850--"the secular man must band together and form people who are the opposite from journalists, who are the opposite from newspapermen, who are people who know the truth, because they have no axe to grind in their own time, who do not belong to their own time."

This order has still to be established, gentlemen. And some of you, I hope, will participate in this. There must be people who do not listen to the ra- -- radio. There must be people who don't read the papers. There must be people who cannot be drugged by the cold drugs in which you all indulge. Because the dope addicts are not the dangers at this moment in the -- of this country, but the news addicts, the people who live by the spirit of their own times, only. And the new order has to be founded, gentlemen. That's just upon us. And if it isn't founded, there will be no future in America. Because you don't want to have it. You don't want any future. You want -- belong to the moment, and the moment is always the last moment. Has no future.

There is no future in this country at this moment, because nobody puts his

foot into this future out of his own time. You are all proud if you are recognized members of the Rotary Club. You're all joiners, gentlemen. You join your own time. But gentlemen, the great task of humanity is to unite the times. You remember we have talked about this at great length. Now Jesus did this of course first, and He did it in a very practical manner, gentlemen. As you know, He died in the middle of His life, which He otherwise physically might have -- expected to live. And He prophesied the downfall of Jerusalem. And He charged the Apostles to remain and to fulfill in a second -- in their life His own office. The relation of the Savior and the Apostles is a very simple one, gentlemen. They continue His own life. It has been said very simple, that in the year 50, 17 years after His death, Peter and Paul were -- Christ. That's an exaggeration, because John probably would -- James would have counted in, too. The Apostles represent the living Christ in their own life.

Now that's nothing mysterious, gentlemen, because it was intended. Jesus left the Apostles on this earth in order to make them live the second half of His life. That's why the Church is not just the Christian Church, but the Christian apostolic Church, because the Apostles are not members of the Church, gentlemen. They are co-founders of the Church. The Apostles precede the Church. They have founded the churches in Rome, and in Corinth, and in Antioch. How could be members of the Church, since they were needed to bring down the Church into reality?

So the Apostles, gentlemen, have to wait till the downfall of Jerusalem, till the first temple is -- the second temple is destroyed, until the Jewish state is -- really has vanished. And the fiction of an ancient world has gone, you see, because there is nothing left of the old dispensation. And this is the -- what's "Vorsprung" in English? "Head start"? Advantage in time. What is it, you have 30 years ahead of others? You have a head start, or how do you call it? You have a -- you have the opposite of a handicap. What's the opposite of a handicap? Wie?

(Advantage.)

Ja, but in -- "advantage" is something that could be in money, or could be in weight or -- it is not an advantage. It's a -- it's a head start in time, you see. What? What?

({ }.)

Ooh. Well, it's very -- very -- cut and dried, gentlemen. You can't take Christianity scientifically enough. Sci- -- Christianity is the science of timing. That's what Christianity is, nothing else. It's the science of timing.

Nietzsche was a Christian, because he anticipated the downfall of the western world. In 1889, he said there would be a -- great world war--he didn't know it was true, but that didn't matter--which would destroy the western world. And in this anticipation, he anticipated the times. And he acted already, like an apostle, as -- as though he was the man who would have to live after this destruction. And don't believe that Je- -- Nietzsche wasn't a good Christian. He was. He only had to secularize, exactly as this Italian had asked, the timing, the science of timing, because the Churchmen have no longer salt, I mean -- they have gone to seed.

But this problem is eternal, that somebody has already to live the life or -- after the destruction that is on hand. That's the whole story of the Gospel of the destruction of the world, gentlemen. A Christian acts as though the world in which he lives certainly will come to an end; and he must live beyond this end. The Christians lived in 33, after the Lord had risen in their hearts, and they knew that they had to continue Him. That's the Resurrection. You cannot -- Chris- -- Christ has only risen in the heart of a Christian who says, "I have to keep the Lord now alive. He must rise from the dead. I'm responsible for it." You cannot look at the risen Christ, you see. You can only believe in Him.

But you are responsible. You are put behind His death, and He mustn't have died, because He has anticipated the end of your era, the end of the ancient world in which you live. In the same sense as Nietzsche acted in 1889, and finally went insane, because he saw that the world around him was just as yours -- the world is to this -- today. If he lived here today, he would do -- just have to do the same, because the world is by and large in 1889 at this moment. You are very backward. You are still before the two world wars. You haven't experienced them. You haven't seen that all the values of this worl- -- of this civilization are -- have -- have perished, or have no power.

You have no time sense. You can't time. You can -- nobody -- Bill Mitchell is the only man in this country who anticipated something, who sacrificed his career for saying, "You have to build aircraft." And he was laughed at, and courtmartialed and people don't understand: how can a man not say what he is expected to say at this moment. "Never say anything too early," you see, is the rule of a -- of a secular moon-calf in this country. And -- the idea of a Christian is that he has to write off the narrow future, because it's already doomed.

This is the story of the apostolic church, gentlemen: there will be a Christian Church, or Christianity, as long as there is a group of men who jump from the bandwagon before the bandwagon -- draws into the abyss. If you don't get a group who jump off the bandwagon before it comes to the -- to the abyss, there of course is no living faith, you see, then the -- the civilization is doomed. And

then a partial disaster must occur.

As far as the Americans are just one group on this globe, gentlemen, they are doomed, because there will not always be a United States of America. There must be some elements in this country who do everything possible to connect, to prepare, to anticipate the merger of this country in a global society. In one form or other, you have to do it. Every one of you has to contribute something, even if you only send your -- your second-hand shirts to the Hungarians. Something has to be done in the form of such an action which anticipates a larger unity of the human race.

That's the essence of the Christian Church, gentlemen, the timing, although the catastrophe is still in the future. You all know that after the milk is spilled, it is very simple; or after the -- horse has been stolen, then you lock the barn door. That's not Christianity, you see.

But -- to anticipate the kingdom of Heaven before the city on this earth is destroyed and burned, that was the great act of Jesus, that He said, "I have to come in the last minute where I can act freely, on faith and not on knowledge." Thirty-seven years before Jerusalem was destroyed, He went to the Cross. I think that's His greatest act. A very human act, gentlemen, but a very divine act, because you say that isn't done. "I wait 37 years, and after nous -- after us, the deluge," you see. "I won't -- I will die perhaps happily in 69," you say. "My widow will still get my life insurance paid out, and then in 70, the city will be destroyed, and the Metropolitan Life will be bombed. But what is that to us? We then go to the Canary Islands."

That's, by and large, how most people live. They think it will last long enough to carry us. Isn't that true, I mean? You all live that way, more or less. And the Christian is a man who is so in tune with the times, gentlemen, that he anticipates the end of all partial eras, of all partial undertakings. And he acts as though the United States, or Dartmouth College, or what-not is already over.

Gentlemen, I want to show you that this Christian attitude is not limited to official Christianity. There is a very great example of this in the story of the great -- Roman who conquered the Roman -- who conquered the countries, the provinces for the Roman empire. The victor of Carthage and of Greece was called Scipio Africanus, Scipio {Amelianus}. He was the grandson of the -- adopted grandson of the first victor over the Carthag- -- Carthaginians. And he -- his -- the year of triumph in which the Roman empire came into final existence was 146 B.C. And it's quite important for you to know that Christianity is a universal attitude. And it is only in Christ that it has taken shape in the form of a incor- -- a corporate body, where people can join together and fortify each other. But

before you could already act Christian-like.

This is my story. It's told by the old historian of the Roman empire, Polybius. And Polybius was the -- the teacher of Scipio, of the great general. And Scipio was in Carthage -- at the conquest of Carthage, in -- sitting on -- high on a hill, prepared to receive the surrender of the last queen of the Punians, of the Phoenicians, in Carthage, and this -- her general, her commander-in-chief.

And they came, and bowed, and surrendered. And Polybius, seated next to Scipio, noticed that the general was not only holding his toga, his mantle before his face, but was sobbing, and reciting a Greek verse. Romans were then very educated people, you see, and they know as much Greek as you all know French.

And -- Polybius was very sur- -- surprised. Here was a victorious general, and he didn't smile, and he didn't laugh, and he didn't rejoice, and he sobbed, and he quoted a Greek verse, and what's all this about?

So he asked him afterwards, "What's the story?"

And Scipio said, "I couldn't help recalling the verse from The Iliad--from Homer," and you see how Homer dominated the ancient -- mind, the -- the Muses of Greece having conquered this Roman. And he said, "I said to myself the line from Homer, which Hector says to his wife Andromache, before he goes to his -- to his death, `There shall be a day when there will be no Troy. And the Trojans will perish, and their king, Priamus.' And I thought"--Scipio adds -- and now comes the Christian attitude, gentlemen, which is probably hidden from you as a -- you will not understand that this is a great action--he said, "I had to think of Rome at this moment, when Carthage surrendered. And I saw that one day my own Rome would perish."

Now this story has impressed me very deeply. And I invited 30 colleagues of mine of Dartmouth College in 1945, and we talked about the behavior towards Europe, of the victorious Americans; and I read these lines. And these gentlemen laughed. And that's a very poor prognostication for the United States. Because instead of weeping, by anticipating that there should be such a day of reckoning for the United States, they could only see that it was very funny, that in the moment of victory one should be overcome by such -- anticipation.

Gentlemen, my -- my lesson I learned from this quotation is that probably the Roman empire lasted 600 years, because its founder--Scipio--anticipated its downfall. That's the rule of Christianity, gentlemen, that life everlasting comes only to those who anticipate their own catastrophe. If you are willing to write off

your own future conquests, you can make a lasting contribution to the order of life. Of course, then you will be moderate. You will not, you see, overshoot your mark. You will do your duty. But if you just laugh off your triumph and say, "That's, you see, all -- one day's work -- within the day's work," you will do nothing about the future. And just as we have spilled the milk in two wars, and haven't -- gotten nothing out of these two victories, because on Armistice Day, everybody was high, and 10 years everybody -- later, everybody was low. Now the Christian attitude was -- would be to be very low in the moment of victory, and to be rather desperate about what to do with the victory.

It's a very strange story, gentlemen. Why should the Roman empire have lasted 600 years? If you think that the United States began to be foreshadowed in 1492 from afar, and that they have now existed for the last 50 years as the big empire, after the English navy was played out--since 1898, you may say, the United States are a great power, not before--it is impossible for you and me to believe that we could last another 400 years. It's just impossible. You know this very well, too. Four hundred years? We cannot fathom 400 years.

Now the Roman empire was founded in 146 B.C., gentlemen, and it lasted at least till 476 A.D., and finally down to 1806, the last Roman emperor laid down his crown, in 1805. So that's quite a story, 2,000 years. And the Roman empire was already in this sense a -- a participant of the Christian era, in a -- in simple way. In a lo- -- as a lonely wolf, you may say, this man Scipio said to himself that the victory should be treated as an anticipation of his own, you see, defeat. One day his empire would be in the same predicament. He stepped out of the Roman myth. He saw the empires fall, as empires, you see, as partial orders.

"Let Empires Fall," there's a hymn, isn't there? Who knows this hymn? There's a Protestant hymn in our hymnbook, "Let Empires Fall." Nobody knows it? That's a Christian notion, you see, that the member of an empire can say of his own empire, "Let -- let it fall." Of course, it's in the Lutheran hymns: "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God." It also says, you see, "let empires fall."

So I warn you: the essence of Christianity is only the power to align all the people who share this faith, but to be a Christian before Christ has always been possible. Christians have existed from the first day of creation. But the knowledge that this is the tasks in -- united, that is the -- what Chris- -- Christ brought into the world, that we can fix our view on Him, and in seeing what He did, find each other in -- as all- -- allies of the same task. That's called "the Church," gentlemen. And it's quite important for you to know what the word "Church" means. The Church is the union of those who await -- for the coming of the Lord. It's an eschatological entity. That is, it isn't that Jesus has lived some time ago, that is the important question of the Church. But the Lord is contained in the

word "Church." K-y-r -- "kyrios" is "the lord." And "{kyriake}" is the gathering around the coming of the Lord. And the coming of the Lord enables us to anticipate the downfall of our various myths. Being a member of a tribe or a family, being a member of an empire, being a member of the Club of Mutual Self-Adulation in Greenwich Village, and being a member of the prophetic group -- people of Israel is not enough. We have still to wait for tomorrow's mandate. And the -- tomorrow's mandate is original. And the coming of the -- the gathering of the people who expect the coming of the Lord means that we cannot be satisfied of having inherited any quality, you see. We must be free to shun this quality. The king must also be ready to become the victim. The prophet must become the sent one. The poet must become the poem. And certainly the priest must become willing to become the living sacrifice.

So the problem of the Apostles, gentlemen, is that in every generation there has to be identity with the founder. The apostolic character of the Church makes it anticipate already the downfall of the civilization in which it is. If Mr. Toynbee now writes or Spengler write about the downfall of civilization, gentlemen, that's an old Christian heirloom, so to speak. The Christians have always expected the downfall of any civilization. That's nothing new. They, with great emphasis, rediscover this. Because in the 19th century, the usual optimism of progress was that there would be no downfall of civilization. It was very unChristian. Scipio knew better.

So this is -- these are just fragments of the Christian faith, which you get in these people, like Toynbee or Spengler. They are very right, and very important. But it is nothing surprising. Any -- any deep -- person with some faith in God has always known that God and the creations of mankind are not identical, and that the civilizations certainly are perishable.

Fortunately. You really think that New York is such a great invention?

Is it 3 o'clock? Allow me a -- just enough to round out this picture for today, gentlemen.

The apostolic church is identical with the Lord's life on this earth, in -- incognito. That is, it anticipates a downfall of values which the secular mind, the secular -- the child of the world denies. The -- the -- this side of this insight into our own -- partiality, our own myth, the people say, "It's all wonderful; it's -- everything is fine; we just bathe in sunshine." And you just have to go probably to Palm Beach and to Miami Beach to convince yourself how most people in this country live in antiquity, and haven't even heard of the Christian era. When I read of these racetracks in -- in Florida--I've never been there, I mean--I just wonder. What these people live for, or live by, or live at, or -- I don't know. They

all perish. And they should perish. They don't deserve to live. It's my honest conviction, gentlemen. I don't think that people who live by and at and near racetracks are -- deserve their salt, I mean. It's just funny to me. It's a foam.

And -- and I don't see why there must be Dodger fans, and so on. I'm immune to this. Pardon me, I'm very stupid, but I have to tell you, I think you have other such -- such things that seem to you perfectly unnecessary. With me, it's just this organized, commercialized sport, which I just cannot -- cannot see as -- as -- human.

This is always with us, gentlemen. In every moment in the Christian era, gentlemen, half of the world is pre-Christian. This you must understand. That since we live after Christ, we have not yet the right to say that everything is after Christ. That's not true. Many things are before Christ. Otherwise you cannot understand the challenge put before you to decide in which era you want to live. You can live a pre-Christian life, and you can live a post-Christian life. But it is not true that you -- can be left without a decision. Everybody has to decide. "Once in every -- for every man and nation comes the hour to decide." And that's exactly this decision: in which era do I live? Do I live with the power to stand the -- the burial, and the funeral, and the death of my most beloved and cherished worldly possessions? Or do I have to cling to them to the bitter end? Or is it better to bury my dead in ti- -- good time, and to begin a new order while I'm still free?

Jesus could have waited, and could have led a very prosperous life, obviously, and had -- could -- He would have died in -- in good time, before the destruction of Jerusalem, gentlemen. You see, He could have -- remained a member of His own time. Do you see that? That's of course a great temptation. Why not live in your own time a good life? Why did He do that? Why? You have to answer this yourself, gentlemen.

But as long as there is anything like Christianity, gentlemen, it will always consist of the hard core of those whose eyes are open for the -- for the transiency of the order in which they live. And they will say that the weak, mortal man, with his very flimsy life, is more than the government, and the Church, and the arts, and the sciences, and the sports. But he's more eternal, more everlasting. And the death of Jesus is an attempt to prove this to the powers that be. He is eternal, and where is the Roman empire? And where is Pontius Pilate? And where is the temple of Jerusalem?

And this reversal, gentlemen, of values, this reversal of direction is the step into our own era: that man, naked; despised, a servant, a victim, a -- a sent child of God without any official status, and merely a poem of God, not recog-

nized as a genius, that He is in the long run stronger than all the dreadnoughts of civilization.

Thank you.