The Way to Peace Through Righteousness

Of the Council of the Twelve Apostles ¶

The question has frequently been mooted whether the ideals embodied in the teachings of Jesus can ever be reduced to practice in this stubborn world. He glorified the peacemaker and the pure in heart and him that hungers after righteousness and He said that the meek shall inherit the earth. In that brief summing up is embodied all the essentials for the perfect society. Stated in the skeptical, calculating language of the day, the question is, will these notions work, or must they forever remain beautifully conceived, fanciful abstractions isolated by an impassable interval from the realm of reality. Certainly the gap is wide between the beauties of association they envision and the ugliness of what actually is. ¶

Need for Better Conditions Among Mankind

In this arrogant, self-seeking, strife-ridden age there seems to be no place for the meek except in submission to indignity and in cringing servility. Humility is a virtue known by little else than its name. Hunger after righteousness is displaced by lust for power and greed for gain while the voice of the peacemaker is drowned out by the din of war. But these conditions do not bring mankind satisfaction, hence cannot be the permanent order of a desirable world. Rather they bring violent dissatisfactions. They rest upon force, cruelty, chicanery, and fraud; they result in resentment, contention, turmoil, anxiety, fear and unrest. The very turbulence of the unrest and the dissatisfaction is convincing evidence of men's feeling that they are entitled to a more serene and peaceful way of life than they are now experiencing. There can be no question about the desirability of the ideal. The issue raised is whether mankind can achieve it. ¶

The Teachings of Jesus Intended for All Mankind

We can perhaps approach our question with a better understanding if we remember that Jesus was not primarily concerned with any temporary or localized condition. His outlook compassed the whole race, and its possible destiny; His vision swept over the whole range of time and existence. The practicability of His teachings must be tested from this long-range view. He came to a race proud of its heritage, vivid in its memory of a long independence and cherished greatness, galled by and resentful of its political eclipse as a subject province of the empire, and unyielding in its hope of return to national independence and former glory. To all this Jesus paid no attention at all. He and His followers had no voice in the existing political government. They exercised no influence in shaping its course. Apparently He never sought to influence it or to reform or correct it. Instead of trying to reform the State He was trying to reform men. ¶

Many men in this world have worked out patterns for what they conceived to be the ideal State, but when they had finished they found they had no people fitted to live in such state. Jesus saw with unerring clearness that society can be nothing better than a reflection of the men and women who comprise it. The ideal state can come only when created and peopled by men and women who embody its ideals in their lives. His first business, therefore, was with individuals, to teach them how to live, individually and in relation to their fellowmen. Advancement in that purpose would assure a parallel betterment of the collective body. ¶

The prescription for the kind of living He enjoined involves the control of self within, self-discipline, the supremacy of individual virtues over baser instincts, self-government which raises the individual to a plane where his conduct is above the compulsions of an overhanging law. This is only to say that there is involved the bringing of the finer spiritual qualities of human nature into mastery over its more carnal animal instincts. The fruition comes with a complete spiritual supremacy. ¶

Perfection Gained by Degrees

But this does not mean that the way to it is divorced from the daily routine of mortal life. It does not mean that the principles of living laid down by Jesus are inapplicable to the world in which mortal man lives. It signifies rather that in that degree in which men and women spiritualize their lives they may enjoy the kingdom of heaven on earth. Life as it is lived in this earth among men with their divergent interests, their conflicting purposes and their crusading antagonisms is the training ground for the cultivation and the development of the desired virtues. Wherever and in whatever degree any of His teachings are observed, to that extent they bear fruit in betterment of conditions of living, both individual and collective living. Politically viewed they state the conditions basic to a well ordered free government. ¶

The whole perfected pattern, of course, cannot be realized at once. The imperfect will be mixed in with the perfect till the perfect win supremacy. In all human things progress is a process of growth; advancement is by degrees. It is accomplished by teaching and acceptance and conformance. ¶

So in considering the practical workability of the ideals we must keep our attention fixed on end results and must not be confused or disconcerted by passing episodes or the deeds of immaturity which seem so entirely irreconcilable with the possibility of ever in this world bringing the ideal and the real into unison. Look, for instance, upon the state of the peacemaker and the meek. If all men were pure in heart and were disposed to peace and in humility of spirit desired only righteousness, the problem of life would be simple. But a distressing perplexity is introduced when one man wants to be at peace and his immediate associate wants strife, when one man wants to do the right while another desires unjust advantage, when one man in meekness of spirit desires to adjust with his contending neighbor, and that neighbor arrogantly demands unconditional surrender to his own unbending will. The unyielding offender must, until he learns better, be restrained. Compulsions must be invoked. But artificially imposed restraints, outward coercions can never be anything but temporary expedients. They afford no cure for the evil they are designed to repress. So long as wrong is held in suppression by force, the force will still have to be maintained. ¶

THE WAY OF PEACE IS THROUGH RIGHTEOUSNESg ¶

That is all basic in the teachings of Jesus. His ideal of government is self-government. His concern was for purging out of the human heart the ignoble desire supplanting it with worthy purpose. To this end He taught the principle of overcoming evil with good, of supplanting fear with confidence, of substituting love for hatred, of doing to others what we should like them to do to us, of being generous and unselfish and gentle and kind, instead of cruel and selfish and vengeful and insolent. We may withstand the invader of our homes, but so long as he has the will to invade we can know no contentment. A nation may repel the onslaught of a devastating foe but so long as the foe stands ready to strike, the nation may never lay down its arms. To maintain itself as a perpetual armed camp would be intolerable as well as impossible. Security and lasting peace of mind, the inescapable conditions of national peace and prosperity, can come only when the enemy has ceased to want to invade. This comes through teaching the better way, through soulconversion that threat and force and compulsion bring no enduring rewards. In the end the way of the peace-maker and the meek must prevail. ¶

In that respect the history of the world teaches but one lesson. No world conqueror has ever been able to perpetuate his empire. When the force that created it was no longer adequate to its maintenance, it has crumbled before the onslaught of the subject peoples who have nursed their grievances awaiting the day of retribution. The present attempt at swollen dominion is foredoomed to failure. It has within itself the seeds of its own destruction. It rests upon force and will be broken by force and in the end nothing but suffering will have resulted ¶

From there the world will have to pick up again and begin piecing together its shattered fragments of faith and belief and start building anew on the spiritual principles inherent in the teachings of Christ. ¶

In a vague generalized way men have been sensing the impossibility of preserving a free way of life unless it is kept on a spiritual foundation. Nearly a year before the outbreak of the present war a group of eminent and observant British leaders warned that the nation must make its choice between spiritual restoration and annihilation. ¶

The Need for Spirituality Felt

A little more than a year ago now forty men of prominence in religious, scientific and philosophic circles called upon the American people to rouse themselves to the danger that lies in the undermining of religious belief and practice. Recognizing that so long as armed aggression is rampant in the world, peaceably inclined peoples must prepare themselves to repel it, they nevertheless issued the solemn caution that unless a spiritual and moral resuscitation is worked and respect for religious values built up, we shall arm in vain. ¶

These are but illustrations of the cry that is going up from many quarters indicating an uneasiness of feeling that something basic upon which our security rested has been slipping away. But I have not found any of them telling us very clearly what these spiritual elements are, nor how to bring them back into our national life. Our original question recurs: Can the idealisms of Jesus be made to work? ¶

Christian Ideals the Basic Principles of Good Government

Perhaps the best answer to that question is that despite imperfection discouraging failures and retrogressions they are, to a degree, already working in the world and for nearly two thousand years have been modifying and tempering and shaping the very thought processes of men and reflecting themselves in the best conceived principles of civil governments themselves. ¶

Our own government is the leading example of this undeniable fact. It is the product of Christ's teachings. These have bedded themselves in its very framework. Its central doctrine assumes the Fatherhood of God, and the worth and dignity of man as a child of God. The declaration that all men are created equal and that they are God-endowed with certain rights which are inalienable and inviolable -- the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness -- derives out of 1800 years of persistent teaching about the reality of God and the immortality of the human soul. ¶

The ideas that form our standards of behavior, by which our conduct is evaluated as being good or bad, by which our laws are shaped which control in our best concepts of good taste and neighborly proprieties come out of our long tradition in the precepts of the Man of Galilee. ¶

When the politician or the orator condemns evils and promises cures and the institution of better ways, even though insincerely and for selfish ¶

ends, he rests his case, though perhaps unconsciously, upon the basis of Christian ideals, all of which demonstrates how deeply these have penetrated into the thought habits of our people. ¶

The Trend Towards Religious Disbelief

But today it seems fairly apparent that even among the most enlightened nations these ideas have been losing ground as guiding principles. Our own nation has strayed far. At the outset they were accepted as part of a firm religious belief. Christ taught a religion, not merely a code of ethics. It centered -- as all religion must -- in God, whom Jesus described as the Father whose will He had come to do, and whose Son He was, and whose promises formed the basis of our future hopes. We have been surrendering these convictions. The last century is generally characterized as an irreligious one. The discoveries of science were startling Men grew in their assumption of self-sufficiency. They thought they would be able to explain everything upon the theory "of pure mechanism with mind, body and soul the result of chemical and physical actions." Jesus ceased to be the Son of God, the Savior of men and became only one, perhaps the greatest, in a succession of great moralists. His teachings became not the Gospel of salvation of divine origin but a code of ethics, with religion flouted as mere formalism and the church the exponent of an archaic superstition. This is striking faith at its source. With its underpinning gone it has no anchorage. It was His claim to divinity that gave to the teachings of Jesus their authoritative sanction. Robbed of that sanction they had no binding force upon men. As mere ethical precepts they have proved themselves wholly insufficient as the present unhappy state of the world attests. ¶

Loss of Faith in God Sets Mankind Adrift

Robert Gordon Sproul, president of the University of California recently said: ¶

There is a great need for some directive force to rally the recuperative powers of mankind and win the race with catastrophe. Education cannot provide such a force, important as it is, because it is not the minds but the souls of men that must be regenerated if catastrophe is not surely to come. Men must listen to God and obey', but they listen to Hitler and Stalin, and grovel. Our American heritage cannot long endure without a firmly grounded religious faith." ¶

With God denied there is none to whom man owes reverence. With reverence gone man is adrift. Each one's notions have equal status with every other one's notions, and no one knows what he ought to believe; respect for authority dies out because there is nothing authoritative left; veneration for parental authority breaks down and reverence for law ceases to command allegiance. ¶

All these consequences are clearly revealed in the course of events, even in our own land. We of this generation received this great government of ours from the generations which had gone before sound in its principles, Its Constitution was everywhere held in reverence; Its laws ¶

were obeyed. No one doubted its. superiority over every other form of government on earth. Every one had unshaken faith in its perpetuity. We pass it on with that faith terribly shaken. Its people are torn by dissension. They do not trust each other. They are not sure that after all our system of government is better than any other. They have grown cynical and doubt if good is to be found anywhere. ¶

Internal Threats Menace Freedom

Unbelief is the menacing evil of the world. Among professedly Christian peoples relatively few could be found, in all probability, who would not agree that the ideal of living depicted by the Master is highly to be desired. But they do not really believe His message. If Christians actually believed they would trust and if they trusted, envy and jealousy and greed and hatred would be subdued. Saying nothing about a foreign war, leaving that to one side, our internal disorders threaten the perpetuation of the principles on which the nation was founded. This manifests itself in the dividing of people up into classes, kept apart by mutual mistrust, with its consequent train of suspicions, envies, abuses and retaliations which blind them to their undeniable interdependence among themselves, their reciprocity of interests and their identity of goals. We set them off as the rich and the poor; the worker and the employer; the laborer and the capitalist, giving each its opposite as if their welfares were inherently antagonistic. ¶

There is inescapable interdependence among all. Whether men ponder in the night the mysteries of the universe and seek to learn its secrets, whether they dig the metals out of the bowels of the earth, whether they spin them into steel or build that into the sky-scraper or the factory or the cottage, whether they have the white and supple fingers of the violinist or the grimed hands of the mechanic, whether their days are spent in the counting house or sitting beside the bed of the sick and dying, whether they tend to flocks and herds, or till the land, all have had to labor together to build the mighty giant which is America. ¶

Power in Persuasion

How stupid, then, that they should be separated into warring classes in hostile camps! How silly to suppose that one can be permanently bettered by the crippling of the other! How futile to hope that unity of purpose and cooperative endeavor can be legislated into being or compelled by punitive statutes administered with undefensible injustice and stupidity. It is placing a low estimate on the intelligence of all the groups to assume that the great majority of them under just and impartial guidance could not be led into peaceful and mutually beneficial understandings. The few recalcitrants could soon be effectively disciplined. The ways of persuasion and voluntary self-disciplining, of humility of spirit, of appealing to the instincts of righteousness, the ways of peace, are so infinitely more fruitful of enduring results. ¶