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May I bring to your attention that there is a -- will be a dual report on today's and tomorrow's classes? And I have been asked for an extension--I think that's reasonable. So the report will be due on next Monday. It's on the meetings -- the class of today and tomorrow. Everyone has to write this report. Also after class, you will receive your wonderful papers, gentlemen. They are not wonderful. The main criticism I have to utter about these papers is -- which of course is the quality of all Dartmouth students: plagiarism. I mean, the naivet‚ with which you steal is appalling. This was -- it is just funny. But it is bad taste, the way you -- you take, for example, Shakespeare quotations from my paper, "Time-bettering Days," quote them as though you had discovered them, and then quote them wrong.

Gentlemen, that's called theft. It is of course the most widespread vice in this country, plagiarism, that you all put foreign feathers into your cap and never mention it, and never say "Thank you." You cannot take a -- a long quotation from Henry VI -- out of my paper, "Time-bettering Days," and say that you discovered it. That's too stupid. It is so stupid of course in this case, because I wrote the paper. But you do it all the time. I only mention it -- it's nothing to me, gentlemen, but something to yourself. -- It spoils your character. I have seen the -- plagiarism is the student's main vice in this country, I assure you. The naivet‚ with which you put another man to work for you and don't give him credit. It doesn't exist elsewhere. Every- -- -where else, people have a spiritual gratitude. And you don't know what that is, spiritual gratitude. You kick the man from whom you steal. And that is very awful, and that's why there is no tradition in this country, because everybody tries to conceal from whom he has learned something.

Be proud that you have somebody who told you so, and mention it. Instead, you -- you always -- parade as though it was your own doing. Of course, there are exceptions; among these people here -- boys here, are some exceptions. I know this. And they no -- must not think I have forgotten them. But on the average, gentlemen--quite regardless of the quality of the paper otherwise--it is your -- your main nakedness, and your main sterility. Nobody can grow, gentlemen, who doesn't add to his own life the path of gratitude to a teacher. Because you have as much future as you have past. Now your own life is too short for having much future, gentlemen. Anybody has that much future as he has a past. And you create your past by gratitude, by reverence, by respect, by recognizing what you owe to others. Each time that you go up on the rung into the past by reverence, gentlemen, you have more future to expect for yourself. And since you all are brazen, you have no future, gentlemen. "So what?" you say, and steal

something, and run away with it, and are very proud of this little conquest, or spoliation, or exploit.

It's like the earth, gentlemen. If you exploit the earth, it will be dry, and your children will have nothing to inherit in this country, as you know. Dustbowl. And if you are grat- -- if you show gratitude to the soil, it will nourish generations of people to come. Now there is no difference, gentlemen, between the s- -- topsoil of the -- of the earth and the topsoil of your brain. If you do not cultivate this topsoil which has fertilized you, it will just die from erosion. And that is the state of affairs. Gentlemen, the brain erosion of your souls is exactly as big as the -- soil erosion on -- of the -- of South Dakota, because you don't say "thank you" to your mental nourishment. You won't mention it. Instead of saying, "I had a good teacher -- I had -- a book from which I learned this," and thereby building topsoil inside yourself.

It's a very serious business, gentlemen, because that is the sterility of our schools, that you go off and never say, "Thank you." They just -- obvi- -- we all are here just to entertain you. Shakespeare -- you don't show respect or gratitude for Shakespeare, that he has made you into a people. You think that you enjoy Shakespeare. Gentlemen, watch out that Shakespeare hasn't to be ashamed of you, as his very poor reader. He is in authority, and you are down low -- below.

A very famous man, gentlemen, died, and his -- his papers were sold to the College of Syracuse in the upper state of New York. And a friend of mine visited there and saw these papers. And there was a guest book. And one of the students--and it was a Dartmouth student--had written these very remarkable lines: "The old ass must feel pleased that I condescend to read him." Literally, for the -- the greatest historian of the 19th century, whose papers he was privileged to look at. But he felt -- up, and the poor man, because he happened to be physically dead, was down low.

Well, look around, gentlemen. You can classify people. The people who can't say "Thank you" have no future. You can be sure of that. And in every field of endeavor, that's true. That's why I tried to introduce you to the power of gratitude--its fertilizing character--by making you write on holidays. Because at a -- on a holiday, what are we? We are grateful. Isn't that the -- impossible to celebrate a holiday, and that's why you can't celebrate the 4th of July. That's why it is run down to firecrackers, and noise, and drunkenness. Because a hel- -- holiday, you see, is the embodiment of a recognition, what you owe to somebody else. Isn't that true?

So your paper has two -- two aspects, gentlemen. Your individual recognition what you owe, and the theme, the holiday itself, has exactly the same char-

acter, making you bigger, because you connect with the whole ladder, backward. And there fu- -- you gain future. This is not my own saying, gentlemen. Perhaps you take this down, gentlemen: a man has as much future as he has past. But most people do not know that you conquer the past by gratitude. You line up with the past by every -- with every good book which you do not enjoy. To hell with enjoyment! You have no right to enjoy anything. But absorb, respect, recognize, decipher, discover for yourself.

Enjoyment, it is fr bar- -- barbarian. Bradley, would you kindly -- here?

So -- so much to -- with regard to the papers. It is always disappointing for me that there are perhaps five papers in which the man is aware of this present made to him. But not more.

You see, a representative man is somebody who re-presents something past. And you cannot be representative without this connection with the past. Because "represent" means to make present again, the true character of man in -- in your own generation. For this, you have first to recognize it as already created, as already present in other eras, in other eons, and by other men's actions, and by other men's sayings, and by other men's books.

Our topic today, gentlemen, is -- has to be compressed. We have -- we have only two and-a-half weeks together. And in this short time, I have to cover the march of events of the last -- 2,000 years. That would be impossible if this march of events was not already signalized, or prophesied, or predic- -- made predictable by the events of antiquity. We have dealt with the creation of the past, the present, and the future in tribal society, in imperial society, and in Israel. And we saw that the -- Greeks enabled man to detach himself from any of these three orders and to look at them in his leisure in a comparing, and a critical, and a leisurely fashion. And ever since, gentlemen, nothing new has been created, essentially, except our own era, and since our own era, this Christian -- strange Christian era which we call A.D., years of the Lord, anno Domini--1956, 1957, 1958--has only added one special character. I think it is possible, and is perhaps even salutary to condense this history in such a short time that you can never forget it again, that something tremendous has happened through the Christian era.

And the first point I want to make therefore to -- today is that Christianity has changed the direction of history. The evolutionist tells you that history is a straight line, and it always runs forward to the abyss: into the Second World War, and now we are already facing with the Third World War, and then comes final destruction, and the world ends in fire. That's of course for the Gentiles necessary, inevitable. Always one disaster follows the other. The whole thing is

called "progress."

Gentlemen, with Christianity real progress has become possible, because Christianity is not interested in evolution. It is not interested in merely doing the next thing. Bigger and better elephants, or bigger and better cars, or bigger and better skyscrapers. That's not progress, gentlemen. That's just development. And it is driving us crazy, into inflation; and into the Third World War; and into all kind of corrosions, and erosions, and deplorable features, because we believe in evolution. It is inevitable, because we have so many cars that tomorrow we must have more cars. I don't see the necessity at all. We could have fewer cars if we were free men. No, it is inevitable. More cars, more refrigerators, more television sets.

You will only be free, gentlemen, if you decide one day that you should have no cars, or no refrigerators. That's the only solution of your problem. As long as you believe in the higher standard of living, gentlemen, you must--like the apes, always -- or the squirrels--always climb up to higher trees of the tree -- higher branches of the tree until you fall down. It's inevitable, gentlemen. Evolution is always a one-way street. And freedom is always a change of direction.

Christianity did just this: it changed the direction. Everything was created when Christ came into the world, for the first time, and had all to be re-created. It was all distorted and wrong, and led to dwarfing, and degeneration, and decay, if left to itself. Why?

Gentlemen, if we only speak of human beings, and not of big empires and -- you will admit that the earth in the days of the Emperor Augustus already was filled, everywhere. There were Eskimos. There were people in this country. There were -- tribes had filled the globe. And then there were tremendous empires. And you must admit that a Chinese jade, or a -- Roman architecture, a Greek sculpture, are just perfect. We haven't added anything to the stature of these statues. And poetry, I don't think the -- Mr. Ezra Pound compares to Homer very favorably. Although he tries to be a Homer. And he has great gifts, gentlemen, but it isn't any better than Homer. And -- just name anything. And you will find that the greatest art is with the ancients. Now nobody has ever been a prophet as -- Isaiah, or as Jeremiah, and there again, in religion, the Psalms have not been -- surpassed in our times. And the very best has -- had been created, and the very majestic, the most imposing. Justice had been done in these empires, bureaucracy, administration, all these things had existed.

But there was one flaw. And this is the flaw which Christ came into the world to combat: once a Jew, always a Jew; once a Greek, always a Greek; once a Chinaman, always a Chinaman; once a Sioux Indian, always a Sioux Indian. All

the great creations, gentlemen, of antiquity were not open to each other. Man was degraded, or was made, or was specialized into his form and his way of life forever. When antiquity came at an end, gentlemen, the times were fulfilled, the Bible says. That's a very strange expression. They were fulfilled, there was nothing more to be done in the way of refining Greece, or refining Israel, or adding anything to the perfection of the Egyptian empire. The economy of Egypt is today still a miracle. No unemployment, you see, social security, medical care, everything. But it was so that no Egyptian could get out of this empire, unless--like the Jews--he broke away and founded an absolutely different way of life. You had to burn or to give up the fleshpots of Egypt and to -- had to go into the desert, like Moses, if you wanted to change the way of life. Egypt itself remained unreformable. There was no hope.

The same is true of -- of course, of the Roman empire. Rome -- the Roman empire, when Caesar and Augustus established it, devoured its own children. In the next hundred years, in the days of the Gospel and Christianity, you know -- Augustus and Caesar led to Nero and Domitian, and to the most cruel annihilation of every noble Roman in the empire. In the year 100 of our era, there was not one patrician of Roman descent left. And the emperors after that time came from Spain, or from Africa, und -- even from illiterate -- ber- -- ber- -- barbarian families, I -- one, Septimius Severus, the emperor, came from the Moroccan tribes, in Mor- -- in Morocco, because there was nobody left in Rome. They were all murdered; they were all killed.

Just an example of what happens when you leave an order to itself, and allow it to go on by itself. If you want to know today the -- look at the isolationists. They also would cultivate the American virtues of Mr. McCarthy. And it would end in -- of course, in a -- how do you call it? the -- witch-hunting, and witch-hunting -- leads to the decimation and the annihilation of the mental nobility of a nation. Because the witches of course, and the spirited people look very similar to the people who have no spirit, and are dispirited. And that happens in the Roman empire. And it can happen any day again, in any nation. In Spain, it has happened under our noses. It's a terrible, a dead country, because every bit of spirit has been annihilated there.

So any special form, gentlemen, tends to inbreeding, and tends to selfadoration, and -- by self-adoration and idol- -- it falls into what the Bible calls "idolatry," which you always think is something funny, in which you cannot fall because I -- you wouldn't worship a golden calf, or Horus, or -- or the -- the spirit of your ancestor. You certainly don't worship the spirit of your ancestor, but you are idolaters, just the same, gentlemen. Because idolatry means simply that that what you have, you worship. Whereas the true faith always is in the invisible, which you cannot see, and which has not yet been taken sh- -- not yet taken

shape, and which is better than you are. As soon as you begin to worship the visible, if you worship the institutions of Brooklyn, and Life and Time magazine, or whatever your--Saturday Evening Post--idolatry is, you worship what that -- yourself, because you identify yourself with what you see around yourself. It is always self-love when we idolize the visible. Because we feel that we participate in this great entity, which we worship. Idolatry is self-love. And self-love always leads to a loss of vitality. To sterility.

The power with -- which refreshes the -- your ra- -- the race, and refreshes countries, and refreshes literature, and refreshes anything--a school--is self-forgetfulness. A school that worships itself is silly, is perfectly sterile. A -- a school that doesn't say -- it is the worst school of all therefore has to improve itself.

I got a letter from South Dakota, from a little school there, where a Dartmouth boy is now teaching. And he says it has one great advantage, this place. "It has absolutely no intellectual pride; it has no conceit. They don't tell me every day how proud they are that they are a new east -- New England college, a liberal arts college with the fine spirit of 200 years ago." And it is true, the New England colleges have a wonderful spirit: of 200 years ago. But now they are just conceited, because they once had this spirit.

Self-love, gentlemen, is the same as idolatry. And as you know, the problem of the Christian era is: how do we rid ourselves of self-love? It's the whole content of the era. And to be very practical, gentlemen, very direct, four kind of people had been created by the -- antiquity. The tribes excelled, as you well know, in chieftains and kings, because ancestry, and the cult of ancestry, and the cult of family--the blue blood, you see--was their piŠce de r‚sistance, that they came from a long line of illustrious heroes and ancestors. And this heroic aspect of the tribe therefore can be summed up in saying that what we learn from tribesmen to this day, what a true elder, a true chieftain, a true king is. And kingship is the creation of the tribe.

Therefore, when Christ came into the world, you can accept one thing for certain: that royalty, kingship was perfectly displayed. What a king was, people knew, and people could see around them. You may call it "chieftain." I don't -- you must not argue the -- about the term. But the main thing is authority of the older, you see, of the ancient, wisely, justly, and powerfully applied to keeping the young in -- in the paths of the law, of what is right. You remember what we ta- -- said about righteousness and about lawfulness, as the great feature of the tribal order.

The second thing, which was created -- or the second type of being were obviously, gentlemen, the priests. In all the empires, the priest, the stargazer, the

man who could predict, and could unshakenly look into the eternity of the return of the -- of the revolutions in the sky, the priest type of man--the man not concerned with earthly power, but with the truth of the returning year, and the returning eternity--was developed. More perfect than an Egyptian priest, you cannot find anybody. That's why the pope to this day wears the three-fold tiara of an Egyptian priest. The pope is the last remnant of the perfect priest. And it has to be represented. Poor Queen Elizabeth has to be your example for the perfect royalty. It's a little small.

But even in America, you wouldn't do without royalty. Look at your Grace Kelley. You couldn't do without her. I mean, you have to have some connection with this strange, an- -- ancient world of -- of princes, and royalty. And you laugh, and yet -- I told you that here is a -- a society for Americans of royal descent. And although they all are bastards, they are very proud of it.

I'm serious, gentlemen, despite my facetiousness, that royalty and priesthood are eternal qualities of human beings, gentlemen. You go to -- know any good priest, and if you know any good chieftain, or senior, or elder, you must -- whether it -- you like it or not, and whether it's -- has any place in your democratic pattern, you will admit that there is something that is irreplaceable. Priests and chieftains, gentlemen, are not expendable. They cannot be replaced. They grow very, very scantily, and -- with great difficulty. And once you kill them off, it's just nothing.

To mention something very near home, gentlemen, the tragedy of Africa--as it is unfolding now--comes from the fact that for 500 years, the slave trade of Europeans and Muslim, has eradicated all the chieftains, and all the princes. You must think that in the South of this country, the Negroes who live there are the descendants not of the riffraff of Africa, but of the princes and kings. They were the ones stolen and exported to this country. And in this sense, the African Negro of the South can claim much better descent than these sons of prostitutes and thieves who live there, side by side with them, the white trash.

That's very strange, gentlemen, that we have ruined the structure of Africa in -- since 1400, by and large, because the raids we ins- -- instituted in Africa were not meant against anybody there. But they always pointedly wanted to have the best and the biggest of these Negroes, you see, so they raided the king's {kraal}, and the chieftain's tent, and robbed them. Women and children, and the men themselves. And if you read the reports of the -- which we have, since the 16th century, Africa has, decade after decade, lost its best people. And you have a -- absolutely wrong picture of the African Negro if you think that they were not capable of a higher civilization. The higher civilization has been destroyed constantly by the raids of the slave-trader. We don't know what the

African man can be like, you see. We just have no proof. Because -- since we have now records of the interior of Africa, you see, we have done everything to break up the chieftaincy and the priesthood of these people. And what is left there today is the -- are the dregs of the po- -- population.

We have a totally wrong -- impression when we now say Africa never amounted to anything. My impression is that it amounted to just as much as Europe -- and by and large in the year 1100, only you have to deduct the difficulties of--as in Siberia, or in -- here in the West--of communication, you see. If you have vast stretches of land, you see, it is of course much more difficult to organize a country than if you are on the seashore on a little island.

And -- well, I draw attention to -- to this fact, gentlemen, because I do think, by and large, that the world was, by and large, filled with good chieftains and good priests for a long time, when Christ came into the world. This was achieved. But there were two other professional people who existed in a perfection which we cannot boast of. And that -- were the prophets of Israel and the poets of Greece.

And if I may then therefore put this down, we can say, gentlemen, that antiquity had created four perfect types. And when we say that the times were fulfilled, or that in antiquity everything was created that's worth creating, for the first time at least, we can express it in these very sober, and very specific terms, that the world, in the year 0 of our era, knew what is the perfect king, what's the perfect priest, and what's the perfect prophet, and what is the perfect poet. There are no better poets than the Greeks. There are no greater prophets than the -- than the Jews. There are no greater priests than the Egyptians, or the Babylonians, Chaldeans. And there are no greater kings than the kings of the Germanic tribes, or of Romulus and Numa Pompilius, or of Theseus and -- and the kings of Sparta, or the great king of Persia--Darius--or whomever you take. You read the Old Testament, and you can see that Alexander, the king of Macedonia, and Darius, the king of Persia, met with the greatest admiration on the part of Israel. And that Darius was considered by them the first great defender of the -- their faith, and that they believed that Darius looked -- read the book on -- of Esther, that he would export Judaism, you see, as monotheism in his whole kingdom.

And for the last 500 years of -- before our era, gentlemen, Jews, and Greeks, and kings, and priests tried to harmonize, and tried to communicate to a large extent. I only will mention one fact to show you how antiquity felt, that it had fulfilled everything that could be expected of humanity: that's the translation of the Bible into Greek. When the -- in Alexandria, about the year 260, I think, the Old Testament was translated in -- by the 72 interpreters, as it is called--the Septuagint, coming from the name -- word "seventy"--the Israelites

established, instituted a great holiday, to celebrate this great event in which the world recognized that there was nothing beyond Greek -- Jewish prophecy, in the line of religious writing. It was recognized. People knew. That was it. Nobody could do better.

What has changed, gentlemen, is that today we can say, which no un- -- ancient person would every have understood: every man a king, every man a prophet, every man a poet, and every man a priest. As you know, you say this very glibly, and you don't mean it. Today nobody is a king, nobody is a priest, nobody is a poet, and nobody is a prophet. But this negative use you have made of your freedom doesn't mean that we have not, as a phantom, perhaps, but as a hope, the idea that everybody might be a priest, and everybody might be a prophet, and everybody might be a king, and everybody might be a priest. Yet you know the Reformation was based on this assumption that everybody wanted and desired very much to be a priest. It's called "the universal priesthood" of the faithful.

When I look around, gentlemen, the one thing you do not want to be is a priest. You say, "I'm just a human being," which means that you can concentrate on your digestion. And you don't want to be kings. You want to take to the back hills, and be left alone. You are pacifists. And you don't want to be poets. My famous answer I always receive when I asked you when -- why don't you write poetry?

"Oh, we stopped writing poetry at 12," at the wise and ripe age of 12.

And -- prophecy you don't -- you think that means to predict on Madison Avenue.

So gentlemen, I think the -- at this moment, we have reached an all-time low. The -- the -- of -- considering the year 0 and the year today -- of today, 1957, you may say that it doesn't -- attract you anymore to be a king, or a prophet, or a poet, or a priest. It's too burdensome. Why should you? You want to be left alone.

However, you all admit that it is not very exciting to say, "Every man a priest." Now it is hard for me to shoot you back into a moment, gentlemen, in which only one man in any -- kingdom could be a king, and only a few were poets or prophets, and the whole rest of the nation had to serve, you see. And nobody outside Israel could be a prophet, and nobody outside Greek -- no barbarian was expected to be a poet. And no priest of any dignity could exist outside these tremendous empires. On a village -- in a village, you couldn't have a priest. And you couldn't have a king outside the discipline of a tribe, and its infinite

cruelty, and austerity, and severity.

So whether you -- you yourself -- apply yourself to these four types of humanity or not, makes no difference at this moment. I think you all can test and verify my statement, that to you it is natural to -- assume that in every one of us, there may be cultivated the quality of royalty, of prophecy, of poetry, and of priesthood.

This was impossible in -- in the year 0, and it is this little bit of a difference. This staggering difference--it is not a little bit of a difference--that what was then only there in single and singular editions, strictly separated one from the other, that this is now available, and open, and accessible to every son of woman.

The -- the Son of Mary has allowed everybody to become a king, and a poet, and a prophet, and a priest, because He Himself was the first who was all these four. It is the quality of Christ to have united these four streams, or ways, or dead-end streets of life, and to -- broken through the wall between the Jews, and the Greeks, and the -- Scythes, and the Egyptians and to exclaim that the full man had to have access to all four ways of life. And this, by and large, is the whole story of the Christian era, gentlemen: how this was done, because you can imagine that these very powerful isolationists everywhere did everything possible to prevent this invasion of the total man into their separate hunting grounds.

May I just -- Amlicke, get your help? What time is it?

(It's seven after.)

Wie?

(Seven after 2.)

Good. So I have 13 more minutes, is that right?

By the way, Chomentowski? May I see you a- -- right after class?

This is the first part, then, of the event which you -- is called the entrance of the Christian era, or the birth of Christ, or however you call this fact that God became man. The headline over this break in direction, gentlemen, is that the ancients have deified four separate ways of life. Royalty was worshiped in the tribe as the spirit. The priest worshiped -- where the priest-king of Egypt was worshiped as a god, one of many, the Jews worshiped the living God of the coming eon, of the future. And poetry was worshiped by the Greeks as the gift of genius, the divine inspiration on the spot of a sporadic outburst. Greece is the

cradle of -- geniuses, in the plural. One genius, a god to himself.

Four forms of divinity, gentlemen, existed in antiquity. Because -- let's not betray ourselves, gentlemen. The word "divine" and the word "God" has little meaning for you. You don't know what it is. But it -- everything, you remember, that is necessary in the past for you and me, that is necessary, is justly called "divine," because it isn't arbitrary as we humans usually live. If you just live humanly, you are not a model, and not a law to anybody else. You may be a law to yourself, but you cannot demand that anybody else follows in your wake. But if you expect that the world takes the direction which you have led it into, you are more than human. You are more than a mortal, because you have to be recognized for having discovered the way of creation. You have just made plain: the next step has to be taken in this way and can be not taken in any other. And this is called "divine."

I wished you would understand, gentlemen, that you can only be saved if you use this word "God" and "divine" with the greatest paucity, scarcity, and economy. The blasphemy today is usually with the people not who deny God, but who speak glibly of Him every Sunday, as though they knew Him personally. He knows us personally, God, but whether you know Him personally, that's the question. That you have to verify by a long life. At the end of your life, we will know whether you have known God. That's true of every one of us. We cannot boast that we know God. But we can believe in Him. And the an- -- ancients, of course, were forced to believe in Him, because Greece existed only by the divinity of genius; the Jews only interest- -- existed by their faith in the coming of the Lord tomorrow; the Egyptians only -- could exist in their country because the sun, and the moon, and the stars eternally revealed the glories of God; and the tribes, in their wanderings from Australia to -- to -- to Malaya, from Malaya to Mongolia, from Mongolia to the Bering Strait, from the Bering Strait to the Panama -- straits, from the -- there into the Amaz“nas valley, as we found them -- find them still today, these people who -- who migrated, 8-, 9-, 15-, -- 20,000 miles of course had to be directed by the righteousness of their ancestral spirits, because otherwise they would have not known where to turn, and what -- what they were.

And so divinity is the condition for any human society. But it is only when you omit all generalizations. God is not a supreme being, and He is not the Divine. He is not an abstraction, gentlemen. He is not an idea. But He is permanently there when somebody in your heart says that you can't do something, that you already know better. How come -- how do we know better? Not because we have discovered the better, but because it has already been created by souls that have been inspired before us. Whenever you know very well that what you do is nonsense, you are in contact with the divine creation which tells

you, "Necessary would be something else." Your whim, your arbitrariness tries now to do something deviating from the necessary.

And as you can imagine, to speak on Christianity is a very distasteful thing, in public, because it has been talked down, and abused too much. So I have tried only to sober you up to the fact that I appeal to your experienced divinity, not to the official form in which it is sold to you. You all know of God much more than you like to admit. Because He makes Himself known to you by all the things that are necessary, despite your arbitrary weakness.

That's then the problem of the -- this step into our own era, gentlemen, that we say, "God became man." It cannot be expressed in a simpler manner what happened in the year of the Lord 0, but that man was taken into the secret of God since kings, prophets, poets, and priests existed. It is ever since we have the Christian era your problem to say when you have to be a prophet, when you have to be a poet, when you have to be -- act as a king, and when to have -- behave as a priest. Since this is now left to every Christian, it is of course the shortest expression to say that God becomes man. Because the divine creation, the -- these creations of human nature, you see, now come under your own choice, under your own alternative. You have to decide whether you have to go to war, or whether you have you have to go into the desert as a hermit, whether you have to become the Emperor Constantine, or the President Lincoln, or the -- St. Francis, or Michelangelo. It's up to you.

And nobody can solve it for you, gentlemen. You are in God's stead, if you join the glorious company of the people who know that they come after antiquity. The birthday of Christianity, gentlemen, as you know, is the death-day of its founder. Because your and my right to say, "Every man a king, and every man a poet," depends on your understanding that you are only allowed to do this after Christ.

If you did it without this connection, gentlemen, you would still simply be within one of these four pagan era -- countries. Take an A- -- modern American, who defies any religion, and grows up here in this very vigorous country, worships cowboys, and David Boone, and -- what?

(Daniel Boone.)

Oh, pardon me, I'm sorry. Daniel Boone, and -- and thinks that he lives in an -- in this country of Manifest Destiny, the New World, set aside, cut off from the rest of the world by the Pacific and the Atlantic Ocean, for good. That would be a -- a pagan conception of America, which people struggle today to establish very valiantly in this country at this moment.

In any moment of the Christian era, gentlemen, there is plenty of preChristian character left, everywhere. And in any moment, we all can relapse into pre-Christian conceptions of our own country, of our own religion, of our own art, and of our own family life. You can go back to tribalism, you can go back to nationalism, you see, any minute. It's a great temptation to say that -- that Christianity is just veneer, some enamel, some -- some nicely -- nice top-dressing. But underneath, you see, nothing has changed.

What we have then to find is: how can any Christian era, or any Christian history, or any Christian quality of you and me have been developed in a situation in which every one of you can deny the existence of this era? The Christian era is the frailest thing in the world, because every individual man living after Christ can destroy it. It's to this day this way. Mr. Hitler tried everything he could to destroy it. And certainly Mr. Lenin did -- tried the same. And it has -- it will be tried time and again. You'll try it, to say the Christian era is "just a pipe dream," "the invention of some fanatics." We live on this earth as we always have lived. Want to eat, and be happy, beget children, and get drunk. That's by and large the idea of most men, that it makes no difference, the Christian era.

We have therefore next time to devote -- to concentrate very carefully, and I -- tell you, I'm anxious to make it as -- as sober, and as dry as I possibly can, although it is a most marvelous and miraculous story there is, that the Christian era is the acquisition of a new quality, which has not existed in antiquity. It is the quality of allowing these old orders to visit each other and to open to each other, but under one condition: that we all retain the qualities of these past orders. You understand that if you say, "Every man a king," it o- -- makes only sense as long as you know what a king is. It is not meaning -- being a brute, or being an individual, or being an independent, or being a hillbilly boy. It means to be a king! The same is true of prophecy. A prophe- -- prophet is not a magician, not a sorcerer, and not a psychoanalyst, not a predictor, not a -- how do you call these people who offer you shares in Canadian -- in Canadian mines because they predict great booms there?

(Speculators.)

What?

(Speculators.)

Ja, ja. A prophet is the opposite from a speculator.

And therefore, the tension of our era is that everything acquired in antiquity must be retained. But everything must be made to meet all the other quali-

ties, you see. There must a constant mating, a constant wedding, a constant feast of interchange and mutual recognition. And that's not easy. And at this moment, we li- -- certainly are forced to say these things again, because they seem to be lost. If I look around, gentlemen, 99 out of 100 people say officially--and even -- even dryly, and in- -- and they think intelligently--that there never has been a Christian era, and certainly if there has been, it is over with.

There -- in my own town in Norwich, Vermont, which is much more intelligent than Hanover, New Hampshire, there was -- in 1940, a -- a speaker came to the Women's Club and said, "Now we all knew that the Christian era was a pipedream and that we were going..."

[tape interruption; end]