An Intelligent Man                                                                  9/30/45

 

Scripture:  Read Psalm 19

 

The calendar of a year seems filled with days and weeks of special emphasis.  Various drives and campaigns use a day or a week to get the attention and action of a community.  And all of this has some merit.

 

The International Council of Religious Education has invited churches and church schools and Christian homes to mark September 30 to October 7 of this year as “Religious Education Week.”  In this connection, there are some simple statistics which ought to give us food for thought.  They were quoted on the inside of last Sunday’s church calendar.

 

Approximately 1000 hours out of the year, in a child’s life, are spent in school - in some schools a little more than that.  At most, 156 hours are spent in church, assuming three hours a week in various church activities every week of the year.  About 2,900 waking hours of the child’s life are spent in the home.  The scale is heavily weighted toward the home - 150 hours in the church and nearly 20 times that much or 3,000 hours in the home.  If the public schools are expected to avoid any formal teaching of religion, then the heaviest responsibility falls on us in our homes.

 

“Thou shalt have one allegiance above all the rest, and thou shalt teach it to thy children, by word, of course, and by deed, and attitude, and prayer, and by the contagion of your spirit.”

 

The church will do the very best it can, in the time it has, to train its children in worship and knowledge of God.  It will try to be  a powerful help to the Christian home.  But it can never in the least take the place of a home’s influence.  Neither can it compete, in basis of time available, with the school.  Here we are offered an interpretation of life.  The “learning-by-doing” of that interpretation comes in the spontaneous, natural, clashing and cooperation of home living.

 

I have no thought of preaching on “education” this morning.  I assume that a centrally important part of education is the attitude, and knowledge of adults.  And so I hope that we may think just now of one or two of the marks of an intelligent person.

 

Public schools have started four weeks ago.  More recently numbers of our homes have seen their older young folk off to colleges and universities.  We want them to be intelligent and capable adults.  “The intelligent man knows how to handle life.”

 

A disturbing anachronism appears, however, in the fact that we have more highly educated people today in America than ever in our history.  And yet we have been taking part in the worst man-made destruction of all time.  With all of our education - do

we know “how to handle life?”

 

We have learned to handle certain things; to make bridges and buildings, to make elaborate and effective machinery, to handle money (when it comes our way).  But, as a people, we don’t know how to handle life.  The slaughter of our days of war and the poverty of our days of peace testify to our lack of knowledge or experience in handling life.  In spite of splendid science, great technology, and a multitude of convenient gadgets, we seem to be unintelligent at “handling life.”

 

A sergeant in a hospital in England, graduate of a Seattle high school, wrote home to his wife:  “Seeing a soldier suffer is not so bad .... but kids, that is different.  They didn’t know what it was all about, just dazed, shocked and scared.  It was no sight for me!  Still, it didn’t fill me with hate.  It did make me realize that this deal can’t be repeated again twenty years from now.  We can’t have our son, or anybody else’s son, walking through a hospital looking at human derelicts, or worse, lying there and having someone walk through and look at him.  There is something wrong with the system, somewhere.  I don’t know if the cure is religion, or science or what, but this can’t go on.”

 

Possibly one reason for this sense of failure, shared by so many thoughtful people, is that we have not realized that the handling of life is central.  This is the purpose, the end.  All else is just the means, or sometimes distraction.

 

Jesus once said that the Sabbath is for man and not man for the Sabbath.  Institutions are the means of living - not the end.  Man’s best self is the end.  If we fail to perceive this vividly, we are not intelligent.  We have created systems of industry and commerce, organizations of religion and of education, of science and the arts, without relating them to the main end - the fulfillment of man himself.  If an educational system is designed solely to make a boy or girl a better bread winner, it fails of the very purpose in education.  If an industry turns out solely a material product without consideration of what happens to the character of its producers, in management or labor, and with no thought of the consumer as a human being, it has not contributed to life - the most important matter of all.

 

Looking over a ship rail, down to the wharf, where, in a time of peace and scarce employment, men were finishing the loading, one could see men and machines puttering around, carrying a bit of this here, a stick of that there, obviously “killing time” and making the working hour stretch.  The man at my side, himself unemployed at the time, laughed and blurted out, “Look at those fellows killing time, busy about nothing.  They know that the day’s job is done, and yet they won’t quit yet because the pay will stop.  My, but I’d like to see the system changed.  The system is all wrong.”  (Sounds like that unhappy sergeant in the English hospital.)

 

Well, perhaps the system is wrong, and probably it could be improved.  But is it not true that no system, or change of systems, is going to be any better for mankind unless man himself is changed - for the better?

 

The inference, here, applies not only to the man who reeks with his own self-concern, but also to the man at the other extreme who cloaks his insufferable ego in zealous “reform.”

 

One of the characters in a thoughtful novel is a man who is proud of his own reforming zeal, yet who made everyone near him miserable.  He was heartless and cruel to the members of his own family, and especially to his sensitive adolescent son.  One would prefer a self-indulgent person to this ruthless reformer, though both be spiritual failures.

 

The first and the latest thing one must learn, if he is to know how to handle life, is to rid himself of pride.  It is hardly an accident that the first beatitude is “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”

 

This primary lesson is hard, because pride has a way of slipping in at the side door even after one has tried to drive it out.  A man accepts what seems a form of martyrdom, and the next day becomes proud of his martyrdom.

 

St. Francis was humble, but some of his followers became spiritual snobs.

 

A young man start out to be a savior and accepts prison.  Yet he fails because he becomes proud of being a prisoner!

 

Paul warned of this danger when he wrote: “Even though I give my body to be burned, it profiteth me nothing unless I do it as an expression of love.”

 

A genuine humility is life’s first lesson.  Intelligence is a loss without it.  Our failure to learn this lesson is reflected in the larger life of the community - the nation.  We hear a good deal of big talk today about the handling of life on a large scale.  Millions of people will be put here, or transplanted there.  These people will be put down; those will be raised up.  We talk in terms of pride in our own power.  We shall make those people behave!  We shall police the world!  We will enforce the peace!  Are those words spoken in humility?  I don’t hear much sound of repentance for our own stupidity and selfishness.

 

If we talk of building a new world on the basis of pride, we fail at the start.  A British Lord [Acton] has remarked “that power corrupts, and that all great men are bad.”  It is an extreme statement - but one of those remarks that, though it make us angry, ought to make us think.

 

If there ever was a time for our people to pray, “Lord of Hosts, be with us yet, lest we forget,” that time is now.  Perhaps it is irony that the Kipling who wrote these lines of “Recessional” and another of the hymns that we sing occasionally, is the same poet who sang loudest about the glories of British imperialism.  But the one saving feature of Kipling and his Britain has been a counter-struggle to be humble.  “If, drunk with sight of power, we loose wild tongues that have not Thee in awe,” and “Still stands thine ancient sacrifice, an humble and a contrite heart.”

 

If the “Big Three” are bent on striding across the world proclaiming, “Our will be done, our kingdom come,” it is no wonder that men speak fearfully of another war.  There is no hope of avoiding it, save as men and women will pray sincerely to the God of impartial righteousness, “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth.”

 

With this absolutely essential humility goes reverence.  The humble man stands in awe before the living universe.  The true scientist, the true poet, the true philosopher - the intelligent man - is a reverent man.

 

A true scientist stands, eager and awe-inspired before the stars of the Milky Way, the power of the atom, the life in an organism.  But the greatest miracle is not mountain nor molecule.  A greater is human personality.  Man - of any creed, or color.  Before man, the intelligent person stands in respect.  The arrogant of the earth, who scoff at human personality, who kick it around as a commodity, have sooner or later fallen.

 

Those who have learned to say to themselves sincerely, “I am a person.  He too is a person.  He is my brother,” find the door to understanding swinging open. When a man, through humility and reverence, finds that door to understanding, he is a free, intelligent human being.  More than that; he discovers God.  He finds that he is part of a great flooding of divine life that fills crevices and chasms - a part of the life that is more than finite, but eternal.

 

Dates and places delivered:

 

            Wisconsin Rapids, September 30, 1945