Old John

W. Carl Ketcherside

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     Many of our readers saw in their newspapers the story of "Old John" Toten, who died in the state prison at Moundsville, West Virginia, October 15, 1960. The account said, "The 83-year-old convicted slayer, spent 44 years behind the walls which he chose as his home rather than 'the outside world.'" He was paroled on January 27, 1948, but several months later returned and asked to be re-admitted. When told he must first violate his parole, he absconded to his former home in Pennsylvania where he welcomed arrest and returned to prison happy. He told a fellow inmate that life in "the outside world" had become too swift for him.

     While it seems incredible that one would prefer prison to freedom, there are many like "Old John" in the spiritual realm. Unable to cope with the responsibilities entailed in a life of liberty, they erect partisan walls around themselves and feel a sense of security behind them. Fear may be the greatest single factor contributing to the perpetuity of sectism in our land. One does not really need to study, think, or engage in spiritual research to be a member of a sect. Indeed, he will be more popular if he does neither. If he can continue to parrot the party plea, and conform to the creedal basis of his society, he will be regarded as "sound" and "loyal."

     It is of the essence of sectism that it measures everything by the knowledge accumulated and crystallized in the past. The interpretations, explanations, and opinions, arrived at by godly, consecrated, but fallible men, in yesteryear, become the criterion by which the worth of all contemporary reasoning must be judged. With each generation the encircling wall of tradition grows higher. Ancestor worship becomes a part of the prejudicial pattern. Original thinking is stifled on the ground that it is a reflection against those who were our fathers in the faith. Dissenters, although honest, are labelled and harassed, and eventually hounded out as heretics. This has been the tragic history of sectism in all ages.

     Eventually, with passing generations, the scales of justice are finally balanced by the weight of enlightened opinion, and the maligned culprit is enshrined as a martyr of righteousness. Most of the religious heroes of today were driven forth as heretics in the long past yesterday. But mankind seems never to learn that, while you can confine men behind walls, you cannot imprison truth. Those who scurry to the inner shadow of their protective walls to preserve truth always end by losing it. Truth was never given to be the exclusive personal property of any sect or segment. It was given to mankind for universal sustenance of the spirit, as the atmosphere was given to perpetuate the

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physical life, not of one group or nation, but of all men everywhere. It is as absurd to attempt to confine truth to human creeds and formulae as to try and bottle or can the air we breathe.

     Just as I never pass a prison without feeling compassion for those who are deprived of their freedom, so I never contemplate sectism with its high walls and barred doors, without a tinge of sadness for those who surrender liberty for security. Peace is not so sweet as to be purchased by shackles. Life is not so precious that we should maintain it at the cost of all that makes it worth living. But prison makes a man unfit to compete in a world of freedom. Sectism deprives man of the will to be free. It wraps him in a mummy-like shroud which renders him helpless. He cannot move upward and onward for he dare not move at all. As the marching prisoners halt when they reach the stone wall, so the marching saints must stop at their creedal barrier. "Thus far, and no farther shalt thou come," is the watchword of every sect.

     Sectism always begins with honest, sincere men, but it is motivated by fear. Those who fear the loss of what little has been gained, build a fence around it, and end by losing all--that which has been attained by stagnation and atrophy; that which could have been attained by complacency and lack of effort. The attempt to define the extent and scope of the kingdom of heaven, by drawing our own lines of demarkation, and concluding that those outside of our walls are outside of God's grace, only reveals the incipient spirit of pride and haughtiness in the hearts of many.

     Freedom is a blessing of such magnitude as to be inestimable in value, but it carries with it such responsibility as to frighten many, and drive them cringing and slinking within the safety of prison walls. "Old John" deliberately chose to die in prison, rather than to live in a world of freedom outside. We are saddened by such manifestations of the degradation of human character and will, but our hearts are even more deeply stirred by the voluntary submission to confinement of those who dare not face "the outside world" in the spirit. May He who came to "set the captives free" give us liberty in thought, word and action, and may we be not entangled again within the yoke of bondage.