Transcript

{ } = word or expression can't be understood
{word} = hard to understand, might be this

[Opening remarks missing]

... in America, since 1620, there is an Anno Domini in every year. That is, something is brought under Christian control of the world at large, of the created forms. It is as if you had a garden and you first planted just some vegetables, and later you planted some flowers, and later you planted shrubs, and finally trees. And at the end, you had the ambition to have every one plant in your arboretum, because you wanted to be complete. In the same sense, the seed that was brought -- stopped down in this country was first very simple, a minimum. And it has become more and more of the created forms of life, the ways of life of -- antiquity. Now, that's all against your idea of life, because you do not believe that just as there are moose, and buffaloes, and doves, and eagles. There are ways of life that have the same honor of being created. That is, man, when he had the right spirit, gentlemen -- the Church calls this the Holy Spirit -- has always continued creation. If you are -- come out right, you are a new creature. If you come out wrong, you are degenerate, decadent. In one case, you are the next form in creation that's needed. That has never dawned on you that perhaps the history of creation goes right on un- -- not under your noses, sondern with your noses. Your noses look it. But we are cre- -- creatures, and I can assure you, gentlemen, that a man who is as old as I has -- seen the destruction of wrong creatures, and the attempts to form the new hotbeds, the new molds of new creation right around him. And that's the meaning of these so-called world wars and revolutions. That you call them "war" and "revolution" doesn't alter the fact that they have a much deeper meaning.

Now, today, as I said, the people in the comprehensives compel me to change a little bit, but I think it's a blessing in disguise, because you'll see that the American scene and the universal scene dovetail very beautifully.

If we now give some more vivid names to the ancient forms of life, we can call the tribes the "seven-generation" situation. You remember, three generations backward and three generations forward, a tribe -- a chieftain of a tribe can tell his people. So instead of saying "tribe," just for the fun of it, I propose that we here say, the "seven-generation" situation, which is the eternal family situation, with your great-grandfather still entering the picture, and with your greatgrandchildren possibly to be expected in your own lifetime. Then we have the 365 eras -- days and years, as well. You remember the Great Year of the Egyptians being composed of 4 times 365 years equals 1460, and I -- you all know of the Olympic Games, which is 4 times 365 days. So if you have "Y" years here, you have Egypt. If you have -- want to have Greece, you put it here, and you see why

Greece is a telescoped Egypt, on a short -- shorter basis. Then we have the timeless, other world of the academic mind, where the arts and the sciences make you time { }. You remember the in-between world, the leisure world. And we had finally the people of the messianic hope, of the coming of the Lord.

Now in these four, which I have now, as you see, stated in terms of timesense, of awareness of time -- you can also call this the seven generations' recurrence, because a grandfather gives a name to his grandson, so that all the time, there should be again seven generations living on this time-raft, so that you, at each point in time, have the same perspective: three generations back and three forward. Then you have here the cycle. Every four years, you again have this vain effort to get all the championships of the Olympic Games for America. And here you have the straight line of history. The creation of history in Judaism. And here in the other world, you have the denial of death; the platonic idealist says, "It doesn't matter, my mind lives forever and the whole physical world is just corrupt and in a cave," and however they express their contempt for the changing physical universe.

If we now go over to the {events} of the last 1954 years, it is obvious, gentlemen, that we are basing ourselves between something, and we are after and before. Otherwise we have no history. It is stupidity -- I think it obstinacy when the historian denies to say what future he expects. And that's my objection to modern history teaching. These people have no common future -- who teach you history -- and therefore they have -- cannot agree on the past. How can they? If you and I have the same future, you see -- if you get engaged to a girl, you can look back at your different family histories, with a meaning that finally the two lines were expected -- meant to meet. That's the meaning of these -- prehistory of your two families, you see. At one point, they met, against all expectation. No one knew it, and that makes it such great fun to get married, you see, because you re-write the whole history of their two families in retrospect. Don't look so amazed, sir. Every generation has a new history, because it has a different future. Can you understand this?

So gentlemen, there is from the year -- to be very careful -- from the years 4 B.C. to the year 70 A.D. is laid the new foundation of a group of men, the Apostles and their Lord, who are indifferent to who is new and who is old. The { } of the Church is that it is eternal. It can only be eternal if the sensation of tomorrow is not any better than the antiquity of old and vice versa. In Christianity, gentlemen, nothing is better because it is old, and nothing is better because it is new. It's called the "good news." The good news is that news, you see, which is eternally so for old people and young people. It's perhaps dangerous to call it even the "good news." In the word "Gospel," as you know, the word "news" is -- is not there. It's -- in Greek, it is "the good message." And I think the translation of

the American genius in this "good news" is typical of the total misunderstanding of Christianity in this country. When it is taught by secular minds, they really think it's -- it's news. But it is the victory over news, and the victory over tradition, which is the good news. Because, as I have -- you remember, we said Chris- -- the Christian is enthroned on the -- at the crossroads and he can choose freely any one of those four ways of the Greeks, and the Jews, and the cyclists, and the time-rafters, the tradition people.

Now, this group, seems to -- the Lord on the -- and His Apostles -- or I think at -- from your point of view, gentlemen, you should get acquainted with the fact, if you wish to understand Christianity, begin with the Apostles, and then look back to their experience. It's better for our time. The so-called "life of Jesus" is such a stumbling block in your way of understanding Christianity, that you'd better drop this idea. There have been books on Jesus the Playboy, and Jesus the Child, and Jesus the Baby, and Jesus the Adolescent and -- that has nothing to do with Christianity, of course, because He didn't belong to His own time, and He was indifferent to His own life. And if you then try to read Selma Lagerl”f or The Robe, or any of this nonsense, modern books, you get lost in the un- -- absolutely unimportant. That's all -- absolutely unimportant. The problem of Jesus was to establish a situation which was victorious over past and future, because otherwise you can't judge the quick and the dead. And that's the meaning of this situation. The Church is beyond the quick and the dead. It's indifferent whether somebody has died long ago or whether {it's} somebody born. They are all still with us, inasfar as they have triumphed, as Athanasius, or St. Augustine, or the Gospel writers, or the Lord and the Apostles themselves. They are beyond these features which today in the Sunday school seem to be meant to make up the secret of Christianity. But they destroy Christianity. Who can have respect for a nice, young man who looks like Mr. {Fiske}? Here we had a minister, Mr. {Fiske}. He allegedly was very pretty, so the children always said they knew how Christ had looked. They -- He looked like Mr. {Fiske}. We don't know Christ after the flesh. And He certainly did not look like Mr. {Fiske}. And He doesn't look like a Nordic hero. He probably looked very Jewish. And that was one of the stumbling blocks. He had no beauty, and no comeliness, the Bible says explicitly. And you cannot understand this, because you have all these wonderful pictures in your mind, of -- live in -- the life of Christ, of Jesus. But that's not interesting. His death is interesting. And the unity with which He knitted together the times, the Apostles and He Himself are one body of time, I tried to tell you.

Now this, therefore gen- -- is recommendable to you, gentlemen, to begin the life of the Church, as far as you ought to know it, backward. It's rather { }. But I wanted to get you out of your thin-blooded individualism. Christianity is the victory over man's loneliness in his own generation. Christianity tells us that

there is one task for all generations of -- at all times, that we are in a campaign which is not broken up because one man dies and the other is born. It's one. Now, how do we rise above your own time-consciousness? How do we suddenly reach that level of behavior in which it doesn't matter at what time we live? That's the whole problem of Christianity. Otherwise everything -- that 2,000 years people have preached is all nonsense. You have only this choice. The cynic says, "There never has been a Christianity." I like that. He is really true to form. I mean, he thinks it only matters what he thinks, what he does, what he loves, what he hates, what he eats, and what he digests. If his bowel movement is allimportant, let him be cynic -- a cynic. He's at least logical. Now there's only a cynic and Christian. Nothing is in between. Idealists are idiots, compared to the real task of mankind, because an idealist cannot make sure that his father and his grandfather try to do the same, and that his grandchildren will do the same. This he cannot get by idealism. And he cannot get it by materialism. He can't get it by any philosophy, gentlemen. And -- but he can only get it by hanging on -- in -- onto this one chariot of God's spirit through the ages.

Therefore, this is then the -- the fact that when you look back, your ancestors at one time were converted. They converged to this common task from their own way of life, whether they were Anglo-Saxons, or whether were -- they were Jews, or whether they were from the Roman Empire -- civilized Greeks, or whether they were red Indians, or whether they were Negroes, wherever you come from, whatever your race or your stock is, at one time in the lifeline of your background, there was a conversion, there was a turn at which time these ladies and gentlemen said that their way led them astray, and that they should end up and join the continuous effort of all men from the first day to the last.

This is then, gentlemen, your real experience of Christianity, for which you can vouchsafe. The rest is, at this moment, hot air. Then we begin from scratch, so to speak, and put a human being today before the question: Is Christianity real? I mean, is it real at this moment? Is it -- does it mean anything? The one thing you certainly all can find in your life is that at one time the history of your -- of your -- branch of humanity there entered the scene a cont- -- some -- some conversion. And as far as the Jews live in the whole Christian world, in -- Chi- -- Japan -- in China, as you know, they aren't. They have come un- -- the rest of the world under the toleration of Christianity. And the -- wherever you have universities and academi- -- academic people, they have come with the permission of Christianity; after heavy battles, but still the society into which they came at one time decided to be a Christian society.

Now this is all said to explain to you why the history of the Church fills -- should fill in your imagination the first thousand years of our era. What happened then was that the width and the length of the earth, to a certain extent at

least, was at that time converted. The first date which I recommend to your understanding of the Church is 999 of our era, the conversion of the Icelanders to Christianity. At that time, these famous Northmen, these berserks, these wild creatures -- rather feeble-minded but very bold -- became Christians, baptized. And you have heard of the Edda, and these Nordic songs. They were all composed in the first five Christian monasteries on Iceland. And we have the Edda only because these berserks, these heroes learned from the Christian monks how to write. Very interesting that we owe the Edda to Christianity, exclusively. This again you do not know.

But that's why the year 999 is recommenda- -- recommendable date. The ancestors of Mr. Stefansson were christened at that -- in that year. That is, the -- you know, Iceland in the antiquity was called the Ultima thule -- the last island of the West, the old ultimate. And that's why I mention it, you see, because it is so far away that it took 999 years before this message, you see, of man's continuous belonging reached these Ice- -- the Icelanders. And as you know, they are very decadent people, because they are so shut up. There's more neurotics even than in America, and that's saying quite a bit. They are very degenerate people. Nothing much of the Nordic hero there. The first time I traveled with two -- Icelanders, they got absolutely, dangerously drunk. And I had great trouble to coerce them.

The -- this 999 that I mentioned, gentlemen, as the time at which Western man inescapably, so to speak, caught up with Christianity, or vice versa, where there was no loophole in the Western world, you see, as I said, where writing and reading forced these berserks to put on paper their strange stories of hate, and of greed, and of feud, and of jealousy. The Niebelungen, you know, was -- came from this -- from this contact. And you know, the Niebelungen have still dominated the imagination of Mr. Hitler in this World War. In January of '45, it's quite an historical fact, the children of Berlin and other cities received pamphlets to summon them to die for the Fhrer, the children from 14 to 18, to die for the Fhrer and to come -- make come true the history of the Niebelungen in which nobody was allowed to survive. You may know of -- that much of the Niebelungen that it ends in total slaughter, in total self-destruction, as Hitler has ended. And so long, gentlemen, then the spirit of the pagan -- paganism, of self-destruction, instead of reconciliation, has lingered on. And so you get a very beautiful two-millennia correspondence. The first 990 years the message takes to reach everybody. It takes another 950 years to dissolve the other message, the pagan message, of the feud, of the vendetta of the tribe. That's how the -- in this conflict, you see, how slow it works. The first missionary comes to Iceland in 999 successfully. But the last time that the old pagan ferocity, you see, obstructs the possibility of making peace, of giving in, in your self-centeredness, in is 1945.

And very few people understand, gentlemen, that this be- -- coming of Christianity into any one country means the beginning of the struggle with the nonChristian forces. You always say how poor Christianity is because the people, after they become Christians, behave very badly. Well of course they do. They all try to escape again. They all are mad under this yoke of the Cross. And every one of these groups -- the Greeks, in their academic philosophies, try to escape. Look at Mr. William James, what a dance he d- -- makes around a religion. It's the last attempt of the philosopher, you see, to prove that he doesn't have to believe anything. And it does- -- it's completely abortive. He can't do it. As you know, he comes out with these strange, I think rather silly, {lines} of religious experience, because he is impressed by his father -- who was in 57? You remember our story, this constant tension between father and son? You remember that? No?

(I -- I took it last year and ...)

Well, it's always the same.

(It skipped my mind).

It's still true. It's still true.

Gentlemen, the first millennium then compares like the Mother Church to the -- and to the second millennium, to the daughter-nations. And that is William James, compared to his father. The father, Henry James, Sr., in this country once more represents the message of Christianity. And William James, the typical behavior of the man who hears the message, tries to get out from under it and can't. And that's your situation. It's everybody's situation, gentlemen, since the world has been created. And in -- in bland letters, it is written over the first 2,000 years of our race. The first thousand years, the -- it is offered. And the missionaries are mar- -- made martyrs, and they are killed, and burned at stake. And the people say, "We won't even listen." And the second thou- -- thousand years consists of the answer given by the nations to an official acceptance of Christianity, but not a true one. An attempt to say, "Yes, all right. We'll count Anno Domini. We'll say -- call -- count the years after Christ. We will admit that we have a Church. But we have a state, too. And we have economics. And we have progress. And we have -- the athletic field. And we have brothels. And we have all kind of nicer things, still, and therefore, we must make a compromise, as they did in the Middle Ages, when you had in every city on one side of the street the nunnery, and at the other side, the brothel." And nothing was done about it. It was just natural, you see. The -- the Christian Church was quite happy to have some people saved and the other had the pleasure.

So gentlemen, I off- -- offer you this as a great picture. First thousand years,

the bringing of the message to the nations. The second thousand years, the assimilation of the message by the d- -- nations. And if you want to have this as a family story, say that the first thousand years belong to the Mother Church, and the second thousand years belong to the daughters -- the nations; France, and Italy, and England, and America. And I have written, as you -- some of you may know, the history of the Western world as this response of the daughter-nations to the message of Christianity in the first thousand years. And I think that is the true story. It is a dialogue.

In this first thousand years, gentlemen, then, all important events of which you read in the textbooks on history are events in the life of the Church. All the important events in the last thousand years of world history are events of national history, of war, of revolution. The first thousand years, gentlemen, are just filled with records of dogmatic quarrels, of council meetings, of the -- of whole nations turning towards Christianity, of some martyr crucified, of some bishop writing a wonderful book, like St. Augustine of which -- whom we have spoken. So gentlemen, will you take this down: the important events in the first thousand years of our era, are all events in the history of the Church.

And that suddenly changes. At the end of the first thousand years, we begin to care less and less for the purely ecclesiastical history until today we would think it very funny if the election of a new minister in this town would be meant to compare to the election of President Eisenhower. Yet, in the beginning of Church history, that's just what the people thought, that the election of the right bishop in Hippo, as St. Augustine's case was, and that was as tricky a place as Hanover, that this was much more important than who this beast on the imperial throne was, in Rome, or Byzantium. And probably it was more important who became bishop in Hippo.

So don't -- think this through, gentlemen, in various ages of mankind, various -- a different class of events is important. It isn't true that in 325 it was important that some Frankish tribes knocked at the gates of the empire. But it was terribly important that Athanasius wrote his Nicene Creed, and that we -- ever since say that the only God-equal man is Christ, because He had no power, and He was a failure. And therefore the will of God could appear in Him pure and simple, not intermixed with the will of men.

Now that's a very simple -- again, an ABC yardstick, gentlemen. I offer you here something which you can use in exams, which you can use in your private life, which you can use in the education of your children, and which you can use for the orientation in the world at large, that we live in an era which has shifted interest in the events that are important -- for the human race. Nobody is an educated man, gentlemen, who does not know the important events of the

Church of the first thousand years. And that's why you are uninstructed and blind. And nobody is instructed, if he is the highest scholastic theologian in the Catholic Church, who wouldn't know the greatest political events of the last 900 years.

So in order to understand life, you don't -- don't dabble with Church and state in the abstract, but deal with what is for you important. Now for you it is important how your ancestors were reached by Christianity. And that is settled in the Western world at least in the first 999 years. And then, in your own life, you have to say to yourself, "I am in a secular story with elections and draft, and building a business, and mar- -- getting married, and having property, and making inventions, and traveling, and writing books, and going to school and getting degrees, and having a professional training and all this comes from the last 900 years or thousand years of humanity, and therefore I must know the antecedents," as I try to give them to you in Philosophy 10.

So gentlemen, Church and state are not contemporaries, are not contemporaries. The Church is, as in America, older in her importance on your lives than the state. You remember, that coincides with the American platform which I uphold, that in America the Church is older than the state. Poor little Europe, when it ceased to be a province of -- Christianity, lost sight of this and tried to sell to its people the idea that France is as old as Christianity, or Germany is as -- even older than Christianity, that they went pagan. And then they collapsed. Then they got Hitler, and Boulanger, and the Dreyfus affair -- in every country in Europe you have the same malaise, the same disease of turning history topsyturvy, and trying to have a political history of your own nation, without the background of the Church history, out of which this nation came, and to which the nation gave a specific answer.

This has very practical results. Gentlemen, if you try to read the history of the Church backward, and the history of the nations backward, and if you say "Iceland" -- let's begin there -- you will understand that the Church always has four elements by which it is recognizable as the Church. It must have mission, because that's the first event which makes you turn to the Church. It must have mission. A church that has no missions, gentlemen, is at the -- its ends -- wit's end. Therefore, in the -- when they make doctors out of our missionaries, and schoolteachers and architects -- and are very proud that Mr. Schweitzer is a doctor in Africa, it means just that the Church is at an end. That's Greek, to be a doctor. That's a Greek -- doctors { } too. They have very good doctors. But there is nothing to be preached, obviously. May be. But that means that the Church then -- I'm all against this humanistic attempt that it's nicer to have doctors in China than missionaries. The only people who can resist Communism there are the missionaries, not the doctors. That's the absolute oversight, but the

missions must be there or there is no Church. A church that has no mission, gentlemen, is as stupid as you are, because you don't know that we have coming to us now Whitsunday. As you know this word is the word for the -- mission, for the pouring out of the Holy Spirit, or it's also called Pentecost. And the fact that this has gone out of existence in this country is a very serious business. You can go to church, and church, and church, and mistake it completely as a tradition or something elegant, or something fashionable, or something that is good for the FBI to know, that you are regular in church, so that nothing will be held against you. Gentlemen, but that's all cowardice. The Church begins when you say, "Even Mr. {Crouch} of the FBI should be missionarized, should be converted. Even Mr. Edgar Hoover should become a Christian." Then I talk to you, because then you think of your church in the proper terms. You know it. It's always the hardest to convert Constantine. And Edgar Hoover is today our Constantine.

But who thinks of this? Who thinks that the people in government need conversion? As long as you do not believe this, gentlemen, you don't know what the Church is. The Church says the most tempted people are those who have power. Therefore they must be preached the Gospel more than anybody else. To the weak, you don't have to preach the Gospel, but to the powerful, and to the strong. And that's why Christianity here is a joke, because it's just pleasant. And you have a rummage sale, and you have a -- an auction, and you have a fair, a summer fair just to make the -- church {go}. Gentlemen, that's not the Church. It should be closed down. It's a scandal. It's displeasing to the Lord, because He is the Lord of the opening of all the side-tracked, blind avenues of mankind. And this can only be done if He comes with might and with a storm, and blows open the gates and says, "This here stinks." And that's mission. An objection, a strong objection to the way people live, without objection, no mission. Mission is nothing pleasant, and that's why it's a mistake to be nice to the people in a mission, and say, "I come as a doctor." You can come in this disguise, gentlemen. You can come as a technician. But that isn't the -- the Church, if you say there, if you just want to be pleasant, then why don't you take a ticket and travel there, and don't call it a mission.

Now the second point, gentlemen, is the inner brotherhood of the believers. There must be communion between them. Without the people who ...

[tape interruption]

... that present of the body of Christ is not {Christianity}. That is, inside the people who go to church there is something formed that doesn't exist outside, the Communion. And that's why you do not go as an individual to church, or at least in the hope to drop that -- the fact that you are an individual. That's why most people don't go to church, but sleep through church, or criticize through

church, or whatever -- study through church. That's why you all Unitarians who think you go to church for your private information, or edification. Of course not, gentlemen. If you go to the -- the church of {George's} in Massachusetts, where John Quincy Adams worshiped with the whole Adams family, there you see still the deep feeling that the people who come into this hall form at that moment under the impact of the word upon their {life however} the body of Christ. If you can't do this, gentlemen, you have not yet made your entr‚e into this necessity that at every one moment, you must conquer your own time. And you can only conquer your own time if you completely forget your own self. And you can only forget yourself if the forming of this body, this Communion body, is more important than you yourself. But as long as you take your Communion supper as a medicine, like aspirin, you are quite mistaken. It is not for your stomach that you eat this. It is not for your digestion. It is so that there may be no skin separating you and the other fellow, that this may be one body.

This is very practical, and it has nothing to do with mysticism, gentlemen, but I have to say this. It seems that nobody else tells you this. The outer form of the Church, gentlemen, which must exist, is that the Church is not of this one time in which it happens to be formed. That is, the Church will always need some renunciation of a part of the world { }, whether the Methodists do not smoke and dance, whether the Catholic priests do not marry -- in some form, I must be able to point to you and say, "He is not identical with this time. He shows somewhere that he wants to express his getting out of his time, his standing here on his time." Therefore you cannot identify yourself totally with the {latest} man about town. Whaler -- Grodon -- what's his name?

({Grover Wale.})

{Grover Wale} is the opposite from the Church. The opposite in his whole existence as a man about town. And do you know this, The Man Who Came to Dinner, you know this play?

(No.)

That's another example, or the snob, or the gentleman, or the joiner, { }, or so. That's always the same type. You can -- in him you say, "This is it. This is America as of today." Or "These are the Gay '90s," or "This is the --" we'll see "-- the dizzy '20s." That is, the time is left to its own devices runs away. That is, put on trial. Now the Christians, gentlemen, are always that party in any nation, in any land that are not found in the bipartisan issues as the extreme leaders. It's always the third group. If you don't like this, if you would like to be either a McCarthy man or a Truman man, it's all right. You are a secular. It's your choice. It isn't very important, I think, because the continuity of life in this nation has

only been secured by the people who did not -- were not vitally interested in this, but were vitally interested in raising their families and following out the commands of the ancestors.

So gentlemen, the outer behavior of any -- each member of any church and the Church itself, is that it must be less fashionable than the fashionable. The degree may change. Today I may be a Christian by not buying a television. Yesterday I might have been a Christian by not smoking. The day before by not dancing, or by pro- -- by something. It isn't -- doesn't matter what you do, gentlemen. Each time has a special phenomenon, and each time needs people who disdain this -- special fashion, because it is only of the day and time. And -- and since you do not want this, you m- -- abuse the Church. It's another fashion today, to go to church. The whole numbers of the Church are very scandalous. In the last year, as you know, allegedly 25 more million people have joined the Church. Poor Church.

The fourth thing, gentlemen, is you can have no church without the name of the founder. That is, the continuity of this campaign -- and now comes the point which is very difficult for you, gentlemen, but around which this whole course has been built -- that which has been started 1900 years ago cannot be started again by ethical culture, or by association of good people today, or yesterday, or tomorrow. You destroy the meaning of Christianity if you say, "I can be a Christian" without mentioning your Lord, the beginner. It's not so important perhaps that you -- you stress this word "Lord." It will come natural to you later, but that you must say, "He has started."

The anti-Christ, gentlemen, is the man who does the things Christ did, without saying that he follows in His wake. That's the real anti-Christ. You have heard very wrong notions of the anti-Christ. Everybody of guts feels the temptation to be the anti-Christ, because that means, "instead of Christ." You know who's -- is the first who talks most about the anti-Christ in the New Testament? That's John the Evangelist, because he was closest to the Lord and knew best the temptation. He was the natural friend of the Lord. He didn't have any conversion, and he said, "And that is why I know that the greatest temptation of the human heart is to say, `I can be as splendid and perfect without the Lord.'" Of course you can be splendid and perfect, but Christianity is not anything that has to do with your own perfection, or with your splendor. It has to do with the unity of all time, with the connection of all ways of life. { } remember, with -- making it possible that all races, all peoples, all individuals, or -- can recognize each other as being with the same, although one is a Jew, and one is a Greek, and the other an Iroquois. And we still can know that we are all moving in one spirit. This you cannot start over again. Anybody who says that this can be repeated destroys the whole story of mankind. And that is today the greatest temptation.

All the people I know think, "Oh, why not? We are wonderful people. And we -- of course, we -- we -- { } and we -- Jesus is one of the nice people, and some of the teachers are quite {agreeable}." Gentlemen, it isn't that you have to like Jesus. It's not very important. But you have to follow Him, which is something quite different.

Because you come afterwards. The whole enterprise, which begins with the -- with the Apostles leaving Juda- -- Jerusalem, and going to Rome and writing the New Testament in Greek, so that the Greek philosophers -- you see, {could} suddenly hear something that has nothing to do with Greek thinking, where a man is God's poem, where the creation is open and still happening. All these things you cannot redress, you cannot retro-act. If you say, "All matters is that we are good people," you destroy the meaning of your becoming good people in -- within the context of the whole human race. Now that's the hardest, I think, in this country for people to accept. Here they are idealists: be good and ask for nobody else. And that's very nice. Gentlemen, the Church -- and I still think the Jews have to share this, and I think there is no dissent really, in this respect. As a Jewish friend of mine once said, "Of course, everybody except the Jews must be Christians. Otherwise we can't live together," which shows you that the Jews share this -- this intelligence, so to speak, that the Christian era is their own salvation. Once you give up this salvation, you get Mr. Hitler, who said, "Christian era, not for me. That's all over." He literally said this.

So gentlemen, we have four points for the first thousand years of the Church. There -- where you find the Christian Church, there have to be:

- The memory of the founder; it must be preached in his name.

- Communion of the believers to form one body through all times. The old and the young must be united: the dead and the living, and future generations. If you have not such a service, gentlemen, in which the founder, and the saints, and your parents, and grandparents, and your grandchildren are united through you in one body of time, you have no church. You have a club. You have Unitarianism. You have lectures. Most churches are lectures today, lecture-committees. But that's not the Church, because the Church goes against the lectures, and says, "Lectures stress the current events." And the Church says, "Current events, very nice, but you can only give a little part of your energy to current events, because it's so -- more important to keep the continuity."

It is to all these, gentlemen, modern people, it is perfectly mysterious why they should raise children, and why anybody raised them. Why do your parents go to all this nonsense of sending you to this college at such expense, gentlemen? Because the light of the spirit is between the generations. It's neither your par-

ents nor you. The problem is to hand it over from one to the other, so that the spirit can be found between you two. You cannot explain why you ever marry a girl, for fun perhaps? And that she has an automobile accident and -- and two wrong dentures. You don't marry a girl for fun, becau- -- but you love her, because you must enter this secret mission of mankind to form one body through all times. It's inexplicable that anybody should raise a child and go to all that trouble if there wasn't something that had absolutely nothing to do with your will, your intent, your fun, your pleasure, your plan, anything.

- So the third thing is some withholding tax on your own life. You cannot be a member of the Church if your minister is a man about town and yourself are. At least the people in the congregation usually want that there minister and his wife look sour. Now it's much better if they are allowed to dance and be happy and if the congregation looks a little sour. That is, if he's a little withdrawn and little indifferent to the latest news, or to speculation on the stock exchange, or whatever the issue is. That's the meaning of the tithe.

I perhaps have told this story. It always touches me to the quick. I knew who a lady who was 87 years of age. And I was a young man. And she told me of the little village from which she came. Have I told you the story? And there was -- it was a very fruitful region in the south of Germany. Doctor Heil comes from the same village, his family. You know the doctor who here so brave fighting his -- his paralysis. And that's near -- in {Badinia,} near Karlsruhe, near the Alsace. And she said, "We would never harvest any cherry tree or apple tree unless we kept one branch untouched." That's the tithe. "It would -- be considered a terrible sin if we would touch and harvest every little bit."

You can hardly understand this, gentlemen. You take the -- more than there is out of the soil in this country, You exploit it, you rob it. As you know, the founders of New England have robbed this soil instead of leaving something, you see, { } we seem to be there. That's a typical withholding of something I can do, but I may not do. Now you have the same with Prohibition. No -- no European country can understand why people shouldn't drink wine as Jesus did. So we have here this terrible strawberry juice or raspberry juice at Communion supper. And well, it's very hard for any man to believe that one can go to Heaven without wine. For me, it is. But it is not certainly more rational than this woman's respect for this branch, this good gift of God, which she would not commercialize, which she would not harvest, which she would not use, but in which, in her devotion, she would acknowledge to be miraculously -- a miraculous gift which, for everybody to see, they would let stand, they would not touch, because it isn't in their power to make a tree, you see. No human being has ever made a tree.

Now all these things which you find classified in the textbooks of the last

hundred years as superstitions, or as folklore, are of course the opposite. They are the salvation of the human race. That we have nothing yet of this type, it is { } all over the country is terrible. Just terrible. That is, that this country is in terrible danger of living to its bitter end at this moment, because you actually think that when something new is produced, everybody has to live on the installment plan. And what do we do, gentlemen, if we don't have this external renunciation, this withholding, this not going with your own time, gentlemen? That you carry over into a later phase the debts incurred on the installment plan today. Anybody who is a man about town incurs more obligations for today than he likes to have incurred tomorrow. That's a very simple reasoning, gentlemen, very rational. In order to be -- have a free future, gentlemen, you must not plan this future on the installment plan, because the installment plan means that the decisions of today make you tom- -- as of tomorrow the slave of your will as of today. You can't improve on your own will. You can't become a newborn man. You are not free. That's what Christianity came into the world to say: "Tomorrow you must be reborn as you are today. So let no decision as of today encroach on your tomorrow." But how do most American families live? For the next 24 months, 60 percent of their income is mortgaged. Do you think that -- that doesn't lead to nervous breakdowns? That's one of the deepest reasons of the nervous breakdown. Anybody breaks down who has sold out his free future. You are all slaves. Everybody here lives beyond his present day. And you call this -- I mean, do -- you think that's your right. Gentlemen, it is your right in the legal sense, but it isn't the right with regard to that strange thing which is the human soul. The human soul receives her time every day anew, and has always to club down this damned own will which tries to tell you you should mortgage your will as of tomorrow.

- So -- and the fourth is this strange thing of conversion, or mission, or preaching the Cross, or being -- going to the martyr -- to martyrdom, because people to whom you preach the Cross usually respond with some very disagreeable action. From Jeanne d'Arc to Saint Stephen, the history of progress is only possible by people who stick their neck out and receive in answer to that a stone-throw, or a pyre, or something similar. Now don't think that this has changed, gentlemen. You actually are outside the Church, because you have the vain hope that nowadays we are such wonderful people that progress is possible without martyrdom. And therefore there is no progress. And you don't even know what progress is. You think progress is the next invention sent into the patent office. But it is only something that comes in the form of mission, that somebody says, "You can take my life, but you must listen to me." That is, these are people who love their enemy more than themselves.

Gentlemen, that's a very practical thing. You always think that's something wonderful. Mission is based on this principle, because obviously the person to

comes -- to whom the missionary comes hates him. He destroys his ancestral gods. That's why the Communists in China now hate and rage against the Christian missionaries. Rightly so, from their point of view. The -- Christianity only begins at this impossible level where you say, "This poor man, because he hates me, has to be converted." That's rather a strange story, isn't it?

Before you have -- do not understand this, you are down on missions. It is terrible in this country as you are down on the Puritans, so everybody here speaks despicably of the missionaries. It's terrible. It's { } fashion, especially in the liberal arts college. "Oh, missionaries are funny people. And you can't do it. And we should leave these heathen. And look, they are so nice, and why do you bother? And it's just an intrusion on their privacy." Gentlemen, if it was your truth and their privacy, this -- of course, there would be no mission. But if the -- these people and you have a common task, then it's very different. As long as you think you sell your wares, when you be -- are a missionary, you are all mistaken. But you try to make it possible that this campaign, which makes one out of all men who have ever lived from the beginning of time to the end of time, that this campaign { }. That is, as the only meaning of life I can understand. I don't wish to do anything that is just -- ends with my own short existence today. This is too -- too cheap for me. It has -- is meaningless. I can do any- -- enjoy life here today, in the light of my certainty that it is within the frame of the total. But if this frame is not established, if I can't get a hold of the people in Malaya to share this deep conviction, then all what I can do is lost -- I'm lost. The whole of America is lost. As this is today, people say, "The black man gets the upper hand, then out goes the white man." Gentlemen, in Christianity, this isn't so. But without Christianity, it must be so, obviously. Why have we -- do we -- could we have the Supreme Court decision on segregation, gentlemen, without a bloody war? Because there were some Christians in the South who remembered the Gospel.

Imagine. It took 90 years to -- to emancipate the Negro. It's quite a story -- 90 years. And that's the way of the spirit. That's mission. And it -- we need some such bull like Mr. Talmadge to find out what it's all about. He's a wonderful example of the, you see, die-hard, whom you have to have in every crisis, in order to understand the resistance that has to be broken down. One always has to last a little longer, you know.

Now, the second millennium, gentlemen, is not class- -- characterized by this preponderance of the Church, because from -- beginning 999, the nations of Europe consider themselves as listeners to the Gospel. Every man born from a woman in this second thousand years in the Western world has received some tradition on the Church. He has found himself exposed to these four problems: sacrifice, communion, mission, and remembrance. He has read the Bible, for

example, you see. He has sung the Psalms. He has gone to the sacraments. And he has perhaps sent his child to the priesthood, or himself become a monk, or has done something in the way of mission. And the greatest sign of this -- and the laity now is responding, gentlemen -- is the fact the first event in the history of the next -- second thousand years are the crusades. And the word "crusade" means the laity responds. So Eisenhower is the la- -- the last member of the second millennium of our era, because he has written a book, Crusade in Europe. And the first book on this was, as you know, intoned in the 11th century, that is, 900 years back. And in this sense, whether you like it or not, Mr. Eisenhower is a man of the 11th century, because his {key} word was coined at that time, and the word you use -- that is your birthright, your birth certificate. If you have to say, "What I do is a crusade," you are a crusader. If you are a crusader, you are contemporary of the year 1099, in which the first Crusader marched into Jerusalem. This you do not know, gentlemen.

But I hope I have tried -- or at least I have tried through this whole course to make you see that what we speak is what we are. You remember, where the tribe says "Uncle," the man is a nephew, because he says, "Uncle." And when you say "Crusader," then you are Christian. Can't get out of it. That is, what you say you do, is also making you backward. Puts you under obligation -- that's why Mr. Eisenhower had to come out against segregation in this country. He couldn't have trusted himself if he had written a book, Crusade in Europe, and then be a Democratic president from the South and said, "Oh well, that has time." So you such a word gets you. Because you write Crusade in Europe, suddenly at home, you have to do something that has consequence.

Gentlemen, every word we say places us in a certain time. It places us in a time at which this one word was born and received its name. That's why we are still, by speaking English, members of the families, as of old. As long as you say "Father" and "Mother," you still have a relation to the old seven-generation order of things, to this time-raft of the tribes.

Now "crusade in Europe," and "crusade in -- in Palestine," and "crusade against the Turks," and "crusade against Constantinople" -- crusade, crusade, crusade is the watchword then of 900 years of national histories. The nations of Europe found in the Crusade the first response. Think of a tremendous oratorium in music in which the Church first bounces forward with it -- her Psalms, and her songs of triumph, and her praises of God; and then the nations begin and try to formulate a responsorium, which must contain similar, and yet secular elements of response. The word "crusade" is the first of such words. That -- that's a great story: 900 years of crusade. Not always very glorious. Don't look down on it, gentlemen. Today again, if I read books, people say, "Oh these alleged crusades, they were very cruel, and they were very meaningless, and they were just

forgeries of Christianity," it isn't that simple. Mr. Eisenhower is not a forger of Christianity. He is a very noble soul. And he is a very simple soul. He's a layman. And that is all in his book. And that is all in his presidency. And that's all in the Supreme Court decision. And he is not a single individual. You and I are in it. We are all in the same boat. We belong to the second millennium of our era, in other words, gentlemen. If you want to know why, if somebody doubts it, you say, "Because we have still lived through a crusade." It may be -- have worn thin. It may be the last crusade. This you can say. You can even work for it, that it should be the last crusade. That doesn't alter the fact that it is one.

The second word, gentlemen, of a secular character, of this era, is the word "reform," "reformation." Everybody can be a reformer. Even Roman Catholics can reform today. They couldn't in the first thousand years. There was nothing to reform. The word "reform," gentlemen, means the discovery that the Church has a secular side, which has to be broken off. That is, the first thousand years, gentlemen, we look at the sanctity of the Church, at the Saints. In the second thousand years of the millennium, we become aware -- of the second millennium -- we become aware of its mortality. The word "reformation" means that there are bay windows in the Church, and side pantries, and kitchens, and cellars which need to be broken off. They are abuses. The word "reform" is not a -- a privilege of Mr. Martin Luther, or of the Calvinists. The word "reform," a reform on head and -- in head and limbs, head and members is the term that the Church herself has used in the Middle Ages for cutting out the secular excrescences, the eczemas, so to speak, you see, of her being in this world, her own danger of becoming of -- just a part of the world.

So reform -- reform, gentlemen, is a new invention, a -- term that has not existed, and you can't live without it. You are all reformers in a small way. And you know that there have to be reformers, as there have to be crusaders. Reform, then gentlemen, is an attempt to apply to the Church the yardstick of secular decency. And there the pope, and the Protestants, and the free-thinkers, and the free masons are all one. Again, very important, gentlemen. Crusade and reform, I only give you names that are unanimous in this world today.

The third term, which the Church has implanted into the laity, is the word "progress." You all believe in it. And it is nonsense to say that anybody does not, to a certain extent, believe in it. The word "progress" -- we all think that beyond being just Christians, we can become civilized, educated, instructed, objective, skillful, progressive, modern, whatever you say. That is, the strange use of the word "progress" is that membership of the nations and the individuals within their church is not enough. Progress must transcend church membership. That's very strange. You have never known this, gentlemen, how much the second millennium depends on the first. When you say "progress," you mean progress

beyond the first millennium, beyond mission, beyond the lip-service of the Icelanders which said, "Now we are Christians." Progress means where do you go from there, you have to go places. Progress then means a strange relation, that we must go on from being -- being allegedly Christians in a passive membership. We must contribute something creative. And we must therefore progress into what has been called so far usually "civilization." We must all become civilized, we -- in addition to be Christians.

Now the greatest heresy of your time is that you have separated the basic Christian situation from the second outcropping of this progress in civilization. You think today progress is a secular term, gentlemen. You'll never get anywhere if you think that. Progress is the relation of Church and the world. The Church is older than the state, I told you. Now in the second millennium, the practice had been to say, "Well, here is this child, baptized in the cradle. Now he becomes an inventor. He becomes a discoverer. He becomes an engineer. He becomes a great painter." Think of Leonardo da Vinci. Of course, he was brought up a -- a Christian, you see. So what of it, that's very little compared to the fact that he goes on from there. He's the first man who builds secular paintings. You may know that Leonardo da Vinci was the first man who painted a landscape without a Madonna in it. That is, who said, "The world without religious topics is -- deserves to be painted." It was in 1472. And you -- have here a clear line of progress. Perhaps you take down this date, gentlemen. It's an important date: 1472, the first secular landscape, painted by Leonardo da Vinci. Or is it '74? It's one of the two years.

This means that progress in the Western world, gentlemen, means adding a par- -- a conquest of the world to your membership in the Church. If you do not understand this, you do not understand the march of the West. And it is not in any secular textbook, because the so-called secular textbook must not mention the Church. It is not in any religious book, because the religious textbook must not mention the secular history, the political history. It's terrible. They have found a trickery of cheating your heritage by separating these two stories. It is one story, gentlemen. The first thousand years made sure that everybody in this Western world would begin as a Christian. And the second thousand years, built institutions, and preached to every hum- -- son of women that they should progress beyond that, that they should re- -- reform the Church backward, and that they should discover God's creation, God's wide world.

And this creative effort, gentlemen, is called "progress" in our language today. If you -- find a better word, you may use it, but I offer you this great secret. You cannot today be satisfied with the theologians, and the people in the church, and you cannot be satisfied with the philosophers and the hist- -- humanists in the world, because they cut into two, without ever reconnecting them, which is the

secret of your own existence, to go on from one to the other. My friend Tillich is one of these funny creatures who has tried to find a way out. He's always ch- -- alternating between philosophy and theology for this reason. He doesn't quite know where he stands. And he always dances around { } all these people, and just goes {chasing} from one end to the other. Because he has this great merit to himself, that he knows that man lives between the Church and the world. The world is only in the -- and you cannot become a {perfect} churchman if you do not wish to redeem the world. And you cannot -- be on -- be - be a complete child of the world if you do not belong to the Church, because the two always tell each other off. The creative side of life is not in the Church. It's not her business. The Church unites the times. But inasfar as you must create within your own time, and be progressive, you are, of course, a grateful member of your own -- of your own time. A painter who paints the first secular painting is obviously doing something also in his own time creative. And we mark 1472 as the year in which the secular profession of painting got a foothold in Europe.

So I -- I really have tried to offer you a deep secret, gentlemen, the true history which is not taught in America at all, and by whose abandonment, or whose lack we are today so anemic in this country, is the story which President Tucker used to teach his -- not President Tucker, President Bartlett, and the previous Dartmouth president used to teach the senior students in this country -- in this college -- every senior did at that time go to the president of the college for a course in universal history. And this universal history was just exactly what -- although in a -- in a previous form, of course, with different facts selected, an attempt to encourage you to be creative on the background of your church membership, to combine progress and mission, to provide for combined motherhood and daughterhood your membership in your church, and your daugh- -- your membership in the daughter-nation. And this course was abolished in 1890 unfortunately, and I have tried to restore it in this course here in 58.

But in the meantime, you have lost your soul, because you actually believe that either you are pious, bigot churchgoer, or that you are a child of the world, and a professional man, and an inventor and what-not. Of course, you are only an inventor because you are a child of God, and you are only a child of God if you are an inventor. You are all castrated, gentlemen. And that's why you are so unimportant, so boring. Every one of you has genius. And every one of you has the Holy Spirit. But you say either-or. Either an atheist and have genius, or talent, or -- or an IQ, or -- or psychological statement what profession I must choose for handling some -- some pieces of wood. Ja. That's what you really believe, that you have a right to choose a profession from such silly things! Scandalous! Or you think, "Oh, I go to Church. I go to confession. I join. I find a better church. I go through three denominations, or four denominations. And I chastise myself, and I keep the fast days. And so I go to Heaven, and it doesn't matter that I am a

very poor clerk in an office." Gentlemen, it matters very much if you are a good clerk or a poor clerk in an office. And it matters very much whether you praise the Lord in doing so or not. Only if you combine the two things are you a man. Otherwise you are just silly. But you all try to have it one way or the other. And the beauty of the way is just -- didn't I try to tell you this? The way of Christianity is, of course, only when you combine two ways or more.

So we have this third term, gentlemen, "progress," I hope elucidated.

So for every man born after the first Crusade, he has the Church in back of him. He has progress of a secular or creative time in front of him. He has the whole world as a field of his discoveries. And he has the nation as his home, as his inner -- not the -- the people with whom he takes Communion, but the whole big nation: France, or England, in which -- from which he thinks he has his inner solidarity. It's the second millennium is -- is -- is the nations give an answer.

So every human being, gentlemen, has these four relations to his own nation, to the world at large as a field of progressive discovery, secular painting, and discovery of America, discovery of the nova, in the moon, or what-not. The comets -- the whole world has been discovered in the last 500 years, has it not? So you see, the Church has another cross. Compare the two. The remembrance of the name of the founder, so that we don't become anti-Chris- -- Christs. We have -- re- -- well, how do you call this -- renunciation, of something that belongs to the world today, and which we judge to be so unimportant that we do not wish, you see, to -- to be sunk. Communion, or they call it Mass in the Church, it's the same. And mission.

Gentlemen, I have tried once to play with the word "mission." You can put it instead of "renunciation" the word "omission." You can here put Mass, which of course comes from missa est, the same root as, you see, to be sent together, to be --. And then you can say, instead of remembrance, if you think of the gnashing of teeth of the modern philosopher or rationalist, you can say "admission," because he won't admit that he -- what he knows, he knows because of Christ. He won't admit it. He won't put this admission in front of his thinking that he knows more about man, because this one man died, you see. Admission -- Christianity is the admission that things are different after A.D. This the -- the -- the, you see, the natural man says, "I know everything as a caveman. I am born today and so there is nothing in between that I must know in order to be different." You and I, however, I hope, know that because of Christ, we know that everything has to be kept going. Because with Christ's coming, the times were fulfilled, the four ways were laid open, and you know exactly where you stand. You can know what you have to do. So this is the great admission. That's the hardest

for modern man to perform. They don't want to admit that because of the life of Christ, you and I live in a different time.

I had a talk with mini- -- a group of ministers the other days in which I tried to tell them the one onslaught on Christianity today was the abolition of the Christian era. Wherever you hear people talk today who are -- mean business, they say the Christian era is a figment of the imagination. There never has been a Christian era. They have -- don't -- won't make this admission, that everything looks different.

So for the gentlemen in the comprehensives, I have done my best.