Transcript

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{word} = hard to understand, might be this

...today a friend of mine who went to the same school as myself in Germany, who went to Japan as a missionary and now serves a -- a Church of Christ in Canada, in this capacity as a missionary in Japan, tonight at 7:30, he will speak at the Dartmouth Christian Union. And Mr. Theodore {Jaeckel} can tell you from his own experience what the soul of such a pantheistic empire as Egypt is like, what man can and what he cannot achieve with this total lack of personality, which the Egyptians, and which you yourself in this modern golden-calf civilization represent. The emptiness and the fullness of a pantheistic attitude of a cosmic life, of a life embedded in Heaven and earth is his theme, Sir, as I understand it. And so I hope you will take advantage of his presence and listen, at 7:30 at the Dartmouth Christian Union in College Hall. And if you know other people who might be interested to learn something about the existing -- to this day, existing difference between the empires and the -- our own era. I think -- have we a rare opportunity, because he's not a man who looks at the externals of a nation's life, but understands what makes people tick.

My step now, from Pharaoh to Moses, shall take the path of -- well, a word and a name with which you're all familiar, but which is left without much meaning in your tradition. This book here is called the Bible. And that's a Greek word, "biblion," "byblos." Now the word "bible" contains the -- the link between Egypt and Palestine--and Judaism--because it comes from the city of Byblos. The Bi- -- Bible is something that the people in Byblos seem to have invented to the Greeks, who discovered that you could write books. Because you could use papyri, and write on them with ink, you didn't have to have stone inscriptions. But you could wri- --not even clay--but you could have, what we still use, parchment, papyrus, paper. Papyrus, after all, being the source word for "paper." And since you all live also today in a paper -- paper world, I think it's very important for you to know that the source word for paper and -- is the -- the oldest word is the word "byblos," and if you spell it, as the ancients did, with a "y" instead of an "i," you have the -- location, the gateway through which the last phase of Egyptian glory, the abil- -- capability of writing, went out into the world at large and made its way through the whole Mediterranean world. It even reached finally America. I don't say that you make use of books. But you at least know that they exist.

If this is Egypt, gentlemen, this is now very crude--here, this -- coastal strip, as you know, swings around, and you come here north of the -- north of -- of Gaza, and north of Tel Aviv, and north of -- you come here, Byblos. Byblos is not -- is north of -- the whole Palestin- -- the Palestine peninsula. And it is -- if you see today an historical atlas, it is usually put in the domination of the Phoe-

nicians. And the Phoenicians were the Semitic group from which the {merchants of Hiros and Sidon}, as the Bible calls them, who brought the scripts to Egy- -- to Greece. Cadmus of Thebes in E- -- in Boeotia in -- in -- was the Phoenician, the tradition said, who brought the letters to Greece.

I think that's all quite interesting to know. What I want to say is that the empires have one limitation. They are only on a part of the globe. Now the one city, and the one colony, and the one connection with the rest of the world, which the Egyptian empire had to undertake, was that port through which they could receive wood -- timber. In Egypt, there is no timber, except palm trees. If you see today still a boat on the Nile, it is composed, or patched together from these little pieces of wood which you can get from palm trees. Palm tree is -- you se- -- see, so -- has so small--how do you call them?--small pieces of wood, that you have to have several hundred to build a little tiny boat. And that's a great hardship. The fellahim has only this kind of a boat. So anything that was of more -- greater wealth had to come from outside. And Byblos shows up the deficiency of Egypt.

Now mark you well. Perhaps it is worth your noting it, or isn't. For me it was a great miracle to discover that Egypt was founded only after it had connection with Byblos. That is, the First Dynasty of Egypt, the first pharaoh, already had his -- his -- affiliated body, his affiliated branch in Byblos. We have found Osiris and Isis, ritualistic tokens, in Byblos of the First Dynasty, names of the first pharaoh of -- some pharaohs of the First Dynasty--that is, of -- from the very beginning of Egypt. And there you see the way in which the empires can be, so to speak, trapped as to their deficiency. Theoretically, Heaven and earth are only between the First Cataract and the mouth of the Nile. But practically--I told you, mythically--as is -- in supplementing the story, Byblos was the place to which the coffin of Osiris in the flood was always expelled, or compelled. And from there then, the wooden coffin came back, the acacia wood and the cedar wood from the -- Lebanon, in which then the Osiris coffin in Egypt could be -- out of which it could be built.

Now it is strange that what the First Dynasty in 2800 B.C. needed, this port, for timber from the woodlands outside Egypt, you see, to you and me is only retained now at the end of the era, as that gateway through which we receive Egyptian paper. The book is called that from Byblos. And that's what the name "bible" implies.

So you see that from the very first day of Egypt, this mysterious center of the Near East, of the -- of the -- hub of the universe, of Palestine, Jerusalem, Syria, Damascus, all these places known in the Bible--has played a part in the history of the world, and in this progress of this great, new acquisition of writing. I think

that's of some importance, that you see that Egypt engulfed or embraced this same region in which Moses set up his defiance of the golden calf. Byblos is farrer away from Egypt than Jerusalem.

So if we talk now of the Exodus of Moses, you must not understand that he left really the aura, the environment of the Egyptian pharaoh, you see, because Byblos was even north of him--and of course he knew that--but that he only found a way of settling outside the highways of commerce and trade and abide his day. The Jews are the people who wait for the coming of the Lord. And that's their essential function. And that is why they create a new dimension in our tradition, because where the Egyptians only had the eternal presence, and where the -- the -- tribes only had the looking-back to the totem pole of the ancestors, what is created by the Israelites, if they wait for the coming of the Lord?

(The future.)

Ja. The future is a creation of human beings, gentlemen. People could not think of what we should call future, in the days of the tribes and of Egypt. Before the year 1500 before Christ, the term "future" didn't exist. Even grammatically, by the way, most languages didn't have at that time any future tense. You couldn't say it. You still can't -- can't say it in English. English is a poor language. It has no future, because it ca- -- it must say "I shall" or "I will." But in Greek, or in Latin, and in Hebrew--not in Hebrew, by the way; they have also not this--but in -- you have a -- a form of the verb itself. "{Goso}," instead of "I go." "I am going today," "I went," you see, and to- -- the future would -- would then in Greek be "{goso}." That is the same root, but it would be a real plur- -- future. This country is today obsessed with na- -- nature, and in the nature, there is no future. There is just revolution; there is just recurrence.

And I am afraid, gentlemen, I have to shake you into the awareness, that when you today use the term "future," it has lost all meaning. For you, future is the result of the past and the present. That's not future. It's not future. If -- if what you are going to be five years from now is not at this moment impinging on you, when -- that you do not do today things because you hope to fulfill something which you are meant to do 10 years from now, you have no future. Most of you live here just in -- for -- day by day, and therefore you have no future. A man who has a future prepares himself for the future. And you can only prepare him for the future, if there is something to pare. Preparation is determined from the future backward.

And so, gentlemen, the Jews are the people of prophecy, because the prophet speaks from the end of days into the present day. He is not a predictor,

as you think. It's the scandal of America that in this country prediction and predictability is called desirable. It's the death of man! It's imperishable causality. We have -- we are no human beings if we can be predicted.

I told you the dean of Massachusetts Institute said, "Very soon we will be able to control the human mind with precision," which means he abolishes the future. Can't you see this? That if everything can be predicted, there is no future. There is no qualitative difference from the past. That's Egypt. In Egypt, there is no future. There is re- -- eternal recurrence of the same thing, the Great Year, we talked about. The Year.

This is what's so -- is so very difficult for me now to undertake, gentlemen, to free your notion of the end of time, of the destiny of man, from your abuse of the word "future." To you, future is the Futurama, is something that can be predicted. The future has the quality of forming you at this moment, so that it is the source of your actions today. If you say that the future is the consequence of your acts of today, you have no future. That's why so few people today have a future. They think that they make the future. I, my -- my dear people, can gratefully say that my whole life has been determined by the future. And not by the past. But you are caus- -- causal people, and you think that the future is produced by past and present. It never is. How could any person marry if the present produced the future? It is the great faith that he is meant to be a father and a grandfather that makes him marry today. He anticipates that this makes sense, what he is doing today. But nobody can -- can prove it from the past that's a good idea.

But you are all great heretics in this sense. And -- your environment has created this chemical and physical impression that the future is caused by the past and the present. Then we would be lost. Then everything would be law -- iron law, and no scientist could make any new discovery. And we wouldn't believe him, that it was true. Because, gentlemen, truth, if it is caused, is not truth. It is just a fact. How can I know that if I have to think certain things, they have any value -- value? I'm just mechanically forced to think certain things, because I have a bad di- -- poor digestion. So I have dark moods, so then I'm melancholic, and I write a pessimistic philosophy. Then -- the next man has a better digestion. He says, "I'm optimist, so I'm not a pessimist. They -- the philosophy is wrong." And that's all caused -- the past; my constitution, that is, causes me to think certain things. But they are just bubbles. I'm just belching, or -- or farting. Most people think today that their truth is just farts of their s- -- constitutional, physical system. That is, they are caused by the glands or by something, vitamins.

Think this through, gentlemen. You will be frightened to death that you

are nearly -- they are lower than the animals at this moment. An animal is a -- has a greater spasm, a greater orgasm, a greater boldness to jump forward and to mate somebody else, to improve the race, than you have, because you think you are just caused.

The future then, gentlemen, is real for the prophets of Israel. They have understood that God is coming. God is creating the universe. He hasn't yet created it. And since He hasn't yet created it, we have to interpret the right and the wrong, not from the past of the ancestors, but from the destiny of man, backward. Since God is creating man tomorrow, our today will be condemned -- stand condemned if it is not preparing the coming of the Lord. Does this make sense?

So everything has to fall away before the coming of the Lord, who is the Lord of tomorrow, and not of yesterday, not of the seven ancestors with their eyes on the totem pole, and not of the eye of Horus in the firmament of the heavens.

And so the first word, gentlemen, of the Bible says the glorious sentence, that the Heaven and earth of Egypt are not like the original and the mirror, that Egypt may be Heaven brought down to earth, oriented, made into a temple. And Horus may be the great power that unites the two heavens--that's why there's always a plural, "the heavens," you see, the split heavens from north and south. We talked about this. All right. Let Pharaoh go from the South to the North and do the impossible, which the stars cannot -- achieve. The God of Israel has created Heaven and earth. Heaven and earth. Earth is not created after -- in the image of Heaven. And Heaven is not the or- -- the -- the model for earth.

This is the meaning of the first sentence, gentlemen, of the Bible. The whole Bible is written dialectically against the faith of the empires. From Egypt, India, China, Japan, to the United States of America. It's a protest against the idea, gentlemen, that the earth is separated in the act of being created from the heavens.

The implication, gentlemen--if you know that your own maker is the maker of Heaven and earth--is tremendous, if you come to think that the heavens never stop circling, the eternal recurrence for an Egyptian priest and stargazer is so overwhelming, because the stars never stop. There is no station, no depot, no halt in the whole process. It's a juggernaut; it's an -- eternal wheel that turns incessantly. So the Jews invent--as they are -- feel that they are created from the end of time--the Sabbath. That is, the stars circle forever. Man and God do not. The discovery of the Jews, since they believe in the future, is that the present can be dismissed. "Class dismissed," "factory closed," "Saturday and Sunday, no

work." You all believe in this, gentlemen. Have you ever se- -- understood that thereby you cease to be under natural law? That the discovery of not rotating, not commuting, not revolving means that man has a power which nothing else on earth has, you see, that he can stop his own movement.

That's why to this day the Jews are connected with the celebration of the Sabbath. And of course, if you read Genesis, you know that it could only be written by an Israelite who celebrated the Sabbath. He only knew that God had created the world in seven days and -- six days and cre- -- rested on the seventh, because the Israelites did this. You can only write that God created Heaven and earth if you have met Him, and you met Him in the peace of your heart on a Sabbath. And you then look into the six days of the week and say, "Incessant movement, business, movements, speed, action" -- "dynamics," as you call it. And you poor fools have s- -- talked for 30 years now that you -- man must live dynamically. He mustn't, gentlemen. He mustn't. He mustn't live statically. He must live in the image of God. And God had his -- has this perfect freedom that He can alternate between rest and action. And if you can't do this, and want to live dynamic, you are crazy.

The discovery, gentlemen, of the Sabbath is the same thing as saying, "God created Heaven and earth," because there is then one power that is outside the created movement. The great thing, however, is that as soon as man comes in the -- into the light of this truth, he is himself free. He himself can laugh at his own dynamics, and can sometimes follow them and sometimes leave them.

The yoga -- yoga in India, as you know, try very hard to stop breathing, because they have of course also a deep feeling that this would be a relaxation of the eternal juggernaut, you see, of the eternal pressure on man. Now they -- make -- do miracles. As you know, they have a sleeping state in which they -- the so-called deep sleep, you see, which is very similar to our deep-freeze for our foodstuffs today. You can nearly eliminate this -- sleep, they tell me, that the -- such a man affects you as though he was dead. And they say that during this time, his -- his soul migrates elsewhere, you see, because he can simply put his body on ice. I know -- don't know enuch- -- enough about it, myself, but I want you to know that this desire to escape from the pressure of movement is of course universal. The Jews are the only -- the one -- the best Israel, so to speak, of antiquity. They accomplished it. I have taken E- -- Jew- -- Egypt as an example for the empires. But you must never forget that the empire idea is universal. It's -- the Incas had it, and everywhere you find such attempts.

I want you to understand that the yearning of Israel is universal. The Jews have not a patent, as though nobody else wanted to believe in the living God. This -- the desire to find God is all over the earth. It is only Israel that has suc-

ceeded. But never think that this is a kind of -- the Jews are something odd. "How odd of God to choose the Jews." You know, that's a famous pun. It isn't odd of God to choose the Jews, because it is something that every one of us wants. Every one of us wants to be told that this -- act of his life as of today is meaningful in the light of his destination, of his destiny. He would -- you would give everything if people could tell you that in the light of what you are meant to live for, you are at this moment on the right path, you see. And if you have no ancestors to orient you, as any immigrant to the United States has to perform a different task from his ancestors, it is obvious that he must be oriented as a prophet- -- prophets. That's why the Puritans in this country were the New Israel and had the voice of prophecy in their limbs, and were the New Israel in every sense of the word, and sanctified the Sabbath. Because if you come -- arrive in this country without ancestors, you see, and you have no empire, but just these little colonies and these villages, the only thing you can do -- come into the wilderness, the only thing you can do if you want to perform a task for humanity is to throw yourself on the -- at the -- on the mercy of the future. And as you -- why do you laugh at the Puritans? Because you yourself have no future, and they had. They had a glorious future. And you have given it up, because you say the future is mechanically coming through the elections, and through the inventions, and through the daily news. And you are out of it. You will be produced, you think, by the times. You won't produce the times yourself.

So I think one -- I think it's disappearing now, but when I came to this country, the tragedy was that the Puritans were ridiculed, gentlemen, and so the two world wars happened. America had lost its future, and so the -- it was taken aback, and by surprise that it had to go to the -- these two wars. Everybody in the meantime said, "Oh, never. We won't go to war. We are --." And so Europe was destroyed, and the -- Communism is in Berlin, and in -- in the places of Goethe and Luther in Germany, because just -- Americans didn't care. And now the -- you are fixed, just the same. And now the American air- -- airports in the Red Sea -- are -- have to be entertained, and in Maroc, and in -- in Berlin, and where not -- I don't know where there are no American planes. All against the will of the Americans, because you have tried to have a mechanical future, and so the future has acted in your place, inexorably, and very foolishly, at tremendous cost. What would have cost you -- this country, the economy of America, $10 mill- -- billion in 1938, we now pay for with a national debt of $300 billion, as you know, and a budget of $80 billion. That's the difference, because you believe in the predictors.

Predictor is the opposite. He is a magician. He deduces, from his little mind's knowledge, the future. The prophet is a man whose heart is already beating in harmony with our destiny. And therefore he can judge the present, and say, "This is a misnomer. This is on -- a deviation. It doesn't lead anywhere.

It's a dead alley." Read Isaiah, read any of the prophets of Israel; what they said was just that in this way, man disperses his energies.

That's the content then of the Bible, gentlemen. The story of man's deviation -- it's called the "fall of man," the original sin, also something at which you have laughed, because you didn't know how deeply sunk you are in it. Original sin is natural, gentlemen. It's the most normal statement. It means that you do not sin individually, you see, but the path on which you -- are set is just leading nowhere. That's meant by "original sin." Going asunder, I translated -- used to translate it, because it is not leading into the -- to the goal of the human race. It's -- why people can ridicule such an -- such a concept of original sin, I have never understood. It's the most normal, under- -- understandable -- platitude, you may say. "Original sin" is the platitude meaning that you can miss your way. Now everybody knows that we -- miss this way very much, so we see so many failures in life: bankruptcies, things going into receivership, whole nations being wiped off the map. Don't you think that original sin is the first idea everybody...

[tape interruption]

...how can a man who lives up -- grows up in New York be saved? Hardly possible. Perhaps if he lives in the Bronx. I mean, don't you know that you are made by the environment? You all say me -- tell me this. Now couldn't this environment be very corrupt and very wrong? You all admit this, but when it comes to original sin, you say, "That's a fantastic, idiotic, stupid, foolish idea. I -- the Puritans believed in original sin."

Gentlemen, as long as you do not believe in original sin, nobody can help you. Because you are not free to look at yourself and say, "This is wrong." You have no power of adjudication of the right and the wrong in the sense that you say, "Well, man is not destined to butcher his brother." Any pacifist is a prophet who says that it's possible: a time of eternal peace. So you must say that all the governments of the earth are fallen, you see, in original sin.

So you -- the contradictions in your mind are so -- so terrible, because on the one-hand side, you know all these truths. And on the oth- -- in the same breath, you deny them. Every one of you believes de facto in original sin, and everybody tries to crack a joke on it. -- It makes you schizophrenic. You are all schizophrenics, gentlemen. You don't know what to believe, you don't know what the fu- -- what is future. It goes all back and forth. You are ancestral, tribalminded, with background, and glands, and genes -- you read Genetics and all this idiotic stuff. Gentlemen, religion makes your faces and your body. Your faith makes it. Look at people, and you -- and -- Mis- -- we talked about this yesterday, Mr. {Jaeckel}, and he showed us some pictures of the ordinary Japanese, who

has a mask around his face--he is not a person--and the Christian Japanese who just explodes with his own personality, because he has found his own freedom, and his own center. And they are two different faces. And you can't -- everybody sees it. Twenty pictures here, 20 pictures there. Just a different world.

So if you have a future, {and it determines your steps}, you look differently, I assure you, from a man who is bowed down by the cult of the ancestors. Go down to the Orozco frescoes in the basement here. And you know that these tribes have no faces yet, because they are under the pressure of the past, these animistic tribes. You know the first group marching on there? And then you look into the face of the Christ, of the risen Christ, and you know that's the future -- He is the future. He is free. And you say the -- all these things don't exist, but your read anthropology, and psychoanalysis, and all these second-rate things. It's second-rate, gentlemen, what you -- what you know of. This is not secondrate, gentlemen. These were people who lived the future. How did they do it? The -- by leaving the fleshpots of Egypt.

Now you recall that when we talked of Egypt, I had this rather painful experience that most of you didn't even know what "the fleshpots of Egypt" meant. The fleshpots of Egypt means the high standard of living. "Fleshpots" means that people have meat. Now any tribesman is hard-put, because meat is rare. On a hunt, you can have meat. But it is so rare, gentlemen, that meat in a tribe can usually only be eaten by the whole group. If you read the -- however, the story of the pharaonic era--in the Bible, the story of Noah and the flood, which describes the flood in -- in Mesopotamia, and Egypt, practically, and its consequences--you will find that God there allows man to eat meat after the flood, because the intensive cultivation of the country leads to the possibility of having cattle, and feeding them, you see, of having a constant supply of food through the whole year for the animals. And you cannot have animals for the whole year if you are not in a place where something grows. And this can only be done if there is constant irrigation or something done, you see. If you are migrating, you cannot provide for these herds, of course, with any certainty, because you have to give ground and have to move to another place.

So the fleshpots of Egypt, gentlemen, were the signal by which the -- the temple-dwellers and the stargazers moved their flock away from the roaming of the migration of tribes. The Egyptian -- the Jews now had to overcome the fleshpots of Egypt, the temptation that for the intensive cultivation of the present earth under the sky of a certain territory, you see, they would give up the future, they would not think that God hadn't yet finished creating the universe, that this was all final.

And for this reason, gentlemen, it is certainly no accident that Moses

decided to leave Egypt after he had seen that the Great Year of 1321 B.C. made no difference in the life of the Egyptian castes and classes, that Pharaoh was entrenched as ever, and that this Great Year had not spelled any liberation, any change. You remember that I said the Egyptian calendar goes from 2780 to 132- --wait a minute-- -21, and then to 139 A.D. These are B.C. Now we of course do not know the exact date of the Exodus. It is assumed that it is -- happened in the year 1280. I think that with some further considerations, one might arrive with greater certainty at a date. People have never connected the return of the Great Year with the Exodus from Egypt. Well, I'm quite sure that there must be a connection. I cannot pretend to know which the connection is. But there is an impulse -- I mean, a relation between Moses' decision to leave Egypt, and the waiting in vain for any change in the -- in the eternal recurrence of the caste system of Egypt, the eternal separation of Egypt from the rest of the world, and the eternal weakness of Egypt to be invaded by unreconcilable Bedouins, and foreigners. The helplessness of an empire consists in this, that it is somewhere in the middle of the world, but it can't take care of the rest of the world. It is like China, you see, overrun finally by -- by strangers, because it only takes care of this, what is between the walls of its own empire. It's -- the center of the universe, yes; but the periphery is -- is not conquered. It's completely left to accident.

So around the year 1300, a professor at the university of Cairo--or Memphis, or Heliopolis--called Moses, decided that the wisdom of the magicians of Egypt was not for him. He is like Karl Marx, perhaps, in a deeper sense, that he felt that all the ways of the Egyptians led nowhere except into eternal return, and pre- -- prevented therefore the God who had created Heaven and earth of entering the human hearts. Because the human beings were made in the image of moon, and stars, and everything under the sun, but not -- of nothing above the sun. Not of the maker of the sun. And there was no redress.

So his first problem was to make sure that the people which he was going to create, gentlemen, would go beyond the achievements of Egypt -- beyond the achievements of Egypt. You could only create the future if you added it to the creations of the past and the creation of the present. And don't misunderstand this, gentlemen. It's very important that you should write, with large letters, into your notebook: the Jews are not a tribe, and they are not a kingdom, or an empire.

One of you wrote in his report--who was it? will he kindly confess?--that the Jews were a tribe. I was absolutely horrified. I didn't tell him at the time, because I wanted to correct it here before the class and for all of you, gentlemen. If you say that the Jews are a tribe, you totally misunderstand the problem of Israel. In order to overcome the old tribal stage, which ended in 3000 for the first time, when the Egyptians and the Babylonians began to -- to -- to build temples,

and in order to overcome Egypt after 1300, the Jews had of course to inherit the best of the tribe. That's why they have 12 tribes. And in order to overcome the empires, they had of course to call their country the "Promised Land," instead of the astrologically, heavenly, you see, ordained land. Promised by a word of God to man, and not by a word of the stars in writing to the earth underneath. The Is- -- Israel is not dependent on the Nile River, or on Sirius, or on the sun. God creates Heaven and earth, and so the word goes out into the ear of -- of stuttering and stammering Moses, that God will be with him--that's the name of God, "I, who shall be elsewhere than yesterday"--in telling him that the land will come in due time, but the important thing is that he's projected beyond the existing order. That's the meaning of the word "promise," that something is sent forth which goes beyond that which -- is under his noses. Take the word "promise" a little more mysteriously, gentlemen. That I can make you a promise means that I can take you out of the present time, and make you live on empty or fulfilled promises. You see, you don't know. Credit, promise, { }.

All these words are very mysterious things, because anybody who believes in a promise overlooks the -- present, and overlooks the past, doesn't he? He says, "I live because somebody did me -- made me the promise that I could study in a graduate school, so I do everything to prepare myself for the graduate school."

When I was five years old, I went to a famous circus in Germany, in Berlin. And the old owner of the circus promised me that I would get a pony on my sixth birthday. I believed it all the year. And when my birthday came, I was told that the old gentleman had died. And he hadn't put it in his will. I never got the pony. But I certainly -- I remember what it means to live by promises.

It means that the -- the present does not matter, and that's the important thing about Israel, you see. The present, and the persecutions, and the 6 million people gassed in Auschwitz do not matter in comparison to the promise that Israel has received. And that's a very great story, gentlemen. They live by -- on -- on the future and by the future. But you want to conquer the future; you want to tame the future mechanically. You have nothing to do with the future. Your future is just the grave of the past. That's why it is so ridiculously boring. All your sensations, gentlemen, all the news which are announced, they are all deducible from the -- from the past. The newspapers in this country to me are the most boring thing in the world for this reason, because everything new is -- viewed in the -- in the -- in the mental categories of these news- -- poor news journalists who have failed in college--or perhaps no- -- have not failed in college; probably in Dartmouth they got an A--but -- but they judge the future with their little mentality of the present. Their mind is never -- stands never corrected.

The Exodus of -- from Egypt then, gentlemen, is the embarkment on promise. And that's why the name of the -- of the God of Israel should be translated correctly: "I shall be where I shall be," or "when I shall be, and that is my freedom." God is free, and man is not free.

The surprise that God springs on us, that's the essence of the Israelitic, messianic faith. He's -- always comes from a different corner than from where you expect it.

Break. We can stop time.

[tape interruption]

...name of God and the second {of course} what I meant by the seven ancestors which look down on the tribe from the totem pole. The Israelites are the anti-mythical group in the world. Since they speak from the end of time, and God will be all in all, they are not interested in any partial statement of the Egyptian myth that Horus unites Egypt. They -- believe that God unites mankind, everything. And they are not interested in the pedigree of a tribe, where after seven generations backward, suddenly the Great Spirit, or the Great Kangaroo appears, or the Great Puma, because there is an end to the story. Tribes--I told you this before--have a memory of by and large 150 years. If you look into the stories of the Navajo Indians, they cannot distinguish anything that is before 150 years back or 500 years back, you see. They cannot tell you when the Spaniards brought horses, and they could begin to ride. That's forgotten, because the memory of a tribe -- written on human bodies with the tattoo is no -- cannot be distinguishable. It cannot discern epochs beyond seven generations back.

We have many such pedigrees. The king of Lindisfarne in England -- Lindisfarne in England, wrote down his pedigree in 790 of our era. And he -- already working under the influence of Christianity, he made a terrible effort to go as far back as he possibly could. And the furthermost year he tried to know something about was 340 of our era. So it was -- much shorter than Christianity. And then he thought it was wise to become a Christian, because a Christian had twice as long a memory. And the funny thing is that in 340 B.C. in a -- A.D., when you read the -- we have this manuscript--the god Odin comes in, the great spirit. So that the pedigree of a -- the king of Lindisfarne in 790 A.D. looks like this, "Here I am, king of Lindisfarne in 790"--the days of Charlemagne, it is--"and I go back to 340, and there the story ends with saying, I am of Wodin," as in Wednesday. You can also say -- of Zeus. That is, the story ends where you -- where it ends.

Now that's a mythical conception of time. Arbitrarily somewhere in the

midst of this story, you stop. In Egypt, I told you, that except for Byblos, Egypt stops at the mouth of the Nile. Everything outside doesn't exist. That's a myth. And you told -- I told you to go back to the -- through the Red Sea, that was a mythical story of the eye of Horus that has to be carried back there at nighttime.

So what is myth, gentlemen, is a treatment of part of time or a part of space for the whole. That's a good definition of "myth." Anything mythical treats the whole -- the part of time or of space as being the whole. So when you believe, gentlemen, that the -- the ideology, and the ideas of today are sufficient for your salvation, you are mythical. It's childish to believe that what the people know in 1957 is -- is sufficient for your salvation. It isn't, but you believe that. And you live a mythical life.

The scientist who thinks that what his science at this day teaches is enough, is -- live -- makes a myth out of science. Most scientists today live in such a scientific myth. They say, "Science is enough." How could it? The conditions that -- for the existence of science are certain -- political ideas about freedom. If you don't entertain them with the laity, the laity will come and burn you. So how can science be sufficient for science? Science is based on your and my patience with these fools. We must tolerate science, must we not? We must think it's good. Now how do you convince a housewife that science is necessary? If she isn't against it--the women have the majority in the United States--out goes science.

That's myth. We are surrounded by myth, gentlemen. And the sooner you wake up to this, you -- the better. Israel is based on the fight against the myth in space and in time. It's the -- the Bible is the book against myth.

This is lost on you today. You bel- -- say the opposite. You say, "The book" -- "Bible is a mythical book." "Christ is a myth." I've heard this, many people say. You say the most extravagant things. You say Christ is a -- is a -- committed suicide. And you say that He -- that He is a mythical figure, and what-not. It doesn't matter, because to you all this is blah-blah-blah. Gentlemen, you -- you have lost any continuity with the march of events through time if you do not see that Israel is an attempt to keep the future free from any partial myth. That's the attempt of the Bible.

Now I come to the name for the God of the -- from -- who judges you from the future. The messianic conception of the coming of the Lord into past and present is expressed very simply in the Book of Exodus. Does anybody happen to know what the Book of Exodus is? What's Exodus? Wie?

({ }.)

From Egypt, and which -- what -- which is the Book of Exodus? It's the second part of the five books of Moses. There is given the revelation by which Moses is said -- is told with whom he has the honor to speak, and what he shall report to his people. And the translation in our strangely scholastic and medieval tradition is, "I shall -- I am who I am." That's in the Vulgate. "Sum qui sum -- {es qui} sum." But that's a wrong translation. And that's not my private opinion that it's a wrong translation. That has been fought through in the last 35 years that it is a wrong translation. Even though in Manhattan College they may not yet know it.

It is very important for you that you should at least be told once that the name for God in the Old Testament is not a -- something that has no meaning for you and me, that it is something the Jews called. I -- I would love to -- to make an attempt, gentlemen, to break through this idea of saying that's the Jewish Bible, or that's Greek, or that's Egyptian. I'm talking to you about things the whole of mankind has tried to solve, the bearer of which have been then specific groups. But what I've tried you -- to tell you about spirits and settlement are your own truth. You wouldn't have been able to act anything out -- anything differently, would you, if you were -- had been in their position. What I'm trying to say about the Israelites is equally difficult and equally normal for me to attempt. But you must admit that you and I, if we had lived after 1320, we would have missed the necessary step, the one thing necessary for your and my salvation if we hadn't left -- Egypt and believed in the God who shall be who He shall be. What does this mean? It shall mean that God has been somewhere, in some place. And it means that He has been some-when in a certain moment. People have been enthused, and inspired, and take a new direction. So God has shown Himself to the tribes' ancestor. Of course, He has. Don't -- don't you believe that? They -- they have created something terrific. They cannot sacrifice this discovery of speech as something arbitrary. It was necessary. Can you see this?

So God is the God from the beginning, this name of God says. God has been somewhere, and He has been some-when. God has not lest -- left Himself unverified, and untestified. From the beginning of the Word, God has been. It's implied in this name. But where He shall be tomorrow, and when He shall appear, we don't know. It's a very complex name, but very simple. It saves the continuity of history by saying, "Of course, God has been in the spirits of the tribes. Of course, God has been in the gods of Egypt. The past and the present had to be created, and man had to serve that royalty." But now you have to -- {know} that this isn't the whole story. The story goes on. The mythical, you see, part of weak man, that he says, "Where God has been, He will be again, and with whom He has been, with them He will be again," that must fall.

The absolute claim of the tribe and the empire is denied by Israel, but not

their gods. The true God that has also been in Adam and in Noah is not denied. That is the miracle of the Bible, gentlemen, that it is not a Jewish book. It doesn't apologize for the Jews. The Jews are made out as just as disastrous as all human beings. They are very ugly in the Bible. They are not nice. They are obstinate, stiff-necked, disobedient. Everything. Of course, they are just people like all other people, as you are, and I. But they have looked through the -- the incredible wisdom of our creator that when He has created one thing, He reserves the right to create something more.

And therefore the Bible had to include the pre-Jewish story. The mystery of the Bible is that it is the first anti-national book, and the first anti-clannish book, because it includes the achievements of Cain and Abel, and Enoch, and all the people after Adam. The 924 years -- or nearly a thousand years from Adam to Noah of course meant as a -- one eon. A tribal era. We would say from 6000 B.C. to 3000 B.C. It's not a better way of saying, because we don't know the years, either. And this is the first part of the Book of Genesis. And then comes the second part, the time from Noah to -- to Moses. And that includes the split of the Japhethites, and the Semites, and the Hamites. And it makes very clearly out that Sem is the larger for -- ancestor. And Heber, the founder of the Hebrews -- group, you see, is -- is only following him.

So the universal character of the Bible is the important thing for you and me. That the Bible makes exactly the same attempt which you and I have todow -- -day make here in Philosophy 58, or which Mr. Toynbee makes, or Mr. Spengler, anybody today, to write a universal story. Only that I think the Bible is infinitely better than what these people -- Spengler and Toynbee are doing. Because they -- this man has caught the necessity of keeping what we have. Mr. Toynbee leaves one civilization alone, then goes on to the next. The same with Mr. Spengler. But the Bible is much more grateful to -- because it believes in God, and says, "God created Heaven and earth, He created the tribes, He allowed men to create, so to speak -- constitute himself as tribesmen, and He -- they began to speak, and then God created the empires, and it was a good thing." Noah, the agricultural, you see, visit, did a wonderful thing. After the flood, he regulated--year in, year out--harvest and sow -- sow time -- sowing time, and winter, and summer and rain, and sunshine, et cetera. That's Egypt. And then come the patriarchs, and Moses, and the people, so to speak, that center group that was kept clean from the aboma- -- abominations of the tribal cruelties on the warpath, and their exaggerations, so to speak. This is the kind of -- the Jews are -- are pictured here as a -- the vertebra, the -- the spine of the human race.

Now as you know, most modern zoology and biology follows the same line. They say that the apes are sidelines of the center stream of life, and we have kept going in the middle of the evolutionary stream. The same way the Bible is

written, saying that at every moment, men throw up a certain thing and are in great danger of getting stuck in a routine, in a -- and there the center part is the revelation group of Is- -- Israelites, who keep the -- {set a} way -- the mainstream open so that no Egyptian -- deviation or no Assyrian deviation, or Chinese deviation can ever make people forget that this is only a mythical part of the story, that China is not the globe, that Egypt is not the planet, you see, and that the Sioux Indians are not the whole of mankind and only speak a very partial tongue.

The creation then of the future, gentlemen, is from the very first moment conceived as a service to the whole of the human race. And therefore, gentlemen, among the many mental crimes which you constantly commit, please do not commit the idea that the Israelites were a tribe, or that they were a kingdom, or that they were the people who -- who worshiped one God. You -- hear very often this -- this ridiculous invention of the -- last 50 years that the Jews were {henotheists}, "{heno}" meaning one. And they -- yes, believed in one god, and not in many; but they were not monotheists, because they were just egotistically centered and said, "Ja- -- Yahweh is the God of the Jews." Gentlemen, anybody who says this, lies! It's one of the most infamous features of our day that you can say things about Jesus, li- -- that He's a "mythical figure," and that you can say of Yahweh that He is a "God of the -- Israel." He is the God who created Heaven and earth. From the very first word of the Bible, you should know a little better.

It is a scandal, because that's what you -- all you do in your fraternities: talk this blasphemous nonsense. If you talk at all on these things. It is -- I have never seen such a conglomeration of insanities as they pass -- are passed around on this campus about the most -- the simplest facts. You just have to open, and take the trouble of reading the first line of the Bible; you know that it is a -- a -- a people who transcend, who go beyond tribes and empires. And therefore, since they come after the many gods of Egypt, the only service they can render is to bring Egypt back into the fold of nations.

So they serve the tribes, and the -- and the -- Egypt as a reminder that this isn't the whole story. And that's the name then of God, gentlemen, "I'm not where I have been, and I'm not when I -- when you know that I shall be." You cannot conjure my- -- up by the constellations of the stars, and you cannot conjure myself up by going to the same spot on earth, and you cannot conjure myself up by claiming that you are of noble blood -- blue blood, and that the -- the tribe has always had the blessings of the sky." It depends on your humbly walking with your creator and listening to what He has to tell you today or tomorrow. "Walk humbly with thy maker," is the great verse in the Psalm. That's a very -- much -- very much more difficult. And if you walk in the warpath -- on the warpath against any provocation of your old traditions, or if you walk under

the sky and its constellations just by the cal- -- astrological calendar, that's much more easy.

I wish to remind you, gentlemen, that there is another way -- before I return to the -- to the prophetic situation of the Israelites. I like to tell you that the -- when the tribes and empires existed, there was -- could be -- come into existence a new group, a middle group that benefited from a compromise between tribes and empires, and tried not to create the dimension of the future, but to make the best of tribes and empires by mixing them, by a conglomeration of the two ways of life. Egypt being absolutely contrary to the tribe, couldn't do it themselves, the Egyptians. But the Greeks are the great humanists who compromised. And every feature of Greek tradition, gentlemen, is based on the admixture of the tribal elements into the empire, and of imperial elements into the tribe. Of this I will talk later, but I wanted to announce it.

If you have two chapters in human history, one representing the domination of the fu- -- present and future by the people of the past, and one -- the other representing the great living under the eye of the -- Horus in the presence, and its re- -- eternal recurrence, you can take two different steps. This is...

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...and you come to the Great Year...

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...be jettisoned, can he prove to the attitude which in 1200 led to the Trojan War already also, just after the Great Year, and led the Greeks to their great explorations of the islands of the -- Aegean and to their manynesses, so to speak. If you want to understand the Greeks, you just have to think that they combined clannishness and local-cult, temple-cult. The Greek temple is a temple as in Egypt. But it is without inscriptions, as a tribe. It's very funny -- the Greek temple, you know, is not covered with letters, with hieroglyphs. The inscription of the ancient Greeks is not written in -- in stone, you see -- as a cosmos. So -- who has not seen -- you all have seen pictures of Greek temples, have you not? Well, the great distinction there is very clear: you see that the temple is clean. That's why we like it, because it is not full of this -- hieroglyphs and magic signs.

So we shall see later that the one solution between this 1 and 2, you see, the Egyp- -- the Greeks say, 1 + 2, and that's Greece. And that's humanism, what you all are. You are all combinations of tribesmen. You have family, and you have a country. You are all Americans, and you are all Mr. Smith. Therefore, you are combinations by your- -- by nature of the tribal traditions of humanity--you

have fathers, and grandfathers, and cousins, and aunts; so you live in families. And you also have a home, and houses, and cities, and states; so you live in a nation. And so you both have -- are Greeks by nature, because you know of two ways of life, some form -- way or other.

Now there is another solution. That's the Jewish solution. They say not "1 + 2," you see, but they go beyond. And they write a chapter in the history of the human race, which we can call Number 3. And this in Israel. I think it may help you to keep the two in a -- two side by side to see that I'm not raving mad. But I'm talking from the concrete steps the human race has really taken. The immediate result of the end of the first era of Egypt was the creation of the Greek mentality, which is the free use of both ways of life: the tribal and the imperial way. We come to this at closer range. And the -- Israelitic way which says, "If we just embark on -- on citification, civilization, tribalization, and clannishness, God can never come. He must be kept free. And we are in His image, the free people, the people of the coming of the Lord."

Again, it was -- this desire is universal, gentlemen. The Greeks had a cult in Eleusis, Eleusis. You may have heard of the Eleusinian mys- -- mysteries. Who has heard of the Eleusinian mysteries? Only two people. The rest have no mysteries. And -- well, the Eleusinian mysteries near Athens, in Attica, initiated the desirous people into the coming of the deity. "Eleusis" means the coming. And {Eleutherea} -- {Elutherea} means "freedom," means "that what is to come."

So I only want to say the Greeks of course were in this sense not lacking the universal desire of mankind to know a little bit about the future, and to -- not miss it. Again, I warn you to think that what the -- Israel stands for is absolutely isolated and has nothing to do with you and me. It is in every Greek heart, in every Roman's heart, and every Chinese heart only they haven't -- been able to give it a -- a separate or independent expression. They have it, so to speak, as a sideline, as a wishful thinking.

The prophets of Israel, however, stake their -- the existence of Israel on the existence of prophecy. No prophet, no Israel. Now the day of Israel, gentlemen, the Great Year of Israel, if we use an Egyptian term, then consists of gathering some people who will listen to the prophecy, to the last prophet. Therefore it was -- is very important at the end of the story of Israel that John the Baptist is explicitly called "the last prophet." There was no prophecy in E- -- in Israel obviously for 150 years before John the Baptist came. And the lack of prophecy was the doom of the old -- of the old covenant.

And it is essential to the existence of Israel that there are prophets. You cannot say that "There is Israel, hence we have prophets." You must say it the

other way around: "Because there is prophecy, there must be Israel." Where there is prophecy, you need a group that carries the prophecy and makes it fruitful. And -- and hears it. Israel i- -- are those who hear the prophecy. Speaker and his public are of course corollary. You can't have playacting if you have no audience. The actor and his -- and his public are -- belong to each other. The prophet creates the people of Israel, and the people of Israel create the prophet in a mutual -- in a -- in a, so to speak, dialectics.

The first way of expressing the prophetic existence of Israel is the projection into the past. From Moses backward, as you know, the patriarchs are told in the Bible to have had the same God. The great invention of the Bible in this respect is that there is a God of Abraham, the God of Jacob, and the God of Isaac. That sounds very trite to you. There is a very beautiful oratorio by Mendelssohn, where this is a great aria: "O God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob." Now that's -- is as important a name of God, if you look back into the times of these people, gentlemen, or into -- if you really understand your own time. Then the name of God, "I shall be who I shall be," from the future, the past is conquered, is looked through, is made transparent. Because God is He who He shall be who shall be, also is the God who is not the -- for this reason the God of Isaac, because He was the God of Abraham. And He is not the God of Jacob, because he was the God of Isaac. He is not an ancestral spirit, you see. They are -- Isaac experiences God directly, and Jacob experiences Him directly; and Abraham experiences Him directly. And the three together constitute the ex- -- divine experience for the past. A very ingenious way of breaking the tribal taboo, of taking the tribal primitivism, where the first spirit is the domineering spirit, and all others are dependent on him, so all the spirit is always mediated from the source downwards. Can you see the difference?

This strange wedding--the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob--is the emancipation of every generation to God. If you believe in the coming of the Lord, and if you believe that God has created the world from the beginning, you have to give expression to this mysterious fact that every generation has equally close relations to God. The -- the name, "God of Abraham," "God of Isaac," and "God of Jacob" means that although you believe that you have the right spirit, you must also believe that your father had the right spirit, or the generation of your father. There is no progress beyond the immediate relation to the divine. Your idea of progress is all foolish, because you believe that you understand better. Gentlemen, progress doesn't consist in understanding better than the first man; they understand -- -stood very well, usually better than we. But that he can build on their achievements, add to their heroic deeds, by becoming founders and heroes ourselves, that's progress.

The human soul cannot progress -- I mean, beyond other souls. Every soul

is a divine creation, as perfect as -- as {God} -- man gave -- received his soul from the very first day, to perfection. There has been genius in the masks. There have been geniuses in the pyramids. There is genius in the Psalms and the prophets. They is -- are perfect. You can't write better Psalms. Hitler tried it. He had { } -- these psalms written, and Germanic Psalms written; it was ridiculous. They are -- they are -- they are nonsense. The 150 Psalms of the Bible cannot be beaten. Why? Because that is their genius. That's the God of Israel in their period of their -- of their necessary service for the -- to the rest of mankind.

Now the tribes' masks cannot be beaten. They are superb. They are insuperable. And the pyramids of Egypt cannot be beaten. Then you understand that you could also say the God of the tribes, the God of Israel, and the God of Egypt, if you want to understand the -- why the New Testament is called the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, you see. It was an attempt to do justice to the creation of the historical man before Israel. Can you see this? Before Moses left Egypt. To make sure -- as a modern historian has expressed it, "Every generation is equally near to God." Every generation is equally near to God.

And there is a -- a tale goes with this, gentlemen. I wrote this sentence, "Every generation is equally close to God," and I thought that people knew this; it's the famous historian, Ranke, who said this, "Every generation is equally close to God." And he just translated the biblical term, "The God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob." And I printed -- I printed it in a book in this country. And a colleague of mine reviewed the book. And he said this was unadulterate bunkum. He didn't know that it was a quotation. He thought that I had fabricated this wonderful expression. And so, in order to attack me, he said it was unadulterate bunkum.

Gentlemen, all -- everything in the Bible for -- to you is unadulterate bunkum. But I still subscribe to it, because I think that by some closer inspection, you will find it's just common sense. It is common sense to believe that we couldn't exist if our ancestors hadn't created us. And that we beli- -- live by their freedom and by their relation to God. You cannot think that you made yourself. And therefore if you are worth anything, you owe it of course to the inspiration of your ancestors. You cannot pick out one ancestor, and say, "He had the spirit, and all the other generations were without it." So to say that every generation is equally close to God, opens the path to the understanding of your real relation to the spirit. And to call this "unadulterate bunkum," is expression, gentlemen, of the complete benightedness of modern man. Mr. {Herbert West}, of course, thought that he was very witty. But I think he wasn't. He was just expressing the haughtiness and arrogance of modern man who thinks that his generation is at its peak -- at the peak of progress, and all the other generations are benighted.

Now I cannot see how benighted men can produce my own present day. They must have not been benighted if I can be -- stand so high. Obviously they have brought me up so high in the last 5,000 years.

And this then is -- gentlemen, is the Jewish vision of the past: that God of course has not abandoned mankind and waited till Mr. -- Mr. McCarthy comes into the universe and then inspires Mr. McCarthy, you see, all of a sudden. But of course there has been inspiration after inspiration. Divinity into -- after divinity in the life of man on this earth. Only the old divinities must not encroach on the power of God to enter the scene again. They must not, like the Egyptians and the tribes, say, "Everything outside of me has to be slaughtered," or has to be kept out, or has to be denied. You understand?

This is the problem of history, gentlemen, and you see then that paganism consists in things like Mr. Toynbee's 23 civilizations. That's paganism, because the rela- -- civilizations do not owe each other anything. They are not marching on. They are not one stepping on the shoulders of the other, you see. They go in their cycle, and over it is. You understand, that's -- that's not history, because it makes a thing meaningless. If there is every- -- anywhere a break in continuity, then there is no God. That's atheism. Blank atheism. Why all this waste, up and down the alley? Rise and -- and setting of civilizations and empires, gentlemen? It just -- it bores me. It's annoying to -- why should I bother with things that come and go, and float, and there's no meaning? I can understand, however, that God wants made -- to make man into one being who masters the past, the present, and the future, and serves in His stead on this globe and is His steward on earth. That's a very reasonable proposition. He had to have one animal, and one plant, so to speak, that covers the ground here, that -- that stands for man on earth. You know, "Adam" means earth. And the first name for man is the right word, you know, that animal or that creature represents the earth. And I think that's simply true, that we today, in building a satellite around the -- with the moon, we represent the whole, global, you see, cosmic energy, don't we? We can get it together.

The Bible then, gentlemen, is the story of prophecy prevented and promoted. It is -- what the Bible tries to say is how at every moment, God tries to make His entr‚e into the world in every generation, and how in every generation, the -- the goats and the sheep -- around Him try -- some try to withdraw their support from this undertaking, and the others come to His support and save Him. So that the cause of Israel is always a lost cause, and always a saved cause. And therefore, the -- Israel is -- the Bible is not a story of triumph or of failure.

It is not a -- therefore a national history. All national histories are -- books

of triumph. And that's why they are not true. And all the books like Toynbee are books of failure, because it's all over. Gibbon, Fall -- Decline and Fall of Rome, and so on. For the last 150 years, all universal histories have been histories of failure. Leading -- things leading nowhere, The End of Empires, you see. Empires Fall, and so on. Tears in his eyes, the historian today writes that it is all stubbles, all ashes, all -- Beard -- Charles Beard, you know, Economic History of the United States, Veblen -- Thorstein, or -- all these gentlemen, you see. All -- Nehru, Glimpses in World History, all over -- it's all over with, it's all ashes. That's the story of failure. And then you get of course this textbook on American history for your schools, and the saluting of the American flag, and it's all victory, all triumph, all glorious, you see. The -- both is absolutely nonsense.

There is not a history of victory, and there is not a history of failure, you see. But it is the history of this combination of resistance and obedience; and that is the Bible story. There is no embellishment of any crime committed in Israel. They are just normal, human beings. But this normalcy, gentlemen, is the greatest anti-mythical act. In any tribe, the enemy is below parity, and the tribesmen are above parity. The Egyptians are above parity, and the outside world is just chaos, or jungle. In Israel, that isn't true. The Israelis are just as wicked, and as good as any other. Sometimes the king of -- Nebuchadnezzar is better than the Israelitic prophets, so to speak, and sometimes he isn't. You never can tell. It's usually unexpected who is just and who is unjust.

And so the Bible, gentlemen, is the first unmythical book, because it tries to be indifferent to victory and defeat. It is superior to this category, because God can carry His purpose out through defeat as well as through victory. It's just not an important category. To you, it is -- may be important: success or failure. Gentlemen, your failures may be your greatest victories; your victories may be your greatest failures. How can you tell? In the eyes of God, He uses both. A man who can -- may -- be not a failure certainly is not a human being, yet, you see. The -- always vic- -- victorious is a mechanism, so to speak. We haven't yet tested him. Can he stand failure? is a very great test for a man.

You take this, by the way, more or less for granted, because you are in the tradition of the Bible much more than you know. You take this all for granted. I only -- would like to -- wake you up to the fact to which you owe your very good character, and your great power to live. You owe it to this creation of the free future.

And therefore, gentlemen, I would like to rese- -- to translate the old phrase, "the freedom of the children of God." We are, according to the Bible, not just enjoying the freedom of the children of God. It is much more important that you must realize that you are the children of God's freedom, and not of God's

law. That He is creating man in freedom at this moment, and we are the children of His freedom, and not of any natural law, or of any -- matter, or of any star lore, or of any climate, or of any geography, or of any genes. We are the children of His freedom. And as long as you are the children of His freedom, gentlemen, you have a future.

Thank you.