Sunset in the West

W. Carl Ketcherside

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     The Saturday Evening Post is running a series of articles by great contemporary thinkers under the heading "Adventures of the Mind." Number eleven in the series was written by Miss Edith Hamilton, on "The Lessons of the Past." The author is 91 years old. She is an outstanding authority on the Graeco-Roman civilization. Her article should be read by every serious American. Think about these statements:

     "Today we are facing a future more strange and untried than any other generation has faced...and the possibilities of destruction are immeasurably greater than ever.... We have a great civilization to save--or to lose. The greatest civilization before ours was the Greek. They challenge us and we need the challenge. They, too, lived in a dangerous world. They were a little, highly civilized people, the only civilized people in the west, surrounded by barbarous tribes and with the greatest Asiatic power, Persia, always threatening them. In the end they succumbed, but the reason they did so was not that the enemies outside were so strong, but that their own strength, their spiritual strength, had given away."

     "A slackness and softness finally came over them to their ruin. In the end, more than they wanted freedom, they wanted security, a comfortable life, and they lost all--security and comfort and freedom. Is not that a challenge to us? Is it not true that into our education have come a slackness and a softness? Is hard effort prominent? The world of thought can be entered in no other way. Are we not growing slack and soft in our political life? When the Athenians finally wanted not to give to the state, but the state to give to them, when the freedom they wished most for was freedom from responsibility, then Athens ceased to be free and was never free again. Is not that a challenge?"

     On the other hand, our luxurious way

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of life may have ruined our hearts for a restoration of the saving quality so needful in these days. Bishop Stephen Fielding Bayne, of the Episcopal diocese of Olympia, Washington, said, as quoted in Time, Sept.29, 1958:

     "The only trouble with our intellectual habit of likening our times to the decadent Roman Empire and the challenge of the barbarians is that in the earlier case there was a vital, revolutionary new leaven at work... Whether Christianity can once again perform that function remains to he seen. To do so would require a pretty radical rebirth of Christian thought, of which I wish I could see more signs. Perhaps we may find such a rebirth in the remembrance of the Birth, that timeless fact about God which did once turn the world upside down. But we shall have to separate the birth from the Cadillacs and the crystal decanters and the ladies' electric shavers."

     It was these pioneers who, amidst privations we have never known, hammered out on the anvil of history, the principles which made this nation great. They lived close to nature. They gauged time daily by the shadow cast by the sun, they anticipated the changing seasons by the flight of migratory birds, and by the activities of the furry creatures of the forest. They learned to nourish themselves upon the breast of mother earth, and revered the soil, until their bodies were finally planted in it and went back to the elements from which they sprang. Their hands were calloused, their faces tanned like leather, and their step sprightly alert. It was from nature they learned the blessings of contentment and serenity.

     The strength of a nation is not often found in cities where vice stalks openly, blighting what it looks upon; and where graft rules as king. In such crowded areas where the poverty stricken huddle in filthy, vermin-infested slums; where children grow up on dirty streets; where all too often clever politicians manipulate the citizens like pawns to achieve their nefarious ends; dishonesty is bred by greed, and cleverness is mistaken for success. Here, where great factories belch out their corrosive smoke, men seem to live always under a cloud of artificiality. Life itself becomes a struggle, the spirit is worn raw by contact with the abrasives of profanity and obscenity. Morality erodes under the constant battering of open temptation. The spiritual background of a nation are its tillers of the soil, whose simple lives and unrelenting toil build stout hearts and stalwart bodies. There can be no adequate substitute for these. Goldsmith aptly states it:

                         "Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,
                         Where wealth accumulates, and men decay.
                         Princes and lords may flourish or may fade--
                         A breath can make them as a breath has made;
                         But a bold peasantry, their country's pride,
                         When once destroyed, can never be supplied."

     One thing which hastened the downfall of Rome was the destruction of small farms, and the enforced transfer of their owners to the cities. The extensive foreign conquests brought more than a million slaves into Italy. Some of the patricians owned hundreds of these hapless victims. To furnish employment and to exploit their bodies for gain, they began to purchase whole sections of rural areas. The price of land increased to such propor-

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tions that the small owners could not resist the offers made for their holdings. The result was that the land, which had long been the proud possession of an independent family, passed into the hands of those who farmed an entire district on a mass production basis.

     The rural folk, dispossessed by financial pressure, moved into great urban centers. They were not adapted to city life, and soon, having spent what they had received for their farms, they were reduced to living in squalor. Foreign slave labor had absorbed available gainful employment, and those who once labored to wrest a living from the soil, and who had gazed with pride upon green fields, now congregated daily in public parks and forums. Here they drifted about aimlessly, watching jugglers, listening to mountebanks and charlatans. Soon they began to clamor for food, and gathering themselves into mobs they stormed the storehouses. Robbery and pillaging increased in volume, and the ratio of crime began to climb in a dizzy spiral. The government sought to appease the hungry, distraught and unkempt rabble by inaugurating a system of public doles and providing for free entertainment and spectaculars.

     The dole system destroyed the shreds of independence and self-respect which remained. Those who once labored to feed the nation by honest sweat in the fields, now came to believe that the nation existed to feed them, and on the days when the pittance was dealt out they pushed and shoved in screaming, shouting disarray, seeking to be foremost in receiving the grain allotment. They filled the arena in order to see others present performances, many of which were satirical in tendency, and gradually cynicism and skepticism became the order of the day. The attendant train of immoralities and vicious actions sapped the moral and spiritual stamina of the people, and decay ate like dry rot at the core of national existence. The nation was weighed in the balances and found wanting, and the sun of destiny was eclipsed by the hordes of daring, adventurous, hardy barbarians who swept down like an engulfing tidal wave from the northern forests.

     One would be blind indeed who cannot see the great transformation in our own national character. Technology has provided for the invention of farm machines which now do the work formerly requiring scores of men. But the investment in machinery demands a sufficient acreage to warrant its purchase and maintenance. This means consolidation of farms in a given area. The little farmer is caught between the crushing jaws of a vise. He cannot afford to pay for expensive machines and he cannot continue to meet competition without them. The lure of regular wages in the city acts as a siren to entice him away from his frugal life, and soon he joins the host of those who annually move away from soil to pavement. In many portions of our land, the empty farm houses with the sparrows flitting through their broken windows, stand as mute monuments to the era of change. Great syndicates purchase the land, and the owners live remote from it in the pampered luxury of the city. It is no longer a home. It is now merely another business enterprise, and the pride in green fields is a false pride, for it is but a symbol of wealth.

     These transformations in our national life produce changes in the people. The struggle against adversity as well as the perversity of nature, breeds endurance. Facing storm and sleet in winter, toiling in the burning heat of summer, these produce ruggedness. City dwellers often become soft and flabby of body, though they may become hardened in spirit. Divorced from a life of wrestling with the caprices of the elements they lose the true spirit of adventure. It was a recognition of the dangers involved in such a type of life which prompted Theodore Roosevelt, in a speech entitled "The Strenuous Life," delivered in 1891, in Chicago, to say:

     "Our country calls not for the life of ease, but for the life of strenuous endeavor. The twentieth century looms before us big with the fate of many nations. If we stand idly by, if we seek merely swollen, slothful ease, and ignoble peace, if we shrink from the hard con-

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tests where men must win at hazard of their lives and at the risk of all they hold dear, then the bolder and stronger peoples will pass us by and will win for themselves the domination of the world. Let us therefore boldly face the life of strife, resolute to do our duty well and manfully; resolute to uphold righteousness by deed and by word; resolute to be honest and brave, to serve high ideals, yet to use practical methods."

1. We should face the situation unafraid. The Christian religion was revealed to meet the needs of all men, wherever they are. It is not a rural religion, nor a city religion. The apostles went directly to the great commercial marts of their day. The first century after the advent of the Messiah provides a drama of the conquest by the Crucified One in Corinth, Ephesus, Antioch and Rome--mighty centers of polyglot population, seething with idolatry and vice.
2. We should recapture the spirit of cooperation and helpfulness which was the bulwark of the primitive agrarian society in our country. We cannot gather for log raisings or husking bees. But a group can get together on Saturday and help a member paint his house, then repeat the act at the home of another on the following Saturday. The wives can each furnish a covered dish, and all can eat together. There is a peculiar value in breaking bread together, found in no other mutual act. Although the first community of Christ continued daily in the temple, they broke bread from house to house and "ate their food with gladness and singleness of heart." To make the leaven work, we must get it out of cathedrals and meetinghouses and into homes.
3. The pioneers were forced to adopt a sharing policy. They shared danger, deprivation and disaster. To survive they also had to work together. If one broke an arm or leg, the neighbors came on an appointed day, and did the plowing or harvested his crop. The concerned ones, who are interested in building a better world, might well gather at the home of a widow, or an elderly couple, clean up the yard, repair the house, and paper the rooms. The act of sharing will reflect in an increased sense of fellowship with God and each other. It is possible that "social security" has brought material security at the expense of real social welfare.
4. Those who live in certain general areas might meet for an evening of scripture reading and prayer each week in the home of one of the concerned ones. Some urban congregations should dispense with "midweek meetings" which are often mere formalities carried out with habitual regularity, and with little genuine warmth, and substitute home meetings in various districts. Members will work all day, face harassing traffic conditions getting home, gulp down a few bites of food, and drive additional miles to get to a church building, passing en route hundreds in the neighborhood of their homes, who are beset with doubts and fears, and who need the comfort of scriptural truth and companionship with others. Home meetings ought not to be elaborate affairs.

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   They ought to be sharing experiences. They might consist merely of reading the scriptures, with each person participating, then prayers led by all who feel a burden of heart. These prayers should be offered while kneeling. If discussions of the Bible passages are engaged in, it should be without one recognized as a teacher, while the others constitute an audience, but rather a visiting with each other as neighbors, with the sacred scriptures as the theme.
5. The idea of "leaven consciousness" needs to be recaptured. Primitive saints recognized a personal covenant relationship to God. They had not been urged to "unite with the church" but to accept and recognize Jesus, whom God raised up. As witnesses of His, they were to affect and influence all whom they contacted. Quietly and surely, as leaven works in the dough, they worked in the social structure about them, for its good. Only by this means can a corrupt modern world be once again brought to its knees in obeisance before the King of kings. It can never be done by hiring preachers, holding meetings, putting on advertising campaigns. It is God's plan that it be done through the ministrations of a priesthood of all believers.

     The sun of western civilization is sinking. Already the shadows grow long over the land. The red and purple streamers of the dying orb reach like fiery fingers across the horizon. Darkness is coming. The specters of gloom are awaiting. Watchman, what of the night? Is there a Joshua, who will rise up as God's leader for this day, and halt the sun in the heavens, and cause the moon to stand still? The skeleton hand of fate reaches out its bony fingers to crush all we hold dear. What are you doing to stay that fate? Are you one of the "concerned ones"?. We urge you to read our next article, "The Sword of Damocles."