Transcript

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{word} = hard to understand, might be this

...to their children, and respect the genius of the child. What I have called "genius," you now understand, the continuous the spiritual life of the child. That is in itself meaningless, because it can become an idol; it can kill the life of this mother, as it did in this one case. And hurt the child, too, because the child isn't helped by getting a neurotic mother in the long run.

So that you have now -- and that is now left, I think, in our time to a -- fewer and fewer people. The people who want to free themselves from the dogma of their own age must wake up to the totality of the dogma between the ages. This woman, if she wants to live right, is now suddenly called out of the ordinary. She has to know more about her responses and reactions as -- in the natural stream of consciousness would be demanded from her. As long as you live the life of your time, you have not to ask these fundamental questions. And to a certain degree, her behavior and her handling of her children is very beautiful. And everybody agrees that she is doing a good job. But there comes this point where she has to limit it. And in this very moment, gentlemen, where you have to go against the spirit of the age, for the salvation of her daughter as much as for her own salvation, the strange thing is that knowledge, consciousness are not -- no longer philosophies, thoughts, or ideas, you see, but they are necessities. They are lifesaving. That is what the ancient people n- -- called sal- -- the "question of salvation." And in order to know what you need for your salvation, you have to emerge, to rise above the spirit of your time.

William James, Jr., did it by the love of his father. He never forgot the spiritual experience; he never -- forgot his gratitude; he never forgot that his father was a religious genius, if ever there was one. So he identified himself with his father in part. This good woman, however, and you and your parents, and your -- your contemporaries, will have to rediscover the meaning of the full freedom of man, that although he is steeped in the spirit of his age, and you may trust that this spirit has in itself some positive, creative meaning, you see, he must be able to go so deep back into the bowel of -- of his heart, as the Bible calls it, to see where this grew out or -- out of our {heart power} so much so that now she is -- or he is -- entitled to grow another offshoot, the next one, and to limit this branch of the universal dogma of the spiritual life between people. Can you understand what I mean, that it is necessary not to say to this woman, "Go beyond there -- your love to your daughter. Go beyond the spirit of the 19th century as the century of the children," you see? But we have to say to her, "Go back to the roots out of which, in 1850, this very special feature grew, and renew this power."

Do you understand why I think it is wiser to speak of going back to the deep center of which this one trend developed, you see, and not to say -- exaggerate this trend, do more, more. You cannot. I mean, after all, you see, to limit it in our {heart} powers. You have to show her that the main point is to keep the heart itself intact, the heart of the world, mankind's heart. This center, this common heart of all men -- out of which the 19th century conceived this idea of being the century for the children -- only by going below the offshoot, the branch, back to the heart, the growing point of this plant, of love, of mu- -- mutual fellowship, of in- -- interdependence, can this woman, so to speak, be converted to a wholesome life and see that she does not commit a crime, so to speak, when she would tell her daughter, "No. This is more important for you, my dear child, that I now have the benefit of a refresher course in life, of staying, you see, away. And you will put up for half an hour without me." And of course, the best thing would have been if she hadn't telephoned at all, and hadn't asked her daughter any question, you see. And just done it. And known that -- that -- this is the typical case where Luther would have said, {pecca} fortitor. Sin with fortitude, and with all your might and main, because it is sin only in the light of your spirit, but what is moving you is something bigger than your temporary spirit, you see. It is able to recreate the order of the universe.

Now, I think you will be faced with this. The whole question of religious education is a question where of the parents today are {asked} in this country, you see: is it enough to wait until the child is wanting something? And the whole elective question. I mean, is it right to ask a 6-year-old child what courses it shall take, or a 12-year-old boy which language he wants to learn? Is it right to ask a 2-year-old child what it wants to eat? It is not right. It isn't right. But you do this. It's demanded from our society.

So I only wanted to say that the overcoming of a dogma is the reason for the existence of the dogma of the Church. The reason why dogma is there is not because you and I, before we have lived, need dogma. But we need dogma in order to free ourselves from our own dogmas. This universal dogma is based on the experience that Father, Son, and Holy Spirit -- the three-generation problem, you see -- is something that in any age demands from any member of this age an act of -- of transgression, of going beyond that which he thinks is fundamentally the easiest thing to do. In this case, to go to the telephone and make yourself dependent on your daughter's decision if you are allowed to see -- to join a party or not. It is so simple as that.

Dogma is in the world against dogma. And you will not understand the dogma of any creed, or any faith if you do not see that you are dogmatic. The men who talk against dogma are always the people who are the most dogmatic. And they don't know it. The ma- -- the point is, gentlemen, the immersion in the

spirit of your own age is unconscious, is this side of consciousness. The goingbeyond the spirit of your age can only be achieved by breaking out, so to speak, into consciousness. You have to burst forth into full consciousness. That's why the Church, for example, has always demanded a confession. But the confession makes no sense for per- -- people who haven't lived and haven't been -- found themselves to be prisoners of their own age. It is only when you have to break the prison of the dogma of your age that you discover the larger freedom.

The United States, gentlemen -- and the world at large, the Western world -- have gone in the last 90 years through a strange experience. And I want to make two points about this. The one is: you must learn to treat a hundred years like one day. You must learn to treat a hundred years like one day. The time from Henry James, Sr., to this -- today is just one minute. It isn't simply possible for any reasonable person, gentlemen, and it isn't necessary, to treat the century of the child as one minute in the history of our race. And from 1865, gentlemen, to this day, we try -- must try to treat the time as at a standstill, as being on one level, on one level of behavior, because this good woman did exactly what Emerson recommended people to do. She's just a contemporary of Ralph Waldo Emerson in this attempt to -- to let the child grow spontaneously, and bring no pressure, or Henry James, Sr., or what- -- whoever you take there. This -- all this gospel was preached then. And it was a gospel; it was the translation of the Gospel in the times of the -- one age, you see.

The second thing is, gentlemen, that as a consequence of these people's dogma, they could not convey to their children the spirit of their own age. They could not convey to the children the spirit of their own age. They abdicated. Now this has taken the form of the two world wars. The two world wars were enacted, as you know, by -- in this country by Woodrow Wilson and by Franklin Delano Roosevelt. They were enacted in Russia by the czars and by Stalin. They were enacted in Germany by a man called Ludendorff, first, and by Mr. Hitler in the Second World War. They were enacted in France by Clemenceau in the First World War and by de Gaulle in the Second. And only in England -- by the grace of God -- is there one man, Winston Churchill, at least who has lived to s- -- to tell the whole tale, so to speak, to live through both wars, which again is a strange fact.

The First World War, gentlemen, and the Second World War, have been led with complete blindness as to the fact of their identity. The only man who has known all the time that it was the same war fought by two generations is Winston Churchill. He has said of the Second World War "the unnecessary war." In all other countries, gentlemen, it was strictly forbidden to say that the Second World War was nothing but the repetition for the benefit of the younger generation, which had been left without the benefit of their parents' experience.

So we have here, I -- I told you, the result of the giving-up of this problem of the interaction of the generations. This is the test case, the two world wars. Mr. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt, on December 8th, 1941, said to his wife, "Will you kindly invite Mrs. Woodrow Wilson to sit with you in the gallery of the Congress, which now is going to declare war?" This he was not allowed, however, to do in public. I always think of Franklin D. Roosevelt waking up every morning of his life and saying, "What is the mistake Woodrow Wilson -- has made in this situation which I now have to avoid?" You know, inter-party system asking the opponent -- has been the principle of Franklin D. Roosevelt, because Woodrow Wilson miscarried when he didn't ask Mr. Henry Cabot Lodge to go with him to the peace conference in Paris. And so on and so forth. This is -- the same is true of Hitler and Ludendorff. The repetition, according to the degree of paganism in the various countries, the repetitive character of the war was not allowed to be mentioned. And you can grade the various countries according to this taboo of never saying that this war is after all nothing but the repetition of the first -- of the -- the other war.

The cycle, as you know, of these two wars begins in 1904 with the attack of the Japanese on -- on Korea, on Inchon, on -- they called it at that time "Chemulpo." But even the change of name is typical of our time, where there shall be no cohesion, there shall be no overlapping of times. Every age to itself. So when you read the history of the first Russo-Japanese war, and you read that they -- they torpedoed the Russian battleships in Chemulpo, in Korea, you do not -- are not even reminded of the fact that that is the place where MacArthur landed in September 14th, 1950, you see. But it is the same place. And the roles enacted there by Russia and Japan have been enacted in 1950, et cetera, by the Chinese or the North Koreans, as you know, and the United States of America. But that doesn't mean that it isn't the same event, that it is there where the world comes to an end, so to speak. The globe becomes the globe and the planet becomes the planet, because they meet at the -- at the other end, so to speak, of this round earth.

Here, I should put in 7, because as you know, that's the year in which the United States entered the war. Now, again, the United States at the same -- in this war, too, are drawn into it, after -- after two and-a-half years. The issue, the problem -- organization of the world in some peaceful manner -- has been the same both ways -- times, as you know, that you couldn't go home from this -- such a world war without doing something for the open discussion of your grievances, so that a war should not come as it had come in 1914. How had it come, gentlemen? It had come as inevitable, and it had come as absolutely unforseen. It had come -- these are the qualities. Will you kindly write down? Inevitable, unforseen -- a contradiction in terms, as you will admit -- unforseen, aimless. Aimless.

We came from a century, gentlemen, of youth, of a century of children and parents to themselves. No aims, therefore, beyond a generation. Now all wars, gentlemen, can only be fought when and as long three generations are not in accord with their aims and their purposes, because the fathers, the {Senate} sent {their} children -- the soldier into war. And the soldiers are killed, and their children inherit the earth. If you have not three generations acting together, you can't have war. If you say every generation has its own aims, the children cannot be sacrificed for the aims of the child- -- of parents, obviously the children are not obliged to go to war, which is just logical.

There was a famous saying in France, between the two world wars, which ran: La guerre, ce sont nos pŠres. That is in -- in English, "War -- this last war, our parents', our fathers' business," you see. "Leave us alone." That was the slogan in Europe. La guerre, ce sont nos pŠres. You understand? Very important, because it bears out this fruit of such an education, that the children felt, "Well, the stupidity of our parents cannot be visited upon us." They were through with this -- with the ancient, Old Testament law, of course, that the sins of their parents are visited on the children in the third and fourth generation. You know that this is simple true, but they denied it. La guerre, ce sont nos pŠres.

In Germany we had the same -- we have the youth movement. And I had a terrible fight with these youngsters, who also didn't want to liquidate the First World War. They said, "We have nothing to do with it. We dream our own life. We go into the you- -- paradise of youth. And we live the good life and that's all you can demand from us." And we -- I had -- this has been in print, a discussion between the leadership of one generation and -- and the business of a teacher who tries to dovetail the generations. I called it at that time, "Leader and Teacher." And it's in a periodical called The Creature, which is just our bad luck, you see. Creature -- as creatures, we are marooned in one age only, of many ages, that I tried to -- to reconcile the thriving youth movement of Germany with some service -- in the service of the re-ordering of Europe. I didn't succeed. But at least the -- the -- the problem was very clearly put, and that's why I founded these work services there at that time, to force upon the youth some service -- in its generation at a time when, as here in the Gay Twenties, you see, the generation -- the younger generation simply thought it had the power, if nothing else, the power to forget everything that had gone before.

This strange fact, gentlemen, of -- of two wars fought on exactly the same lines by two generations who, in some countries, as in America, were even anxious to obliterate their identity -- which is very strange, you see -- has very much to do with our problem of the Jameses. It has come to a miracle of mo- -- much -- many older people that the majority of young American boys did go -- to fight in Korea. And there has been, as you know, many times voiced, amazement

that these youngsters, without understanding what it was all about, were willing to fight in the First World War and in the Second again -- with some reluctance, perhaps, but at least they did.

Now gentlemen, this gives you a lesson, that in a decent human society, it isn't you and I who have to know what we are doing. If there is faith between people, we -- one person does because the other person says so. If you -- have belief in your elders, you do it before you have understood it. This is the same question as of this child and his mother, who goes to a party, you see. If the mother says, "You must understand and tell me if I have to come back," you see, that's the -- the official ideology of our day -- time, you see. But if the mother is loved by this child, and the child has the minimum respect and faith in the mother's decision, it is wrong to demand from the child to know, and to know what it's all about. Now this seems to be a very small decision, but it's very much the same as in a war. The boys of 20 cannot understand what it's all about, but if they have every reason to believe that their elders are responsible and will not jettison the life of their loved children for nothing, then they go, if the father or the grandfather, and the generals, and the judges later, and the president say, "Children, you must defend the home, our home," you see. If there had been a fire, you do not ask questions from the chief of the fire department why you are sent out to carry this pail of water to this { }. You just you do it. He { } understand. You don't.

But you come from a time where you actually and seriously believe that a -- the individual soldier has to know what he's fighting for. This has never been in any war, believe me. In the warpath of the red Indians, it wasn't possible to explain to anyone, and it hasn't been true in -- about the Civil War, and it hasn't been true about any war, that the people actually understood fully the issues. Here, I mean, in Vermont, a soldier might have -- go to war against slavery, when it wasn't slavery; it was secession -- well, what Lincoln really forced, you see, to raise an army and to declare war on the South. And so on and so forth. I doubt that it is very important whether a soldier knows what he's fighting for, if he's completely tuned -- in tune with his country. In the process then, if the war drags on, he will get information and -- at the end, he may fully understand. But I don't think he should -- you should ask that he should begin -- he should understand fully in the -- in the first place before he decides. That's asking too much.

You have to write off a part of your gospel of the environ- -- of the Enlightenment, that everybody has to know everything. This is idiotic. Then there would be no division of labor with regard to knowledge. But knowledge is, of course, sparse, gentlemen. You think it can just be scattered. But you cannot know serious business if it isn't our business. And we cannot know how serious

it is before it is our business. So before you are soldiers, you read even the political issues with a vague understanding as your -- our friend told you -- told us. Well, you participate, you are informed. But you say, "Well, I am not informed enough to pass judgment on this." But when the Congress declares war, then the judgment has been made and then you -- now you have then to learn by the facts of life, by joining the army, what it's all about; but you can only know by participation. You cannot know beforehand. Can you see the point?

And yet you come from a dogmatic century, gentlemen, which sold you the idea that a young man cannot make any sacrifice before he has fully understood what it's all about. I'm sorry, gentlemen. You will never see such a world. And the sooner you write off this as a bad philosophy, the sooner you will come to know what philosophy can do and what it cannot do. This is an idiotic gospel, and I think nothing hamstrings more American education than the idea that it is not so. The general idea is that any man -- any voter and so on, does not vote for General Taft or General Eisenhower, but for the issues. My -- my experience in this country so far has been -- I have celebrated yesterday my 20th anniversary -- is that the people only vote for Eisenhower or Taft and Truman, and for nothing else. They -- have people they trust and they have people they don't trust. That's the first thing. And later in -- in the process of participation, of course, they come to form their judgments, too.

The double war, gentlemen, is the payoff for the double standard of the generations in the last century, for saying that genera- -- every generation can have its own standards, and the parent as parent doesn't exist as a moral entity. The parents of the First World War have not been able to convey to their children their convictions. They haven't. And you may even say they had no convictions, gentlemen, because that only is more than opinion which we are forced to convey to our children. It is impossible, gentlemen, to form more than an opinion something which I do not wish to propagate.

And here you come to this result of the last century in another respect. The result of the last century in its disintegration of the relation of parents and children, and teachers and students, has been that -- propagation of the Gospel has been replaced by propaganda. Propaganda does not include the propagator of the propaganda. Propagation does. A father can teach his children only that which he believes himself. A propagandist can teach anybody anything over the radio for which he is paid, or which he has some such interest, without believing in it himself at all. You know that.

Now, you are so much victims of modern propaganda, that you even believe that all propaganda is of the same brand, and that only those who do not propagate their faith are decent, and everybody who wants to make disciples is

indecent. Gentlemen, I want to make disciples. Certainly. But it is claimed as bad -- bad taste in this college: "You mustn't make disciples." Gentlemen, then I couldn't teach. And therefore you have no teaching in this college, because nobody wants to do anything but sug- -- make suggestions, and perhaps it's a good idea. Perhaps you look at it in your own way. I think that's silly; it's a complete waste of time. If I am not convinced, that is, if I do not think that my -- my thought must bear fruit, I certainly am not adequate for teaching. Teaching means the propagation, you see, of the truth, and can only propagate it if you get hold of this truth, because I say so.

Now all this is against the trend of this last century in this country. A friend of mind asked the superintendent of schools why her three children hadn't learned anything in the schools of their town in California. And the superintendent wrote back and said, "Lady, forgive us. For the last 30 years, we have not believed in teaching." That is America. We have believed in making the children happy and giving them luncheons. And taking school -- I mean, school buses to the -- and making them read funnies. Or taking them to all kinds of inspection trips, or what-not. We have made them fun, but you haven't been allowed to learn anything, gentlemen. That's why your mind has gone so absolutely color-blind.

You haven't believed in teaching, and that how -- as you see, it's all one thing. The century of the child. You -- we have waited until you will be good enough to learn something -- or not to learn something, but to say something, to think something, or what-not. Now we have, of course, always reaped the good and the bad of these fruits. I -- don't think that I'm blind to the greatness of this century. This is a very great attempt, but you can also see that it is only one attempt. This is what you have to keep in mind. I'm not disparaging this. My own parents have allowed me all the liberty and freedom. But I think I am a little bit the first Henry James in -- in reverse. I mean, I woke up in the -- by the -- the Russian-Japanese war, and this is my whole life story -- to the fact that there had to be authority, and that there couldn't be -- shouldn't be a revolution. My -- my -- my horror of the Russian revolution was when -- there when I was -- well, how old was I then? 16 years old -- I don't know why, but that's how it happened. And for all my life I have devoted to the question -- of this question where -- of which I am trying now to give you the vivid picture, so that you see it is our task.

What are we to do then if the generation of children which finally matures says, "We need authority"? This is what has happened. After a hundred years, you see, of devoting all the energy, all the savings of a country to the freedom of education of the child, to forgetting teaching and to say that only the students matter, and only the -- the children matter, the -- you find a generation of children of whom I feel to be the first-born, but of whom your children will all

be members. I am the head of a group which now, as children, says, "Lo and behold! We need authority." My genius is in -- in looking for the amount of authority that is needed, you see. I don't know how. I don't know why. I'm perfectly free to find any solution that is feasible. But I know one thing: that this mustn't happen again, you see. That such a waste, such a -- of an unnecessary war, such a catastrophe of complete forgetfulness, of la guerre, ce sont nos pŠres, of progressive education, of all this nonsense which is at this time visiting America, you see -- one generation Communist, and the next McCarthy, and nobody knowing, you see, how it all -- is all about. Just this -- this twist of the human mind. It's too much.

Now we have therefore today this central -- this central question that the children are conservative and the parents are liberal. The -- what the liberals thought was impossible. Or the children are reactionary, so to speak. Mr. McCarthy has a fan mail, as you know, of hundred -- thousands of people, and very many young people. And rightly so, I mean. It's crude. It's coarse, but I can fully understand it, because these children all of a sudden realized that if they have to be soldiers that it is better some order over three generations, because you cannot be a soldier, gentlemen, without the three-generation principle. And the threegeneration principle is on one side, and the principles by which Henry James educated his son are on the other side, and they are in themselves not to be reconciled -- reconciled so easily. It's not so very simple.

So we have today the fact, gentlemen, that the fathers are all Williams Jameses, and the sons are, so to speak, all Henry Jameses, Sr., at least. That is, they speak again out of the fullness of an eternal gospel of something lasting, something embracing the human race, and something that tries to avoid -- that every generation just does anything it pleases.

If you begin to see this, then you will understand why I am very interested in this dogma, gentlemen, which is part of the Christian dogma, that before God, there is no time. That what we say, the Creed -- Father, Son, and Holy Ghost -- and what we say with Henry James, Sr., and William James, Jr., and what we live in the two world wars, and what I teach you in this classroom for two hours a day, that this is the same, regardless whether it stretches out over millions of years, or whether it stretches out over five minutes. What I tried to show you is that this body of time, gentlemen, in its relationship between a past, present, and future, is equally complex, is equally marvelous, is equally mysterious, whether you think it up now, at this moment, as students in Dartmouth, with regard to your parents and teachers and your own children, or even if you only think it in terms of your four years in college with what you believed before you came here and what you are going to do when you go out from here. Wherever you have man, he is in this same strange quandary: that he must

continue what others have done before him, and he must begin something what others must continue after him.

Therefore, to convey conviction and to inherit conviction is the essence of your fruitful living. Therefore this is the essence of all questions today of the philosopher, nothing about the world, nothing about pessimism, socialism, materialism. I mean, who cares? The main question is: how am I able to continue something which my fathers began? And how am I able to start something which my grandchildren will continue? If this cannot be, gentlemen, then there is no meaning in life, absolutely no meaning, because nothing, gentlemen, a man can do himself the -- the final result of the -- all these analyses ought to be for you -- we come too late to our own lives. We come too late to our own lives unless we are allowed to continue what is worthwhile, and unless we are going to rely on other people to do with our lives something in continuation.

When I now know all these things, gentlemen, unless you do something with this, I have known all this in vain, because obviously I have not been able to prevent the two world wars, although I knew all this since 1904. All I have learned is how to teach it, how to preach it, how to convey it to you, how to show that these events are setting the pace of your own life. You, perhaps, by my early teaching, can at 20 already do something in time.

Gentlemen, we all come too late to ourselves. Will you take this down? We all come too late to ourselves, with our self-knowledge. Anything -- you are all so clever, you are so psychologically minded, you want to psychologize, and to know yourself. All right, know yourself, gentlemen. But know one thing: what you learn by experience has to be inherited by somebody else before he -- anybody is really helped, because you have spilled the milk, you see. You have gotten into trouble with a girl, or with debts, or with gambling, or with -- with intellectual mistakes, or -- choosing a wrong college, or what-not, you see. But you can prevent another man to do the same thing. Yourself, you are {done with}. I mean, you have all the scars of your mistakes. We all come, with regard to our experienced knowledge, too late to ourselves.

Well, I mean, in minor matters in -- in -- you don't come too late. You know -- well, I mean, you can make an invention, spending -- like the Wright Brothers -- 10 years on it and still be lucky and find it yourself. But if you analyze it carefully, every mistake we make, every experience of which we say "No, don't repeat it," you see, after all has been made. So the "don't" which we then write on the table -- on the door of this experiment, or this experience, you see, can only benefit ourselves as different people. We have changed, and we don't have to do it a second time. That's perfectly true. But the person who went through the wrong door is no longer there. Only gentlemen, if your children -- or the next

generation -- aren't your physical children, of course -- can represent your best aims and your best knowledge, can we want to make any experiences. Experience has to be conveyed in order to be experience. My own experience cannot benefit my s- -- my old self. As I said, it can benefit myself, but then I have to analyze carefully and say, "I am not really the same person now. I have been changed by this experience, and now my other man -- my next man, so to speak, doesn't repeat it. But then I am a chameleon. I have just gone from one transformation to the other."

This whole question, gentlemen, of today, continuation of effort, in order to have mea- -- give meaning to any effort, is the new question of our time. It has never been asked by all -- any philosophers. We call it today with a very poor expression, "the philosophy of time." Many people speak about the secret and mysteries of time today. But I want to draw your attention to the fact, gentlemen, that we have here in this course, on the escape from history -- "America's escape from history," as you could call it -- as showing you that we are speaking of experienced time. We are not speaking of time as we look at it, with a stopwatch, or with a -- by the clock. What you and I experience is that once we have experienced something, it's so much water over the dam unless the -- its fruit, its content, its meaning can be conveyed to somebody else, who is still before the jump, before the event, before falling into the -- into the Connecticut River.

Now, as you know, there are two choices for the continuation of experience. One is: no trespassing. We just prevent the next person of jumping into the river or exploding the firecrackers on July 4th. We just forbid. That's just the German principle, you know, verboten. You just don't allow anybody to make the same experience again. You see, you exclude all negative experience. Obviously, gentlemen, the new order of society, you will have to avoid this mousetrap. It's too simple. The experience of a -- one generation has -- can never consists in simply saying, "No other man must make the experience which is -- we found to be fruitless or negative." It also cannot run, "Make all the same experiences as we have done and found fruitful." Many parents try to -- give their children the same opportunities they have found useful in their own life. Send them to Europe, you see. I tried to make my horse -- my son ride horseback because I love horseback riding. Of course, he never learned how to ride, because his father told him so. See -- you -- you -- this is very complicated. We cannot return, in other words, gentlemen, to 1850. The times of simply restoring the authority of the parents over the children is over. The result of what we have lived through, the last hundred years, cannot have the -- the character of an interlude, so that we just go back to normalcy. There is no normalcy, obviously, in human relations.

So gentlemen, we have two things. The simple way of re-establishing the

authority by having the child repeat the "yes" and "no" of their father -- that's what it is, "yes" and "no" of their father -- is not the solution. We must never forget that the children today -- and I myself, too -- have been allowed by my father to discover authority under my own steam. So the new authority, gentlemen, is voluntarily discovered. That is a very strange story. It is voluntarily discovered by the young against the authoritarian elders who had ceased to be authoritarian. That's a very queer world.

So gentlemen, I have to admit that my good father and my teachers allowed me to discover the anti-doctrine, the doctrine which turned against them. Therefore, I'm -- owe them, you see -- owe to their liberalism my authoritarianism. Queer -- a queer situation, you see. Can you see this?

And there we -- our life begins, {to me} problematically. But gentlemen, in this one sense, as far as you can discover in your si- -- inside yourself the same problem: how the young must now ask for a certain amount of authority to McCarthy, to Eisenhower, to planning to -- to the -- alliances, to -- to anything, I mean, of an order, organized character, insofar you and I are contemporaries. And I want to stress this point more than any other, between you and me, gentlemen, because you are unable to conceive of this fact: that before God's eyes, a hundred years are like nothing. Inasfar as I have made my point, that I woke up in 1904 to the very problem you are loaded with, since 1950 in your own mind, you see -- decision, draft, service, authority, fight against conspiracy, you see, giving up of a certain amount of civil liberties and what-not -- as soon as you see this, you -- we have reached the point, gentlemen, where you also can rise above the spirit of your own generation. There is -- are issues, gentlemen, in which people are organized by experience and not by the accidental age in which they live, physically. That's the reason why the saints of the Church and the great men of the past still have -- are your contemporaries and partly waiting for you -- are ahead of you, because their experience still waits to be be taken up by you. They were not shared at that time, by the -- mass of the people, what they experience, you see. But they are waiting, still.

And gentlemen, you have to break through the idea of being contemporaries only of your contemporaries. Every one of you must find in the course of life, gentlemen, that he's the contemporary of people of a different age. That is -- means the belief in God. There would be no God if this wasn't possible. If God is only the God of your time, and the -- then you have no communication with the other times He has also created, then there would be no aim, no continuity, and you would only be the contemporary of your so-called contemporaries. Now I feel, gentlemen, that I'm not the contemporary of my contemporaries, but that my time has still to come. And I think every decent person, ever since -- since God was revealed, has believed this way. Abraham, and Moses, and Jesus, and

the Apostles, and Luther, and Cromwell and -- no one has ever believed that the people who were -- happened to live in his own time were his contemporaries, you see. They felt very definitely that these people { } out of { }, you see, or he was out of { }, the man himself.

And you have given up in your -- that is naturalism, gentlemen, then. Naturalism overlooks that the -- your own time must be overcome. This is what William James, you see, had to overcome when he had to love his father. If you are totally nature, then only your own time counts. If you are not totally nature, you can get out of your -- the accident of birth, the accident of your own time. But then immediately you must look for allies in other times. That's why you read books, you see. And that's why -- what is the meaning of the Bible is to reach this timeless level, in which all times are contemporary, simultaneous, at the same time.

Thank you.