“It is fundamental to the nature of faith to take God’s word for things; acceptance on the authority of God is the biblical analysis of faith on its intellectual side.” The truth of this statement by J. I. Packer is nowhere better demonstrated than in the life of Abraham, the great exemplar of faith in both Old and New Testaments. In these days when faith is faltering in both pew and pulpit, we might do well to take a look at Abraham’s faith.

What were the grounds of Abraham’s faith? The answer is simple: the words—or, more specifically, the promises—of God.

When we ourselves are asked to believe certain things on the grounds that they are revealed to us in the Bible, the word of God, we often jib, feeling that we need more evidence. How much easier things would be, we think, if only we could see. Living by sight comes naturally to us, and in an age of science we have become conditioned to seeking tangible proof for everything we are called on to accept.

In Genesis 12, where Abraham’s life story is first told, we read: “Then the Lord appeared to Abram, and said, ‘To your descendants I will give this land’ ” (v. 7), a promise that was renewed on various occasions later. Consider Abraham’s position once he had received this promise. For a start, he was a mere sojourner in the land, a nomad. In the words of Hebrews 11:9, “he sojourned in the land of promise, as in a foreign land, living in tents with Isaac and Jacob, heirs with him of the same promise.” Having camped briefly between Bethel and Ai and built an altar, he then moved on toward the Negeb. He knew in advance that the land was occupied territory, the home of the Canaanites (Gen. 12:6), and this was not a very hopeful sign. We now know that it took hundreds of years and the rise and triumph of Joshua before the promise could be fulfilled.

There were also other factors to disturb Abraham’s assurance. Twice he was driven away from the area by famine to an uncertain existence in Egypt. What was perhaps even more upsetting was the knowledge that his descendants too were to be sojourners in a foreign land (15:13), and slaves to boot! In chapter 14 we learn how the territory was invaded by distant rulers. And when Sarah died he had to buy a plot of ground for her burial place (chapter 23). It appeared that all visible evidence for his cherished belief that his descendants would inherit the land was crushed. Any hope he had left stemmed from the word of God alone.

Furthermore, there was something frustratingly intangible about the promise of God so far as Abraham himself was concerned. It hardly satisfied any selfish personal desires he might have had, for initially the land was pledged not to him but to his descendants. And if we find believing the word of the Lord difficult in the twentieth century, we need to remember that Abraham had far less grounds for confidence than we have. For us the revelation is complete; Christ has already come in the flesh; he has died, risen, and ascended. We have a whole cloud of witnesses, greater even than that known to the writer of the Epistle of the Hebrews. God grant us a faith like Abraham’s to believe the great and wonderful promise of new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells (Isa. 65:17; 2 Pet. 3:13).

Two other promises were made to Abraham that called for the exercise of faith. God told him that he would make him a great nation. (13:16): “I will make your descendants as the dust of the earth; so that if one can count the dust of the earth, your descendants also can be counted.” This was a great promise, but one that must have seemed so remote to a man in Abraham’s position. Sarah, his wife, was barren; and as she and Abraham grew old the idea of having a child must have seemed more and more absurd. Sarah especially tended to waver, and she schemed to ensure that the promise would be fulfilled through her slave-girl, Hagar. When told she should bear a child at the age of ninety, she laughed at what seemed to her a fantastic suggestion. But she failed to reckon with God, who is faithful to his word and capable of bringing it to pass, and in due course Isaac was born.

Ahead lay an even greater test. Abraham was told to offer his only son—the very linchpin in the line of succession that was to bring blessing to the world—as a burnt offering on the mountains of Moriah. Once again reason would say that the game was up; the promise and the covenant were both futile. But as Abraham raised his death-dealing dagger, God, the ever-faithful God, stepped in once more, this time to provide a substitute ram for the sacrifice. Abraham’s faith had brought him through the extreme crisis; he had been prepared to risk all for God and to give him his most prized possession.

Surely we need to be ready to exercise a similar faith at critical times today. God has already provided the supreme sacrifice for us—his only Son, and in his case there was no last-minute effort to stay the executioner’s hand. His Son died as a lamb without spot for our sakes and for a multitude that no man can number (Rev. 7:9, 10), so that through faith in him we might be presented faultless before God to rejoice in his presence forever.

The final promise made to Abraham again involved not himself directly but others through him—“in you all the families of the earth will be blessed” (12:3b, RSV margin). Now with the hindsight of more than 3,000 years we know just how true that was. But Abraham had only a word from God to base his faith on, and this appeared to be in constant danger of contradiction. For a start, Abraham, characterized by all the familiar weaknesses common to mortal men, jeopardized the promise through his own vacillation at critical moments. In the interest of self-preservation he twice tried to pass off Sarah as his sister and almost ruined the plan and purpose of God. He had to separate from Lot, partly because both of them had grown prosperous and had many possessions and partly because their respective herdsmen were constantly quarrelling. This did not augur well for the future blessing of “all the families of the earth.” Later Abraham was involved in fights with neighboring kings. Having emerged unscathed from these troubles, he became embroiled in a dispute with Abimelech.

Several lessons of Abraham’s life seem particularly relevant today.

First, if we are to be Abraham’s spiritual children and heirs of the promise, we need to recognize that faith is true only when based on the objective word of God (Gen. 15:6; cf. Rom. 4:3, 9, 22, 23; Gal. 3:6; Heb. 11:8). In an uncertain world, faith as biblically understood is the only foundation for life (John 5:24; Rom. 4:23–25).

Secondly, Abraham was a man of flesh and blood like ourselves and triumphed only after a tremendous struggle. This struggle was poignantly described by Calvin (Inst. II, x, 11) whose own experience was in many ways similar:

He is torn away from friends, parents, and country, objects in which the chief happiness of life is deemed to consist, as if it had been the fixed purpose of God to deprive him of all the sources of enjoyment. No sooner does he enter into the land in which he was ordered to dwell, than he is driven from it by famine. In the country to which he retires to obtain relief, he is obliged, for his personal safety, to expose his wife to prostitution. This must have been more bitter than many deaths. After returning to the land of his habitation, he is again expelled by famine. What is the happiness of inhabiting a land where you must often suffer from hunger, nay perish from famine, unless you flee from it?… He wanders up and down uncertain for many years.… Wherever he goes he meets with savage-hearted neighbors, who will not even allow him to drink of the wells which he has dug with great labour.… Thus, in fine, during the whole course of his life, he was harrassed and tossed in such a way, that anyone desirous of giving a picture of a calamitous life could not find one more appropriate. Let it not be said that he was not so very distressed, because he at length escaped from all these tempests. He is not said to lead a happy life who, after infinite difficulties during a long period, at last laboriously works out his escape, but he who calmly enjoys present blessings without any alloy of suffering.

Thirdly, if we are inclined to be daunted by the prospect of the fight of faith (cf. Heb. 13:13), we need to recall that Abraham was sustained, guided, and kept (cf. 1 Pet. 1:5) by a faithful, merciful, loving, and sovereign God who first gave the word and then ensured its ultimate victory by overruling every weakness in the one to whom he had given it and every thwarting turn of events. Doubt, says Pareus, “has two arguments—will God do this? and can God do this? Faith has also two arguments—God will do it, because he has promised; and he can do it, because he is omnipotent.” In our own battle of faith, as we struggle with our weakness, we should be fortified by the knowledge that many others have faced the same sort of problems and found success.

Finally, just as Abraham was promised that God himself would be his “exceeding great reward,” we should not lightly throw away our confidence (Heb. 10:35); for when Christ who is our life appears, then we also will appear with him in glory.

H. K. Stothard is further education tutor at teh Village college, Peterborough, England. He holds teh B.A. and Certificate of Education from Nottingham University.

“But what can I do?” White Americans have asked this question in regard to the racial crisis in our land so often it has become a cliché. Discussions with blacks usually yield the answer: Go home and get yourself together. Try to begin to understand what is involved in the problem.

“The greatest thing you can do is deal with the problem where you are,” says black evangelist Tom Skinner. “White society has to have its attitude changed.”

In the Chicago Daily News, columnist L. F. Palmer, Jr., wrote: “Many do not recognize the new mood of the black man because they simply do not want to. Others cannot comprehend because their isolation makes it impossible to understand the kind of life a black person lives in this country.”

At the recent U. S. Congress on Evangelism, white evangelist Leighton Ford warned: “If we do not seek to heal the gaping, rubbed-raw wounds of racial strife, then we shall deserve ‘the fire next time.’ It is to the shame of the Christian Church that we have been so slow to face the demands of the Gospel in the racial revolution.”

Before one can begin to solve any problem, says Palmer, “there must be an honest understanding of what the problem is. There is one answer, then, to the perplexed white American who asks in obvious sincerity: ‘What can I do?’ The answer: embark on a mission of undertanding.”

An evangelical pastor who has worked to foster friendly relations between blacks and whites in the inner city points out that “understanding precedes fellowship.” One cannot begin to understand others until he begins to feel with them, to gain insight into their lives, and to respect them.

The vicarious experience of reading is an excellent means of launching the journey to understanding. But the knowledge explosion has hit this subject as well as many others, and the number of books available is enough to make a librarian turn pale. How can a person who wants to become more informed about the racial crisis decide which books would be most helpful?

The following list of suggested reading is the result of a survey of eleven evangelicals, both black and white, who are well acquainted with the racial situation and with the current literature. The respondents included an editor, historian, sociologist, anthropologist, author, evangelist, pastor, social worker, college professor, graduate student, and counselor. Each was asked to recommend ten books. The ten with the most votes make up a mini-library that is available in paperback for about $15. They are listed in order of popularity, with the number of votes each received given in parentheses. Each book received a vote from at least one of the black respondents.

1. The Autobiography of Malcolm X (nine), by Malcolm X and Alex Haley (Grove Press, 1966, 460 pages, $1.25). From tape-recorded conversations, black writer Alex Haley put together the memoirs of this onetime Black Muslim leader. Malcolm X never expected to live long enough to read the results, and he proved to be a prophet. Assassins’ bullets cut him down in February, 1965. This is the story of a former thief, dope peddler, and pimp who rose to become a leader of the black revolution. Initially committed to the Black Muslim separatist philosophy, Malcolm broke with Elijah Muhammad and his racist doctrines in 1964. After his conversion to the Orthodox Islamic religion, he set to work to build what he called “an all-black organization whose ultimate objective would be to help create a society in which there could exist an honest white-black brotherhood.” He pointed black Americans toward an ultimate awareness of themselves and their individual worth. This emotion-packed account of a sensitive, proud, highly intelligent black leader cannot be ignored.
2. Crises in Black and White (eight), by Charles E. Silberman (Vintage, 1964, 370 pages, $1.95). This perceptive and accurate diagnosis probably gives more solid information than any other book written on race relations in the United States in recent years. Silberman, a member of the board of editors of Fortune magazine, sees blacks and whites trapped together in a vicious circle from which no one seems able to escape. But they must escape. A man cannot deny the humanity of his fellow man without ultimately destroying his own. “If we cannot learn now to reorder the relations between black and white we will never be able to handle the new problems of the age in which we find ourselves.” Without sustained preaching or special pleading, Silberman reflects a kind of social and moral commitment that is badly needed today.
3. Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (six), (Bantam, 1968, 609 pages, $1.25). After the racial disorders of the summer of 1967, President Johnson established the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders to discover answers to three basic questions: What happened? Why did it happen? What can be done to prevent it from happening again? This report (the “Kerner Report”) places the blame on “white, moderate, responsible America.” Its basic conclusion: America is moving toward two societies, one black and one white, separate and unequal. But racial division is not inevitable. Common opportunities for all can be realized within a single society, the commission believes, and it makes numerous recommendations for bringing this to pass. But it warns that to achieve this all Americans will have to undergo some changes of attitude, and acquire new understanding and new will. A twenty-nine-page summary is included in the opening pages of this detailed, sobering document.
4. Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America (six), by Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton (Vintage, 1967, 198 pages, $1.95). In this outstanding statement of the philosophy of black power, the authors explain the origins, development, and goals of the movement. Disclaiming the idea that “democratic” America will allow democracy for all people, they argue that a revolutionary approach is needed. Blacks must build their own power base from which they can make substantial and lasting improvements in their lives. With this independent power they can enter coalitions with white organizations and gain equal decision-making authority.
5. Dark Ghetto: Dilemmas of Social Power (five), by Kenneth B. Clark (Torch, 1965, 251 pages, $1.75). This scholarly and impassioned study of the black man’s environment explodes the fallacy that inhabitants of the ghetto are responsible for their own condition. Dr. Clark, psychology professor at City College of New York, writes from his experiences as chief consultant to Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited. He analyzes the poverty, crime, low aspirations, family instability, and exploitation of the blacks, and presents facts about the political, religious, economic, and intellectual leadership that raises questions about their effectiveness in dealing with ghetto conditions.
6. Black Rage (five), by William H. Grier and Price M. Cobbs (Bantam, 1969, 179 pages, $.95). Two assistant professors of psychiatry at the University of California Medical Center (San Francisco) tell of the desperation, conflict, and anger of the black man’s life in America today. They give insight into the history of black men, methodically dehumanized and exploited by society; the development of womanhood and manhood; marriage and family life; character traits; education; mental illness; and many other subjects. The message is grim: It is still no easy thing to be a black person in America. The New York Times calls Black Rage “one of the most important books on the Negro to appear in the last decade.”
7. Soul on Ice (five), by Eldridge Cleaver (Dell, 1968, 210 pages, $1.95). The essays and letters collected in this book were written while the Black Panther leader was in California’s Folsom State Prison. (He now is self-exiled in Algeria, to escape return to prison for a parole violation.) Cleaver tells—sometimes with sweeping generalizations—about the forces that shaped his life and are currently affecting our national destiny. Included are sections on the Watts riots and Cleaver’s religious conversion. The major theme of the book is hatred. Cleaver “rakes our favorite prejudices with the savage claws of his prose until our wounds are bare, our psyche is exposed, and we must either fight back or laugh with him for the service he has done us.” Soul on Ice is a disturbing report of what a black man reacting to a society he detests can become.
8. Before the Mayflower: A History of the Negro in America, 1619–1964 (four), by Lenore Bennett, Jr. (Penguin, 1966, 435 pages, $2.45). This survey evokes the tragedy and the glory of the black man’s role in the American past. It begins with the American Negro’s origins in the great empires of the Nile Valley and the western Sudan and concludes with the black revolt of the 1960s. In a highly readable and provocative style, the senior editor of Ebony magazine tells of the part black Americans played during the colonial period, the Revolutionary War, the slavery era, the Civil War, the years of reconstruction, and the period from Booker T. Washington to Martin Luther King, Jr. The book has both emotional and intellectual impact, though as history it is limited by its partisan approach.
9. The Souls of Black Folk (four), by W. E. B. DuBois (Fawcett, 1961, 192 pages, $.75). This classic volume established DuBois as a leading voice of the twentieth-century civil-rights movement. As early as 1903, when the book first appeared, this distinguished social historian called the color line the problem of the century. No serious research in the field of black America can fail to take account of this penetrating and powerful work. DuBois sets forth the spiritual world in which black Americans live and strive and reveals the black man’s feelings as he struggles for his inalienable human rights in this land of the free and home of the brave. In expressing the soul of one people in a time of great stress, DuBois shows its kinship with the timeless soul of all mankind.
10. The Fire Next Time (four—including two votes cast for “any Baldwin book”), by James Baldwin (Dell, 1962, 141 pages, $.75). The fire this black autobiographer kindles burns the reader. James Baldwin, one of the most powerful essayists on the contemporary scene, was once a boy preacher in a Harlem store-front church. He pulls together his fragmented thoughts into a single summary statement: “We, the black and white, deeply need each other if we are really to become a nation.” His book issues a strong warning that it is later than we think.

Three other books received three votes each: My Friend the Enemy, by William E. Pannell (Word), and For This Time, by Howard O. Jones (Moody), and The Other America, by Michael Harrington (Penguin).

The reader should try to approach all these books with an open mind. The white Christian will not like all that these men say, but understanding involves listening.

These authors cannot be dismissed because they are not evangelicals. To read only those whose views are similar to one’s own is little more than listening to oneself talk. “This might be very enjoyable, but it is not likely to be very profitable,” comments Lowell Schoer, professor of education at the University of Iowa. “It is, in fact, likely to be not only unprofitable for us as individuals but quite possibly fatal for us as a society.”

It is well, though, to try to gain some perspective on the various authors before reading their works. Dr. Ron Rietveld, history professor at California State College at Fullerton, cautions that “in reading current literature on black history it is wise to have an awareness of the author’s bias and background so one can perceive his intent and integrate it into constructive thinking.” For example, he disagrees with Bennett’s view of Lincoln as a white racist.

This listing will not meet the needs of all readers. Where a person is in his thinking will determine which books will be most helpful. One respondent warned that “some of the books are so stark that you have to come in gradually or you can’t take what the author presents. However, we have to have the courage to face what these books say.” Reading Baldwin or Cleaver for the first time can be a shocking experience. For the beginning reader, Sarah P. Boyle’s The Desegrated Heart: A Virginian’s Stand in Time of Transition (Apollo) might be a good starting place.

Further insight may be gained by reading the leading black magazines, Ebony, Tan, and Jet. Ebony has a useful column on books. Another aid is The Other Side (formerly Freedom Now; available from Box 158, Savannah, Ohio 44874), an evangelical bi-monthly publication devoted to helping readers sense the needs of others, particularly in social areas.

Black evangelist Tom Skinner testifies that “the white community doesn’t know us—they don’t read Elijah Muhammad’s speeches or Stokely Carmichael’s book on black power or anything.” His associate William Pannell confirms this opinion: “We keep educating the wrong people. It’s the white suburbanite who needs the black studies.”

“But what can I do?” ask concerned white Americans. Well, as a first step, set out on a mission of understanding; try to learn what it is like to be a black in white America. Read, baby, read!

Lois M. Ottaway is manager of the News Service at Wheaton College, Wheaton, Illinois. She holds the B.S. (Kansas State University) and M.A. (University of Iowa).

Time does not lend itself to inventory. No cursory glance, not even a thoughtful and comprehensive survey, can begin to encompass the brilliant color, the diversity of action, the variety of mood, and the magnitude of change lying under the soaring arch of time that covers the five decades just past.

It has been my privilege to witness this kaleidoscopic period from a unique vantage point. Since 1919, as special assistant to the attorney general under instructions to make a study of subversive activities in the United States, through the years as director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, my work has been in the investigative field. It has been national in scope, and it has afforded a kind of observation post, a behind-the-scenes view of the forces and instrumentalities that induce change and influence manners and morals.

Whether we like it or not, the morals to which we subscribe as a people are vital to our survival as a free nation. The French philosopher Montesquieu spelled out what is essential to the different kinds of government. Fear, he said, is the required ingredient of a despotism. Honor is the key to the monarchy. And what of a republic? “Virtue is necessary in a republic.”

Seven years from now we will celebrate the two-hundredth anniversary of the beginnings of our great republic. The five decades to which I have reference make up more than a quarter of the life of this magnificent experiment in self-rule. These same decades encompass changes more accelerated and more extensive, perhaps, than those that occurred in the course of a great many preceding centuries. The physical changes take us from the horse-drawn carriage to manned flight to the moon. And the changes in moral and ethical matters are almost as great. As we prepare to commemorate the bicentennial of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, questions are being raised on all sides about the current revolution in manners, ethics, and morals. Concerned citizens are beginning to wonder if we may not be in grave danger of rejecting those things that are the source of our national strength.

Are we entering an age that must end in anarchy? Are we rearing a generation almost wholly lacking in self-discipline? Have we almost used up the reservoir of that moral quality that Montesquieu deemed essential to the preservation of a republic? In short, do we deserve our magnificent inheritance? Are we good enough to preserve the great republic to which we have pledged our allegiance? Will we retain the capacity to do our duty as Americans?

What is this duty? Views on this vary. I choose to draw mine from the tenets and principles that shine with glowing intensity from the pages of documents, books, and letters bequeathed us by the Founding Fathers. Their strict sense of duty—arising from a stern moral code—permeated the hearts and minds of the majority of early Americans. Duty was a part of their very being. It was the idea that sparked their actions.

Although the following words of a French Dominican friar were not written until many years after the Declaration of Independence was proclaimed to the world, almost every American who helped bring the republic into being would have subscribed to the thought: “Duty is the grandest of ideas, because it implies the idea of God, of the soul, of liberty, of responsibility, of immortality.” God, the soul, liberty, responsibility, immortality—these intangibles formed the focus of American existence. And they coalesced and meshed in one short word—duty. Americans accepted without question the immense spiritual responsibility inherent in such a concept of duty, for they were a God-fearing people. That in itself turned them toward action marked by selflessness and courage, for, as Burke indicated, “he who fears God fears nothing else.” And, like Burke, they held the fear of God to be the “only sort of fear which generates true courage.”

Fear of God and faith in God as the keys to American freedom were freely acknowledged by Americans and observed by visitors. The first American president voiced this in the simple words: “It is impossible to govern the world without God,” and a visitor to these shores from South America noted: “Go to New England, and visit the domestic firesides, if you would see the secret of American independence.… Religion has made them what they are.”

How did Europe view us? The German poet Heine expressed the meaning America held for his continent: “If all Europe were to become a prison, America would still present a loop-hole of escape; and, God be praised! that loop-hole is larger than the dungeon itself.”

For centuries the world saw America as a haven, a refuge, a hope for the poor and downtrodden. And the world saw Americans themselves as unique—a people who had broken from a tyrannical government and projected a declaration that held danger for the world’s rulers in its startling new credo that all men are created equal and are endowed with certain unalienable rights.

The Founding Fathers—those men of extraordinary wisdom and magnificent faith—drew up a spiritual contract with posterity. They built a new nation on a pledge and a daring belief that succeeding generations of Americans would uphold that pledge. And they gave us a blueprint for preserving the republic they had launched—if Americans of the future had the pride, self-discipline, will, understanding, and courage to accept the challenges inherent in the word “American.”

Always that word has had spiritual meaning for the rest of the world, whether or not it is acknowledged, because from the outset our form of government has been a living challenge as no other, before or since. A former ambassador from the Far East, leaving these shores after many years, expressed his farewell in This Week magazine in simple and moving words. He cautioned: “Never forget, Americans, that yours is a spiritual country.” He spoke of its wealth and affluence. Then he concluded with these words.

But underlying everything else is the fact that America began as a God-loving, God-fearing, God-worshipping people, knowing that there is a spark of the Divine in each one of us. It is this respect for the dignity of the human spirit which makes America invincible. May it always endure.… May God keep you always—and may you always keep God.

Nations have souls. The spirit of grace and beauty that Greece bequeathed to the world still lingers. The lamp of law and justice that lighted the Rome of Trajan and Hadrian may sometimes flicker low, but it has not been extinguished. And what of the spiritual light that is the heart and soul of America? Will this generation permit it to wane to the point at which we, in effect, dispense with this quality upon which our nation’s strength is founded?

The answer is to be found within ourselves. The words of an English clergyman born nearly two centuries ago point to the vital issue: “There is a time to be born, and a time to die, says Solomon, and it is the memento of a truly wise man; but there is an interval between these two times of infinite importance.” It is what we do that counts. We need to face the realities of the present with forthrightness, ascertain what needs to be done, and develop the fortitude to do it.

What are the realities?

We are witnessing irrational violence stemming from a widespread promotion of the doctrine of civil disobedience. We are experiencing lawlessness unexampled in our nation’s history, and a growing percentage of vicious crimes being committed by the very young. We are recording instance after instance in which, by reason of technicalities, unrepentant felons are being loosed to prey once more upon the public. We are watching society’s safeguards sink lower and lower each time an unjust and irresponsible shout of “Police brutality!” is raised. And we seem to be developing a peculiar attitude toward criminal activities. The current myopic stance condones constant expansion of the rights of the criminal, including shorter and shorter periods of imprisonment, together with an overweening reluctance to condemn criminal behavior. In Alice in Wonderland fashion, we are focusing tender concern on the criminal while ignoring the cries of his victims. We seem to have forgotten the Justinian definition of justice—that it is “the constant desire and effort to render to every man his due.”

We are witnessing an era of permissiveness in which vacillating pedagogues and parents too often abdicate their decision-making roles, thus forcing their responsibilities to fall upon immature students and children. These young people are growing to adulthood in a culture that has changed drastically in recent decades. Undiluted filth stains great segments of our literary output while the seals of vulgarity, unrestrained sex, violence, and brutality are stamped upon much of the material purveyed by our entertainment media. We are witnessing a denial of formerly accepted values. Too many parents preach one thing and practice another while their children, revolted by hypocrisy, reject all values.

Thousands of young people, unable to face life as it is and lacking the courage to strive to improve it, seek to destroy everything. Some commit suicide. Some simply withdraw into a shadowland of drugs, suffering the subsequent degradation of soul and mind and body. Many adopt the cynical, nihilistic, and anarchistic philosophy constantly being promoted by the totalitarians in their efforts to destroy individual freedom. Indeed, we are witnessing an age in which cunning representatives of an international totalitarian conspiracy are given the broadest opportunities to subvert the minds of our young people before knowledge and experience enable them to form sound standards of judgment.

These are some of the difficult realities with which we must contend as we approach the bicentennial of the birth of the republic. We have to decide what kind of world we want—one of liberty or one of license. Our forefathers sacrificed without thought of self to give us, in Jefferson’s words, “what is most valuable to man, his right of self-government.” We are among the fortunate of the world to have been given that right—as well as the opportunity to show by our deeds the value we place upon it. But that precious right cannot long be maintained in the absence of the individual citizen’s acceptance of his obligations.

I speak of the “individual citizen,” not the “ordinary citizen.” In view of the proud challenge issued by the Founding Fathers almost two hundred years ago, no citizen of the United States is ordinary. What each man is and does is important in a democratic republic. Alexis de Tocqueville, after viewing the raw, young republic, noted this and wrote with great perception: “Thus not only does democracy make every man forget his ancestors, but it hides his descendants and separates his contemporaries from him; it throws him back forever upon himself alone and threatens in the end to confine him entirely within the solitude of his own heart.”

The “solitude of his own heart” must be fearful indeed for the man who is without faith. For the believing man, that dependence upon self offers a constant challenge that demands the best he has to give—and de Tocqueville noted that, too. In a statement before the French Senate on his return to France after his visit to the United States in 1831, the great French observer reportedly said:

During my journey throughout America I sought for the secret of the genius and the greatness of America; I sought for her genius and greatness and growth and glory in her rich soils, in her rich mines, her great forests, her fallow fields, her ample rivers and noble harbors, but I did not discover it there. I further sought for the reason for her growth and her glory and her genius and her greatness, and I found it in her matchless Constitution; I found it in her schools, churches and homes, ablaze with righteousness. It was there in her Constitution, in her homes, in her schools, in her churches, that I found the true secret of the source of America’s genius and greatness.

I have given this statement as it was quoted by Senator Henry F. Ashurst in his farewell speech to the Senate of the United States in 1940. He concluded with these words of his own: “So it is, fellow Senators. America is great because she is good. When America is no longer good, she will no longer be great.”

My days are filled with evidence of crime, corruption, betrayal, and subversion. Often during the past quarter of our nation’s history it would have been easy to become doubtful and pessimistic—and never more so than in the present decade. Yet, when the strains and tensions become almost unbearable, I am blessed with a recurring memory from the past. Crossing the continent by rail many years ago, I had the privilege of riding on the open platform at the end of a long passenger train. There, as we passed through sleeping prairies, high mountains, and lonely reaches of desert lighted by low-hanging stars, the glory and grandeur of God’s handiwork became as manifest to me as I’m sure it was to those superlative sailors of space whose midnight message from the distant moon reminded us once again that we are not alone.

I believe in the great challenge of America. I believe that if the children of America were taught to understand the meaning of that challenge as fully in its spiritual sense as in its material, we would regain that ordered discipline stemming from a sense of personal responsibility that once marked our national behavior.

How far we have strayed from the once universally accepted image of Americans became very visible recently in a foreign columnist’s reference to the impression made in Britain by the Apollo 11 moon flight. The behavior of the astronauts, said the columnist, “showed that they were not men of stature only in space, but were of equal and superlative quality in the ordinary business of life. To a people fed with endless stories of American vulgarities and violence, these men recalled another America of sober dignity, responsibility and dedication to duty.”

Whether we like it or not, we are born to a challenge. By virtue simply of being American we are “keepers of the flame.” It is our continuing and inescapable obligation to prove that man is, indeed, capable of self-rule. In the brief interval between birth and death that God grants all of us, let us do our duty as Americans.

J. Edgar Hoover has been director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation since 1924. He received teh LL.B. and LL.M. degrees from The George Washington University

TWO CHRISTMASES

Again this year

Two Christmases are served.

One is gobbled up by nerve endings

And other things sensual and selfish;

While the other in a fog

(Or incense, depending upon disposition)

Sifts in to round off the sharp edges,

Tries to convert excitement into feeling.

One Christmas is flushed out of TV sets,

And overflows into crowded irritated ways;

The other seeps in slowly.

But guilt is a catalyst,

And so is compassion,

Even wobbling faith is a help.

Two Christmases.

One is chartreuse and flashing pinks,

The other is dark blue, speckled with starlight.

BERNARD VIA, JR.

Bob Hope and Art Linkletter proclaimed the week of November 9 one of national unity. It turned out to be a week of demonstrations, particularly in Washington, D. C., and San Francisco. The subject: a moral question, and not a new one—what to do about the war in Viet Nam. If there was some unity on the question, there was little on the answer.

One answer came on Veterans Day when some of President Nixon’s silent supporters spoke up. Largely in response to his TV appeal, 15,000 of them gathered at the Washington Monument to acclaim the President and his Vice-President and to disclaim the anti-war demonstrators coming later.

That was Tuesday. On Thursday, one of the first peace protests was held at the Pentagon.

Shortly after noon, the Rev. Ian Mitchell and his wife began singing folk songs; when a Catholic priest prayed for the U. S. military complex, an onlooker hissed. Episcopal cleric and author Malcolm Boyd had just begun his sermon when a government official called the gathering an “unauthorized demonstration” and asked the group to leave.

Father Boyd continued: “The time has come when the religious community must respond, however painfully, to Spiro Agnew.” He was interrupted by applause greeting the arrival of police to arrest 186 clergymen, seminarians, and lay people.

Thursday evening 46,000 people—mostly young—began a forty-hour March Against Death. Carrying placards with the names of U. S. servicemen killed in Viet Nam, they walked four miles from Arlington Cemetery to the Capitol, where they dropped their placards in a dozen coffins.

On Friday, Clergy and Laymen Concerned about Viet Nam sponsored a service at the Episcopal National Cathedral. Several thousand filled the unfinished Gothic building to about double its capacity to hear folk singer Pete Seeger and World Council of Churches head Dr. Eugene Carson Blake do their own things. The young people obviously swung with Seeger; some of them weren’t sure they understood Blake. The issues, he said, are “not political. They are moral questions. Any hope for true or lasting peace depends upon repentance of our own evil ways.”

Outside, fundamentalist Carl Mclntire and some supporters, who had been dissuaded from disrupting the service, told all who would hear that “the way to peace is through victory and not through surrender.”

McIntire repeated his views Saturday afternoon at the Washington Monument grounds, where more than a quarter-million people massed for the major rally, co-sponsored by Yale chaplain William Sloane CoffinAt Washington’s National Press Club the following week, Billy Graham was asked about clergymen—and Coffin in particular—who participate in anti-war demonstrations. “We are to do all in our power to bring peace,” the evangelist said. He and Coffin disagree on many things, he said, adding: “He has the right to do anything he wants to do; I just don’t intend to march with him.” Of the demonstrations he said, “I think they have made a point … but they could go too far.… I hope we’ll use the democratic processes” to change the system. and pediatrician Benjamin Spock.

Leading up to that finale had been a march from the foot of the Capitol to the foot of the Monument. Near the head of the marchers was Daniel W. Billings, one of the few blacks present, carrying a 300-pound wooden cross. “If Jesus Christ were here,” he claimed, “he would be sick at the stomach over the war.”

Seminarians helped carry the coffins with the names of dead servicemen. Among clergy leaders were National Council of Churches official David Hunter, Harvard’s Harvey Cox, George M. Docherty of Washington’s New York Avenue Presbyterian Church, Rabbi Balfour Brickner of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, and Dr. M. Edward Clark of Central Baptist Seminary in Kansas City, whose son was killed in Viet Nam two years ago.

At the monument grounds, representatives of Campus Crusade for Christ gave out copies of Student Action. On the paper’s back page was a “Wanted” poster warning that Jesus Christ is “extremely dangerous” because of “his transforming message.”

Some demonstrators stayed to bombard the Justice Department building. Tear gas dispersed them as it had at an earlier confrontation at the South Vietnamese embassy.

Among 150,000 marchers at a similar parade and rally in San Francisco were 200 “militantly involved” members of the Christian World Liberation Front (headed by former Campus Crusade staffers). They distributed thousands of leaflets and carried signs with messages like “Follow Jesus to Peace.” A half dozen group members preached repentance on street corners.

Behind the speaker’s stand at Golden Gate Park, a hearse served as their headquarters. There three members of the Mari Krishna sect, a Hindu group distinguished by pink bloomer-like costumes and Cochise style haircuts, made Christian commitments.

Before all the demonstrators had gone home, peace leaders were already talking about December’s demonstrations. While they go on, millions of Americans will be sending and receiving Christmas cards wishing peace on earth, good will to men.

JANET ROHLER