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{word} = hard to understand, might be this

You will recall that I used two full-fledged churches--the Mormon Church of the Latter-day Saints, and the Methodist Church--as examples of how the local congregations in this country tried to grow into the largeness of the secular country, of the secular government. You saw -- remember that the Mormons for this purpose had to declare that all other earlier churches had apostasized, that has -- has lost their true character of a Church, and so began from scratch. Also went back on the achievements by these apostasized -- allegedly apostasized churches. One of them certainly was that marriage was only understood in the light of a comparison of the founders' beha- -- attitude toward this church, that every man and woman mu- -- must be only one body, and one only -- can only be justified of course under a higher sanction. You cannot deduce this from any biological, or sociological, or ethical, or such fact.

All ethics are quite incapable of giving laws to other people. Your ethics are not another man's ethics. And I have always thought that moralists are the poorest thinkers there are on earth. And this country has so few good thinkers, because everybody is a moralist. Everybody wants to be good. We never know what is good and evil. We only know it afterwards. If we would have to act by knowing what is good and evil, we could either act never, you see, or we would c- -- all be hypocrites and pharisees. So don't try ethics. They don't exist. That's the -- our whole revelation to the Bible, that there is no such thing as our knowing what good and evil is.

But that is the heresy. And the churches, of course -- always to integrate people -- the individuals into people, where people, by mutual love and forbearing, would cover a multitude of sins.

Now the -- we have to ask us today, that's the topic of this meeting--and perhaps we need one more; I'm not quite sure of this, how long it will take you to understand the -- the question or the task that was left unsolved by Jason Lee and by Brigham Young. How can the tradition of a relation of everything that goes on in this country, with everything that goes on in the rest of the world, through all ages, how can this reach the individual child in every generation? That's the problem of the Church.

There have been, as you know, since 1840--that is, since the days of the Millerites, since the days of the Pentecostal -- days of the end of the world--innumerable new groups of religious life in this country. But they all must bear the name of a sect which is not a church. The most difficult thing, I think, for anybody born and -- in this country is to understand the distinction

between a church and a sect. Because from one point of view, I fully -- would agree to say that all the churches, including the Roman Catholic Church in this country, are mere sects. "Denominations" you call them, which is a polite name for a sect. And I would say to Mr. Sheen -- Monsignor Sheen, or -- Mr. Spellman to -- their face, that in America even the -- their church is a sect. Without any impoliteness, but it is a fact that in this country, the individual churches have become just part of a strange picture.

As you know, there have been counted 287 denominations in the United States, about 10 years ago. By now it may be more than 300. In the telephone book of Los Angeles proper, there are -- there are--how many were there when I counted?--there were 11 pages with churches, or "church organizations," as they call themselves in part today, because they're already trembling, and think that the word "organization" sounds already in the age of the organization man a little more attractive than "church." So I mean, the -- the very word "church organization" shows you already the crack in the building. The word is no longer self- -- you see, explanatory.

Now what do these 287--let me stick to this number, because that's a colorful number, and easy to comprehend and to retain; all odd numbers, you see, and all odd names are more readily retained than round numbers, strangely enough. So 287, I think makes good sense in this respect for your memory. Two hundred eighty-seven denominations in this country means that it is absolutely hopeless to imagine that any one of these groups can covenant the larger community of America, as at one time in the individual township or village, it was perfectly possible to consecrate, and aggregate, and congregate people of the same faith. So what -- happened locally, you see, cannot be transferred to the larger community. And you have even forgotten that it is -- has ever happened before, that whole towns were of one faith. You are quite accustomed to see now three or four so-called church buildings side by side on the -- on the -- in the same street, and this is nothing to you.

However, the Church in this country therefore has -- lost one significant feature, which people, when they founded churches, thought was the most significant feature: they do not unite the people. In this country, the Church is divisive. It is divisive. And anybody who is sensitive to the unity of the spirit must suffer under the divisiveness of churches. I think the better a man -- a churchman is a churchman, the more he must feel that this is terrible, that this is a refutation of his claim to be the one and only church. And now with 287 denominations, this country has however reached a phase in which the pious hope that J- -- Pope John XXIII will unite Christianity, is just a phantom. You can read it. It makes headlines. It's very good for -- reporting, but it makes absolutely no sense.

That's the first thing: the churches are divisive, and will never unite. They cannot; there is a number -- 287 forbids it. There are many other things theo- -- of theological nature into which I could go. But we are interested here in the social aspect of the Church as a part of everyone's life, because whether you go to church or whether you sit down at 11 o'clock on Sundays--as some of my friends do, saying they are very proud that now everybody else goes to church and they can sit down to work--in this country, there is still a strong bias either for -- before -- for or against the Church. To be against the Church is of course just as -- as penurious and dependent on the Church as being for it. The only people who at this moment keep the interest in the name of God alive are the atheists, because they fight for stating that there is no God, you see. And so, as long as there are atheists, you see, the faith in God gets a tremendous help, you see, because somebody's still willing to take it seriously.

And so the atheists in many -- in America, I think, are the only people who still believe in God. They believe in the importance of the issue, whereas the churchgoers usually think it's a social thing -- to be seen with your new bonnet Sunday morning after church. That's not taking God seriously. It's just taking your society seriously.

And you know, it has come to this point, that most people, who -- when you ask them to define the Church, they say it's an organization; they say it's a society. There is even a famous definition by the Roman papacy to this expect -- respect -- in this respect, that the Church is a society. Now if -- as soon as you can define the Church by something else, it is just one among many things. It is not unique. Unique things, you see, cannot be classified. Linc- -- Abraham Lincoln cannot be classified, you see. And all -- class- -- you see, the -- your thinking is of course very impoverished, because I have never thought that we all hanker for being unique, for being unclassifiable. I told you of -- of my great honor of -- having been called statistically unimportant.

People who don't count in statistics begin to count in their own right. And the Church is either unique, or it isn't a church. So we are really in a real quandary, the atheists being today the only ones who, so to speak, encompass the whole issue by saying, "The power you worship in church," you see, "is no power," and at least thereby unifying all the people who still go to these churches, you see, by their attack. The Church lives by attack. As soon as she has no martyrs, the Church always collapses.

This is the point then today for the churches. They are omitted from the picture practically in secular life, on the surface of things. They are not attacked in this country, to a large extent. Very few people are as rabid atheists as they were 50 years ago. And the last point, which is the underlying, critical point, is

that for the last 150 years, everybody in the field of secular government and teaching has been in some ways a son of a minister, or an ex-minister himself, a runaway minister. This is coming to an end. By the way -- or a runaway -- the son of a rabbi, that would be the same.

Today, as--for the first time in the academic profession and in the teaching group the children of ministers, and the runaway ministers disappear, or do not prevail anymore--we still have in this college midwestern professors who are still burned up by the -- by the pettiness of their local church in Kansas or Iowa, and who therefore fill their whole life with this contradiction, you see, and with this upheaval, and with this rebellion against the Ten Commandments. But this is dying off. And you are, I think, the first generation to which it doesn't make sense to say that in the field of secular education, you find all the people who try to make up for what they were missing in the churches.

So the relation of public talk in your lecture halls and Sunday sermons, which was in the last century very largely a dialogue between, you see, the two groups--one contradicting the other, one saying, "I can do without your worship on Sundays," and the other proclaiming of course that they couldn't--this whole nice relation between public and -- and people is, I think, for your generation disappearing so fast that you may no- -- never think of it.

The other day I was -- I was together with friends from the East. They talked about the famous faculty here, in the land. And one of them said, "Out of 15 professors, 13 were the sons of ministers."

That gives you a picture, by and large, from the interplay, you see, of Church and state in the last 150 years. Because as soo- -- long as the father was a minister and the son is an anti-churchman, he is in a constant discussion with his father. And you -- you are, too, if you have real fathers today. Everybody is in a constant discussion with a father, until he has inherited him and -- in variations. But he has to enter upon the in- -- inheritance. That is, one day a son must cease to be foolish and say, "I'm against my father." He must take over for what the father stood, with all the remedial changes that are necessary for the times.

And all your educational problems -- who is in the department of education? Who studies here? Well, you see. The -- the silliness of all these educational programs in the -- is that nobody tells these children that one day they will step into the shoes of their parents. Everything looks very different--your own rebellion--if you know that in the end it will just lead to your also being married, and ha- -- having children, and having to educate them.

I think a normal child knows this, here, if it isn't told by wrong psycholo-

gy that it has -- to forget that. I have always waited to be my father -- in his own right. And that's very normal, I think. And if you can't arouse in a child of 10 or 12, or 14, this tremendous expectation of being 45, you haven't educated the child. Because to educate means to lift a child into its own proper time span. That's education. It doesn't mean "to lead out." But it means to lift one up so that he can connect with his past and his future. That's education, to -- to -- as you have here--how do you call this box for the electric light, the contact there, you see?--so the child has to make contact with what has gone on before, and what's going to come, so that it is willing to accept its position between these two times. And that's becoming -- able to deal with fatherhood itself.

That's why all rebellions of children are relative. There is so such thing as an absolute rebellion, because the child has learned to speak from his fatherland, and has been born from his mother's womb. And this he has to accept, whether he likes it or not. And there is in his own makeup so much passion and verve that he is not at peace unless he has given life to some future creature--be it a book, be it a child, be it a school, be it politics. But you all cannot use your passionate forces of love in your glands if you have -- do not found something.

So we all are heirs and founders. And we talked about this before, but at this moment, it seems to me, that this is the central issue of the redemption of the modern masses. A modern mass man, or a member of the modern factory, or a member of our -- here, this campus life--we all in this collectivization--survey, plan, feel, realize shorter time spans than are our due. All you think is a philosophy of today, or vielleicht, this year, or why you are in college.

I always think of the boy in my college who was a -- a free-trader that -- by conviction. And he went around and crusaded for free trade as a means for world peace. He had a point there. Free trade would make for peace, probably. And the tariff, as you know, has been a -- a thorn in our flesh. You'll remember "The Reply to Haynes," I mean. Tariffs are aggressive. And they can lead to war between -- sections of the same country. So this free trader was a -- quite a decent chap. But as soon as he left college, he accepted a position of a chamber of commerce which stood for high -- protective tariffs. And he defended them with great vehemence, because his promotion depended on it, and his wife of course needed the money.

Now I pity such a man. He's a bro- -- of course a broken reed. Most of you are the same way. It will all -- happen to all of you. And you will become Philistines, and you shouldn't. And -- this is only possible if the length of your life, and the length of posterity is a power in your existence, if this step here now in college, and tomorrow a job, is not all you -- you are re- -- contained in. If you have a larger background as an American citizen, and as a Christian, and the father of

this country in the future, and the refounder of this community, all your problems will suddenly fall in perspective. You will become patient, and one thing will happen which is essential to the division between people and public, between th- -- your little mind, as of the moment, and the spirit of the age. Which -- the difference? The difference is very simple: that the mind plans for success, and security, and recognition. And the spirit is quite indifferent to these three things. Security is a by-product of life. The wherewithal is a byproduct of li- -- living. Everything you do right comes first, and the material side of it comes second. You do the otherwise. And so this boy found he was quite right in advocating, when it cost him nothing, free trade; and later sell out to the highest bidder. If he was such a person, and he wanted to sell out to the highest bidder, he should have never made speeches when it cost nothing, you see.

So I despise the idealists who are idealists when it is very s- -- when they are very secure, you see. I have always wondered about the academic freedom that consists in -- in berating the president of the United States, for which we are -- to which we are admitted freely, still. So far we don't go to jail if we -- if we say something about the president. But you cannot say anything about the college in which you are. The college president, the university president, or the local thing. The same problem we have in the factory. The unions, of course, can -- may -- may attack the government or the Congress for its laws; but inside the factory, you cannot berate the foreman. You see. That would be much more important.

We have not reached the stage where we really are free in our dealings without next-door neighbor. We are only free in dealing with our farrest-door neighbor. You can -- of course berate the Russians. You shouldn't do that, because it costs you nothing. It's cheap. They are not there to defend themselves. That's gossip. Anything you can't tell a person to its face -- his face is worthless. That's gossip.

Now I -- I say these things in order to make you see the real trouble with -- today with the Church, the churches, which is already -- is a divisive term and -- and destroys the meaning of "Church." The Church is not the Church when there are churches.

I just got a -- a summons this morning from a radio to make a broadcast on nondenominational religion. So you see, I am in the midst of this difficulty. And of course, I will turn the offer down. This is nothing for broadcasting.

Because you are not committed. The listener is not committed. You can only talk about the Church with -- with people who are equally committed as you are. That's why this free-trader, you see, was in -- in error. He could ins- -- he could acquire a conviction in college, you see, and then implement it by his

later life. But he could not preach something. We have here in this country nine- -- 19-year-old certified preachers, you see. And you can understand that therefore religion is daily destroyed. You don't have to believe in 19-year-old boy anything. He can change his mind like that.

I told you perhaps already that a Catholic priest once told me, "Never believe a man anything before he's 30, because he has a perfect right to change his mind." That's why bishops have to be 40 years when they -- before they can be consecrated. Only then do they -- are they stable.

So the Church tries to deal with fickle people by giving them the liberty of seeing the length of their life and their relation to all issues, far beyond the state of mentality or mind they have at this moment. The -- what we call the spirit of the Church is -- an -- a -- is the guarantee, so to speak, that our mentality shall not destroy us, that the mind is fickle and passing, and changes all the time, and must change, like the fashions. Your tie and existentialism are two fashions. Fifteen years ago, there was no existentialism, and there were no -- there were -- all the ties were Truman ties. And you couldn't buy any other ties at these--I wouldn't say what I think of them. You remember them, perhaps not even the Truman ties, do you? Oh, you are wonderful, since you have no tie. That much better.

So the mind is like fashions. It lives by newness, by stimulation. You even say of a lecture that -- tries to give you the truth, that it is stimulating, which is a verdict on such a lecture. If I'm only stimulating, I'm not a good teacher.

That's -- again something second-rate. I wou- -- would like to -- to add something to this strange example of the free-trader who later becomes a hightariff man, because I think this will all -- happen to all of you if you think that to make decisions means to be successful.

Did I tell the story in class--please remind me--of Dorothy Thompson? Perhaps I did, already. I don't wish to repeat my best story. Of the columnist? Wie?

(You told one story of Dorothy Thompson.)

About how hard it is to -- to starve?

(No. No.)

Well, it -- but I'm not sure. If I have told it, I apologize { }. The story -- please, would you sit down, young lady? House cannot, you see, be assembled

half-standing and half-sitting.

Dorothy Thompson, a famous columnist of this country, wanted -- had a father who was a poor Methodist minister from England, living in upper-state New York. And they grew up on a salary on which no worker today of course could live, or would live. A little more than $1,000 a year. And there were several children, and so -- she was the oldest, and she was wavering between making money immediately for the family, or following her best desire to become a nes- -- a newspaperwoman. So she went to her father and said she wanted to be this, but could she, in the economic conditions of the family?

And he gave it the classic answer, which she has told me herself. And I think -- you should write this down, because it's one of the most important advices given by parents to children. He said, "Dear Dorothy. If you are serious, do what you must do. And then you will find out to your amazement how difficult it is for a person who is in earnest to starve."

Any inventor knows something about this. And any -- any man who has done things for the first time. If a man is serious, in earnest, it is very difficult for him to starve. And as long as you do not understand this mystery, you will all be lost as a public that is looking for success stories, that is looking for what can be placarded on posters, what -- where we go to Inspiration Point, here on -- Roger Wil- -- William--what is it, the man's name?

(Will Rodgers.)

Will Rodgers Park -- State Park Inspiration Point. You get the inspiration on a point, so to speak, immediately. Inspiration is something that keeps you beyond all your different mentalities. Spirit is the unity of your life, despite your change of thought, and s- -- of system, and of philosophy all the time. Philosophies must change. Every age has its own philosophy. As an adolescent, you can't have the same philosophy as a father. But woe to the father who tells his boy that for this reason, he must not undertake something new, because now the father of course wants to be a capitalist, and the son is a Communist. And any boy at 12 -- 20 must be a Communist, and anybody at 60 must be a capitalist. These are stages in human life. A man of 60 wants to be independent. He gets physically weaker, so he -- of course he must amass treasures around him to enable him to live without the first spring of his physical energies. And any soldier in the army who is not a Communist is just a poor soldier. And the same in college.

So Communism and capitalism are not issues of -- of the spirit. They are issues of the mental state. I despise any boy who has not -- who is thrifty, and

parsimonious, and a niggard at 20; and I despise a man who at 60 is at the -- is not interested in making money. But that doesn't -- but that's -- they are passing stages. That's not a religion.

And now perhaps you understand the difficulty at this moment of -- the churches are in. You are either public or masses. That is, you are either still proud of making your own personal stand in the community, or you have given up and you are collectified. And you try to keep up with the Joneses. And you cannot even remember what you thought three years ago, because now you think something different -- something else. Most people I meet do not wish to be remembered how they behaved -- or what they thought of Germany 10 years ago, or of Communism five years ago. They have forgotten it. They haven't forgotten it; it has been driven out of them, by the fear that anybody could remember that they not -- have -- always have adjusted themselves completely to what's do- -- going on today. Most people in this country have absolutely no memory of their own convictions. And therefore, they are no longer persons. And they are not even individuals. But they are what I call "masses." And mass man is a man whose mind is so short-lived that he cannot connect his presentday mentality with what went on before, and what's going to happen tomorrow, his mind.

Well, most of you will know of the book 1984. Who don't -- has heard of it, 1984? So that's what they actually do in -- I have lived in Yugoslavia last year, and I can assure you that the -- Mr. Tito, who's as bloody a tyrant as can be, tries very hard to make people do the -- just that.

That's mass. A mass i- -- the members of a mass do not have the right to appeal to their own judgment that went on before this moment, and that will follow after this moment. And therefore, of course they must be given security as the only enticement, so to speak, for acting, you see. If you do this, then you are at this moment un- -- unpersecuted, so to speak. You don't go to jail, or you don't -- you get your -- your ration card, or you get your wage, or whatever it is.

Personality, individuality, member of the public--of the critical and receptive public--is the person whose life is still considered a unity from birth to death. But people, we said before, is the community in which the individuals even can live together despite their great difference in mentality. That is, there is only a people if philosophies, personalities, individuals can come and go, you see, disappear and reappear, and yet people can recognize themselves as of the same kin and kindred, as of the same spirit.

So in terms of time, you can easily understand that in a people, a son that grows up -- who grows up sees himself already as a father, and therefore always

encompasses three generations. Because there is his father. There is he as of now, as a son. And there is -- he himself as a father of the next generation. And this is his problem. That's the real tension.

I think immeasurable harm is done in our schools, because our children are not called "daughters" and "sons," but ch- -- "girls" and "boys." Up to the age of 75, they are girls. And -- that's a scandal, because they are -- cheat the people out of their time relations that -- from before and later. Then I prefer the Daughters of the American Revolution. All the educators, they have never thought about the harm they do by never giving these children to understand that they are not girls and boys from the street, but they -- they are sons and daughters who have to inherit father and mother.

So the people contain our office through time -- our offices. Because to be a son and a daughter, and a father and a mother is an office. And this has been of course wiped clean from the slate today. Everybody--as I said, I have seen a young man -- minister tap the old lady on the shoulder and say, "Now how, girl, come?" She had to smile. But she didn't like it.

The other day, I was in church. There was a beautiful mother of four children. And the young -- much younger minister took her in his arm and said, "Come on, sweetheart." She would have liked to have spit him in the face, as she told me later, but she wasn't allowed to. Her rank in the community, you see, was -- was -- was jeopardized by this -- destroyed by this man. For him, she had to be the mother of these four children. Nothing else.

This today is not obtainable. And that's why the Church today is a social organization for most people. It's a social club. If it is a social club, then it is as adaptable to time and circumstance as all clubs.

We have only one religious institution in this country left in which the her- -- inheritance -- the heredity is still respected. And that's a strange institution. These are the political parties. Two-third of the Democrats and Republicans in this ques- -- country are hereditary. They are heirs to a tradition that you are a Republican and Democrat. And as long as this is so, the parties are religious group. And that's very -- not surprising, because the government of course was such a tremendous creation of the 19th century, that it was done with real, religious fervor.

Wherever you find this respect for something that is older and later than I myself, you always can only be in such a group for a religious reason, for something that binds you beyond your mind. Religion is, as you know, the admission that I'm -- bound by something that is stronger than my own reason or my mind.

I cannot understand it, but it's just there, you see. You want to kill somebody, but you know you can't. The 12 -- Ten Commandments that are in force -- are inside yourself, that's a religious command, you see, because all your own will is in the direction of doing this. Yourself, your feelings, your will, your mind. And religion is stronger than this little bit of will, and this little bit of mind, and this little bit of feeling in yourself; and you calm down, and you see how utterly foolish you and your fashion have been. Held by religion.

Now -- today people say they can be without religion. The atheist, of course, is the most religious person--as I already tried to show you--because he believes in the tremendous importance of his own inspiration, that God is on- -- has revealed Himself only to him. He only knows that there is no God. Nobody else does. So he claims a tremendous authority, you see, bracing even himself for going to the scaffold, or being imprisoned, you see. And therefore, anybody who will undergo persecution and attack, of course, believes in God. The atheist only believes in the god in his own heart, in his own chest, and not in the belief of others'. And not in the identity of this -- his belief with the belief of others.

Now whatever religion is, our political parties, I think, are on the way out in this respect. I do think that the loyalty of the Democratic and Republican Party for you people is already hard to understand. I don't know if I'm mistaken. But from mere observation -- I have no way of proving this to you at all, but my -- I would say that after the two world wars, the veterans are in this sense emancipated: that the soldiers of these two wars have no longer the inherited allegiances to the old parties. Would you agree to this? Does this make sense? I would like to hear some -- some suggestion about this, because it's very hard to gauge this.

It is however not necessarily astonishing that this should be so, gentlemen, because all wars change the religion of a people. Religion must change, because wars are always religious enterprises. Wherever a man gives his life for a cause, that's a religious affair. There is no other religion. It has nothing to do with your own use, utility, you see, with enlightened self-interest. It is certainly stupid to be killed by a -- by a -- by a bullet for a cause outside of you, from the point of enlightened self-interest. And all the attack -- attempts for the enlightened self-interesters--these -- funny group of people who want to have the cake and eat it, too, you see--to say that one can make sacrifices from enlightened self- -- interest -- enlightened -- including one's own life, just are poor thinkers. They are illogical. -- All nonsense. If it comes to my own existence, obviously, the sacrifices of my life can never be explained by my own self-interest. The self disappears when you are a soldier, or you are a coward. The self is no good for the -- for any carrier of a spirit through the ages. We are -- we -- must lose our souls in order to -- to win it -- win them. That's obvious. Nobody can fight in any good

cause--not even a lawyer in court can make a good plea--if he doesn't forget himself in the process, and throws himself on the power of his conviction, you see, and let the chips fall where they may, as we say. Nothing has ever been achieved by one's self, but only by the power to get out of this ridiculously short time span of one's own 70 years, and -- see the -- the continuity which has to be restored.

Now the churches cannot do this at this moment. I have attended foundations of churches where they would sing at the same -- on the same moment, so to speak, the hymn: "The Church's One Foundation Is Jesus Christ Our Lord," and the next moment the minister would get up in the pulpit and say, "Today we found the Church." Now you see the contradiction. If we today found the Church, then it's a club, then it's a society. If Jesus Christ is the only foundation of the Church, it has gone on from time immemorial as the Church -- all fathers of the Church has always said, "The Church has existed since Adam." The Church doesn't begin with the Christ in the flesh at all, but it -- from the very beginning, the religious people have been -- formed the Church of God from the very first day that there were men on this earth. Without this, it is impossible to believe -- the Church has no importance; if it isn't that lasting, meaningful unity of mankind through the ages, then -- let's forget about this and let us call it "organization."

You should try to begin to distinguish clearly: social orders, society, social organizations are shorter than the people who found them, you see. Lifetime things that coincide with your -- with my own person, you see, are contained between my life and -- birth and my death. And all important things pose the problem of lasting out your and my individual existence, and certainly even more -- all the organizations in which we erect and establish during our life.

Now most of you take their -- explanation of social problems from shortlived processes; and you think that the long-lived processes ex- -- can be explained by, for example, four weeks in -- in Maine for group mechanics, one of the most diabolical inventions I know. You may have he- -- heard that this man--I knew quite well--who was devil incarnate, invented this idea that you could learn about how the cardinals, and the bishops, and the ministers, and the people of Christ should behave by going four weeks in a mechanical grouping, and find out about -- about behavior -- group behavior.

Would you take down my deepest conviction? I think I have proven it in many books, but I will put it down as my -- mine, so to take all the responsibility and to let you -- free to disprove it. This is: that always in society the larger -- form of life explains the shorter; never the shorter the larger. You can never explain why there is a holiday in the family, a birthday, by adding up the 365

days of the year. It is only when you understand why -- you celebrate your parents' wedding day or your birthday that you can understand how to behave on a weekday, where there is no holiday. No sum of 365 weekdays will ever explain the order of -- the beautiful order of a year, with vacations and Sundays. Never. But any one higher unit--because the Sunday belongs to eternity, and your birthday belongs to your whole life, and the wedding day bel- -- belongs to the homestead and this household, for 30 or 40 years--any such larger unit explains everything how it must be handled, which is below this.

Now all your thinking is in the other way. Everything we call secular thinking in this country, or psychology, or what -- for that matter sociology, tries to build up the beautiful unit of man's history out of atoms. You ex- -- you observe a man, how he behaves during 24 hours, and you say, "Now I need the requirements of this man." You don't know anything. Because for a higher aim, this man may very well starve himself to death for a whole year, if he wants a career. Or he may very well absent himself for seven years. Or he may serve, like Jacob, seven years for the woman he didn't -- love, Ra- -- Leah, because he wanted finally to marry Rachel. And that took him another seven years, as you may recall.

That is, we do many illogical things, and on the surface of things, nobody can explain them. If you had seen Jacob serve for -- Leah the first seven years for a per- -- woman he didn't like, you would have said the man does it for {monit}," you see, and you would have completely misjudged him. He didn't. He made a tremendous sacrifice. It isn't -- it isn't agreeable to marry a woman you -- you do not love, but you do such things for higher purposes.

So the -- the larger time unit in the history of mankind always explains the smaller. By the 4th of July, you can explain many silly political measures of today, many slogans. You can never explain the 4th of July by running through your own little life as it is lived now. Never. But all -- everybody tries. And this is the disease of the modern mass man, and of your so-called mentality, which is as fickle and unreliable as can be, because these same people who make these investigations are all weekday specimens of the moment, you see. As you go through the Journal of Sociology or Psychology in this country, you have a new fad of explanation every five years. You must. These people live, of course, like the flowers, by seasons.

So our problem is: what has the Church at this moment to offer? I think she has to offer one thing: completeness. That is, the 287 denominations together represent practically all the candles -- -lights of the -- of the chandelier, so to speak, of the Church. Every sect and every denomination undoubtedly represents one point that deserves to be attended to, that -- represents an item in the

multi-color scheme of the revelation. That is, of this power to look through one's own time, and see one's own time in the -- light of this constant renewal and inheritance. To look through one's own mind as a mere fashion: that's your task as decent people.

The -- completeness of the sects, then, in space, so to speak, offers at this moment only in U- -- the United States a tremendous invitation to worshiping the whole of the truth. If you see it rightly--and today I think nobody -- no Congregationalist, no Disciple of Christ, no Nazarene -- Church of the Nazarene member, no -- even no Mormon I would hold--can at this moment pretend that you can know the fullness of the truth only with -- with disregard to the signs, so to speak, you see, the illumination in -- by the very existence and the power with which these other groups have come about in the last century in this country. It is a complete picture. And I think one quality of the Church which has to -- to be opposed to uniqueness is completeness. Anything that is needed, you see.

Now that's today not written into only one church building or one denomination. But it is represented by the completeness of these groups. I think that's a great thing. And this is the -- America's contribution to Christianity. This may be enlarged on. If 287 pointers are visible today, on every Sunday, that you go through the streets and think about, "To which Church shall I go?"--if you have this menu offered, you see, bigger as -- with -- in Romanoff's, then you discover that obviously in every one of these buildings or communities, there is one item that is less important: its administrative form. I think God has allowed this division of the churches, actually, for a lesson to us, because you and I have no difficulty today to see that Episcopalian, Congregational, Presbyterian, -- Revival form of administrating a church, you see, long-range, short-range in -- administration is a minor matter, that you can vary in your ideas. The -- Greek and the Roman Church can immediately, for example, agree on the point, in which they already have agreed in Poland, that the marriage of the lower priesthood or the celibacy is a moot question, that you can deal with this, you see, differently. There -- as you know, there are whole branches of the Church as -- is -- of this moment, where the pope is recognized as head of the Church and where the lower clergy marries. And no harm done.

Now that's just an example for learning to distinguish the im- -- the unimportant and the important issues of the Church. Obviously the Church cannot depend on any one of these administrative, you see, forms. That's not the Church. That's not the essence. That's passing.

I think this is America's greatest contribution at this moment to the rest of the world, this great encouragement that it is not necessary to exaggerate the importance of whether you have a bishop at the head, or a Presbyterian, or a

congregation, or what have you. On this however, there is more to be said.