Foundations of Social Order

The Te Deum Laudamus

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Foundations of Social Order

Lesson: 4-19

Genre: Lecture

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Dictation Name: RR126B4

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Almighty God our Heavenly Father, strengthen us by thy word and by thy Spirit, that we may be more than conquerors through Him that loved us, and that in this dark and (?) world we may move with the peace and victory of Jesus Christ, in His name we pray amen. Our subject today is the ancient hymn Te Deum Ladamus. Te capital Deum Laudamus L-A-U-D-A-M-U-S, and our scripture Philippians 4:1-4. Therefor my brethren, dearly beloved and longed for, my joy and crown. So stand fast in the Lord, my dearly beloved, I beseech you Euodia and beseech Syntyche that they may be of the same mind in the Lord. And I entreat thee also through (?) help those women which labored with me in the gospel with Clement also. And with other of my fellow laborers whose names are in the book of life. Rejoice in the lord always, and again I say rejoice. The early church took very seriously Paul's words that they were summoned to rejoice. And they haste a world that was hostile and persecuted them with a tremendous sense of confidence and joy. This was especially infuriating to the opposition, and the Roman Empire as it dealt with this little minority whose future seems so bleak, whom they slaughtered at will, the Roman Empire faced these Christians with irritation and anger. How dare they be filled with so much confidence and joy when Rome could destroy them as well as destroy it.

But the Christians have cause even in the midst of their suffering, even in the midst of martyrdom for joy. All around them they could see the growing collapse of naked unadulterated humanism, and this made the alternative, orthodox Christianity seem all the more clearly mans only hope. As against the bleakness of humanism, they had the faith in the triune God, their creator and their savior. As against the vagueness and uncertainty of humanism, they have the certainty of scripture. As against the pessimism of humanism, they had a sure hope in Jesus Christ. The world around them was a bleak one, and even with their suffering, even with martyrdom, what they had was so far superior that they could rejoice. They faced the persecutions of the Empire and of paganism, and in the years that followed the so called recognition of Christianity they faced the persecution by the Arians, the humanists who had taken over and who claimed to be the true church, but they still had a joyous faith knowing the sure word of God. This triumphant faith firmly grounded on the creedal victories, on the Apostles and Nicene creeds, found expression in the hymn Te Deum. It is a hymn of triumph and a creed of faith against heresies, and echoes the battles of the church against Gnosticism, Arianism, persecution, against all its enemies. The rest of the Te Deum are in the bible, in the Gloria Patri, and in early hymns of the church many portions of the Te Deum being in the Apostolic Constitutions. And it reached its present form in the 300’s, during the time of the Nicene and Constantinople Appolitan counsels. The hymn, one of the greatest of all hymns and once the most familiar hymn in the church, today is used in rather limited circles, it still is a part of the liturgy of one or two churches, it is in the episcopal Book of Common Prayer but is used less and less frequently. The hymn reads: we praise thee oh God, we acknowledge thee to be the Lord. All the earth doth worship thee the Father everlasting; to thee all angels cry aloud, the heavens and all the powers therein. To thee Cherubim and Seraphim do cry Holy Holy Holy Lord God of Sabaoth; Heaven and are full of the majesty of thy glory. The glorious company of the Apostles praise thee, the goodly fellowship of the prophets praise thee. The noble armies of martyrs praise thee; the holy church throughout all the world doth acknowledge thee; the father of an infinite Majesty; thine honorable true and only Son also the Holy Ghost the comforter. Thou art the king of glory oh Christ, thou art the everlasting of the Father. When thou tookest upon thee to deliver man, thou didst not abhor the virgins womb. When thou hadst overcome the sharpness of death, thou didst open the kingdom of heaven to all believers. Thou sittest at the right hand of God in the glory of the Father. We believe that thou shalt come to be our Judge; we therefor pray thee, help thy servants whom thou hast redeemed with thy precious blood. Make them to be numbered with thy saints, in glory everlasting. O lord save thy people and bless thine heritage, govern them and lift them up forever, day by day we magnify thee and we worship thy name ever world without end. Vouchsafe o lord to keep us this day without sin, o lord have mercy upon us, have mercy upon us. Oh lord let thy mercy be upon us as our trust is in thee, oh lord in thee have I trusted, let me never be confounded.

Te Deum as you can see, rings with a fierce joy in the faith, it is a triumphant fighting hymn. The Te Deum can be summarized as having three parts. The first part is an act of praise to God by us and by all creation. The second part is a confession of faith with two portions, first a general consent to it, and second the particulars of it, that is what we believe. The third portion of the Te Deum is a prayer, a supplication, grounded upon this faith and the first part of the prayer is for all His people, that they may be preserved here and saved eternally. And second, more personally, a prayer for ourselves who praise Him that we may be kept from future sin pardoned for past sins, because we trust in Him. There are several characteristics of the Te Deum which are very clearly in evidence in this hymn. First, the Te Deum affirms the orthodox faith; this is the answer to the question of those who say that counsels represented the theologians of the church, these were the learned men debating and resolving things, but this did not have roots in the common people of the church, the Te Deum is the answer to that, because the Te Deum was the popular hymn of the church. It was the hymn that expressed the faith of the common people, and the Te Deum is the creed set to music. It is the creed expanded into a hymn, and the popularity of the hymn witnesses to the popularity of the true faith, and it is easy to understand the popularity. Here is no vague talk as with Arianism about the great Monad being God, the ultimate the first monad, nor a god who has no self-consciousness and is not a person but is the silent god. Here is the reality of a personal God, who is our personal savior, and these certainties ring out in the hymn, and they rang out in the minds and voices of the people of the early centuries. A second characteristic of the Te Deum is this, although the orthodox believers were a minority, a minority as against the pagans, and a persecuted minority as against the Arians. They sang the Te Deum in confident joy that the true believer is always in the vast majority in Gods universe. All the earth doth worship thee, the heavens and all the powers therein. Heaven and earth are full of the majesty of thy law. The Te Deum echoes psalm 19 which states: the heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament showeth his handiwork. The whole creation moved in terms of God’s will, how then could the believers, even if they were a handful be in the minority, they were in God’s majority. The enemy had only a silent God, a dead God. They had a self-revealing God, creator of heaven and earth.

The enemy had the power of the Caesars to be sure, but theirs was the power of the god of every Caesar, and this God had through Jesus Christ died for them and would also care for them. Thou art the king of glory, o Christ. The third characteristic of the Te Deum comes out in the concluding sentence, let me never be confounded. This is an amazing prayer and it is the culmination of the Te Deum. Nothing seems more startling from the perspective of a pagan and more infuriating. How did anyone dare pray that way? The most obvious fact any pagan was that life, the gods, history, circumstances perpetually moved to confound men. Three words sum up the philosophy of the ancient world and of all men today apart from Christ: You can’t win. This was their attitude, you can’t win. The odds are against you; sooner or later you’re going to be dead. There’s no rhyme nor reason to life, you can’t win. Life is going to confound you, this is their faith, and here these Christians concluding a joyful hymn, confident words, let me never be confounded. This was incredible, and it was infuriating, because people have in their sin, a constant desire, if I’m going to be miserable then all men must be miserable, what right does anyone have to be happy? The venerable Bead (?) in his book on Ecclesiastical history of England describes the coming of the first missionaries to England. And he reports the kind of incident which took place then and elsewhere, and has taken place even to our times on the mission field. Now incidents of this sort have form the lives of the early saints been expanded on and a great many legends created concerning them, but the sub stratum of truth is definitely there, what was it?

It was the fact that these missionaries moved out into the far parts of the world into strange and unknown places, into the wildernesses. They moved out in the absolute confidence that God was with them, that the God who created all things and who predestined all things had a purpose for them and he would care for them until their appointed time, and therefor they need not fear. And it was that very often, the wild animals themselves were at peace with them to the amazement of pagans. And in recording such events in the life of Saint Cuthbert, be it said for it is no wonder that the very creature should obey his wishes who so faithfully obeyed the great Author of all creatures. But we for the most part have lost our dominion over the creation that has been subjected to us, because we neglect to obey the lord and creator of all things. The early church saw the issue clearly; to be a Christian means, the orthodox party saw, restoration into Adam’s lost dominion and kingship over the earth, and such a faith makes for a magnificent confidence in the face of all things, men and wild animals alike. And in this confidence they moved out, and the pagans were over awed by it. In fact, in England, in 627, when King Edwin’s advisors successfully urged the adoption of Christianity, they did it not because any of them were Christians, but for very pragmatic reasons. They said that, literally. It contains something more certain, it seems justly to deserve to be followed, and so for that pragmatic reason, England adopted Christianity. These people had a certainty, they had a sense of victory, a sense of confidence in the face of all things, they knew what they believed, they were not moving in a strange and hostile world, but in God’s world. And so, King Edwin the first decided this is for us, this kind of faith gives men power. Let me never be confounded, an amazing prayer in terms of humanism and paganism.

But the hymn here reflects the scriptures; David again and again utters this prayer, for example in Psalm 22: 5 they cried unto thee and were delivered, they trusted in thee and were not confounded. Again in Psalm 69:6 David prays that those who followed him, even as he follows God will not be confounded. Let not them that wait on thee, o lord God of hosts be ashamed for my sake, let not those that seek thee be confounded for my sake, o God of Israel. In many many psalms David prayed for the confounding of the ungodly, and in many others rejoiced that God was the one who confounded the ungodly, over and over and over again in history and would do so again. Saint Paul, in first Corinthians 1:27 declared: God hath chosen the foolish things of the world, that is us, we who in the eyes of the unbelieving are foolish for believing as we do. God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise, those who think they have wisdom, and God hath chosen the weak things of the world for we are weak in the sight of the world, to confound the things which are mighty.

The hymn sings with a confidence that God will spare His saints from confounding, and use them to confound the powers of this world. The fourth characteristic of the Te Deum is that it declares the mighty agent of this confounding is the king of glory, the second person of the trinity Jesus Christ. He is our great judge, our savior and our present help, He is the incarnate one who experienced all things man experiences, including as the Te Deum declares, the sharpness of death, therefor He understands our every feeling, and undertakes for us. The Te Deum was thus a victory song by men who were under fire, but confident of their destiny in Jesus Christ, it is a triumphant expression of orthodox creedalism, and it was a battle tested church which sang confidently; Te Deum Laudamus, we praise Thee, oh God. Let us pray. We praise thee oh God that thou art He who deliverest thy saints, age after age. That thou didst deliver thy saints in the days of old, David, Moses, and the prophets, and did it confound the workers of evil. And thou art He who didst deliver the saints of the early church; we thank thee our father that thy power is unchanged still. And so our God we come to praise thee, to rejoice that thou art God, that the king of glory is our savior, and that we have the certainty that thou wilt deliver us, and that we shall not be confounded. Our God we praise thee and thank thee, in Jesus’ name, amen.

Are there any questions now? Yes.

[Audience] Do you feel that there are still martyrs (unintelligible) [Rushdoony] Yes, we know there are still martyrs today, that there are people who have died for the Faith behind the iron curtain, from central Europe through china. Countless numbers, and in Africa as well, they are being martyred for the faith. And of course the word martyrs we must remember means witness, literally, so that in a strict original sense of the word, whenever we suffer for the faith for any degree, we are martyrs. The martyrs of the early church, many of them died for the faith, and there are those who are dying for it today, but all who witness for the faith and suffer for the faith in any degree are martyrs, and the Te Deum says the noble army of martyrs praise Thee. Yes. (Audience unintelligible) Did (?) ever meet Calvin? [Rushdoony] Yes, he was in Geneva for a time and sat under Calvins ministry. He went to Geneva and there absorbed the faith first hand before he went to (?). Yes. (Audience unintelligible) Yes, well he is far from original, this story about Paul supposedly being an epileptic is over a hundred years old, and it was invented by a number of scholars who were out to prove that there was no truths to the bible, that Jesus was totally a myth, and Paul was an epileptic who had wild dreams and therefor created Christianity and so on, a lot of nonsense. I think anyone who repeats these is self-condemned; they are making a fool of themselves and revealing that only one thing motivates them, hatred. (Audience unintelligible)

Yes. (Audience unintelligible) Right. (Audience unintelligible) Yes, a very good question, why do the scientists today dream that they can create life, eliminate death and so on, are they breaking with this philosophy if you can’t win? Well of course in the Roman Empire they also believed that they were going to create a heaven on earth, the answer to that is that humanistic man is basically schizophrenic. He on the one hand professes that this is the great and brave new world he’s going to create, on the other hand he moves suicidally in all that he does, so that the more he dreams about destroying everything that makes for death and for defeat the more he courts everything that does. Now we are talking today as in no generation in recent times about defeating all the problems that confront man. But have we ever worked more zealously to create problems that are destined to defeat man? This is the insanity of humanism. We are doing deliberately those things which are going to insure the destruction of our hopes. [Audience] A lot of the time somebody would say they would find a way to do away with the common housefly because they can’t really find one single thing that doesn’t look good. So I was wondering does the bible speak about this? I mean let’s say that one could eliminate a certain animal or snake or an insect or something perhaps (?) all of them (unintelligible) [Rushdoony] Right, well there was an article on the common housefly in the scientific American in the past year, and the authors admitted that they hadn’t found any convincing evidence yet that the housefly is guilty of all the things charged to it. They were sure it must be, but so far they hadn’t turned it up. So they were unwilling to acquit him, but they couldn’t endite (sp?) him, so the poor housefly part from being a nuisance doesn’t have too serious an enditement against it, as things stand now. [Audience] Well the eggs of (?) maggot, if you have nothing around and you’re wounded and you put some eggs into the wounds it’ll sterilize it, that’s one thing good. [Rushdoony] Yes. (Laughter)

[Audience] On a slightly different point, I noticed in some of the new wordings of the bible that the word charity is now changed to love. Now from my proposition I would feel that charity has much more of a meaning than (?) love. [Rushdoony] Yes, that race is a very difficult question of translation, in a sense it is a justifiable translation but it is a confusing one. Now, the word charity is from the vulgate translation, because the original King James version as well as the Dewey (?) both had charity, rather than love because they were influenced by the vulgate which gave it as caritas. Now, the vulgate however was a translation of the Greek testament, now the Greek testament where it reads caritas actually has agape, and sometimes filio, two different words. Now the word actually is love in the Greek but there are three Greek words for love, two of them are used in the bible, or in the new testament which is the Greek portion, one if Eros, from whence we get the word erotic, and eroticism. This is not used in the bible. The second is Philio, from whence we get the word Philadelphia.

Phil, love, adelphos, city of brotherly love. Now this is often used in the bible and it means the human kind of love which we have for our family, our children, for one another. The third word which is used was a word which is a strange word, it was in the Greek but had practically no usage, it is almost, some scholars said, as though the word was prepared and waiting for the bible to come along when it had it first real usage. And that means, agape, divine love, divine grace, which reaches out to undeserving man. Now, it could be rendered as charity, but charity has the connotation of something human, charity is something we exercise one towards another, but that’s the trouble with the word love too, so it was originally love in the original. Again, love in the English theres only one word for three words in the Greek, so love as it is in the bible can absorb the wrong kind of meaning, of Eros, and Philio. It could be rendered also in a sense as grace. This perhaps might be the best, it isn’t literally the same word as grace but it is closer in meaning to grace than it is to love, and to charity. This is a problem in biblical translation that is a tremendous one. In most cases, English has been remolded and remade so that it has become an excellent language for conveying the biblical words and ideas, except at this crucial point. This is the one almost, the one problem case, there are a few others, but this is the basic one. But you can see what a problem it makes in translating the bible into many languages today, where the people have no background of Christianity, where the language very often doesn’t even have a word for God, let alone grace and charity for example, a host of words for which there’s absolutely nothing in these languages. This has been a problem for example even in such cultures, well especially in China, China is such a relativistic culture it’s been very difficult to translate many of the biblical words into Chinese, this is true also of Japanese, and sometimes it leads to very great difficulties as they translate and find the word has connotations they never understood.

A little humorous sideline on that, not with translation of the bible but speaking, a missionary went to Japan, began to preach at a service, and he was anxious to show off his command of Japanese, he had studied very extensively, and he was distressed that the women who were very quiet normally were beginning to titter and giggle, and the men were vastly delighted and amused, and when he ended he found out that he was speaking of Christ as their savior of sins, but actually he was saying because the two words sin and wife were so similar sumi and suma, he was saying Christ was saving them from their wives. (Laughter) But translation is a problem and it is hard to know what to do in this particular case, what the proper answer would be. Yes. [Audience] Go back to the statement on Paul, recently I ran into a (?) interpretation of the (?) with Luther, a well-informed friend declared to me that Luther was a little insane, and I never had run across that before, I stated to her that I thought probably that it was (?) she read that (unintelligible) [Rushdoony] Oh yes, you see all of the great men of the church as well as the great figures of the bible have been subjected to this, there has been quite an extensive body of literature and one considerable book as well from the Freudian perspective written to prove that Luther was characterized by anal fixation, and that everything in Luther’s life and theology is to be interpreted in terms of anal fixation. Now it is the weirdest kind of literature imaginable and all you can say is that there is fixation in the minds of the writers, but it is fantasy. But this kind of literature, and there’s a vast body of it, and there have been books written to demonstrate from the psychiatric point of view that Jesus was insane, and Schweitzer wrote a defense of the mental health of Jesus, Albert Schweitzer, which leaves him I think in a sorrier state than the critics did.

Yes. (Audience unintelligible) Yes, so much of the material is so thoroughly manufactured today, out of old cloth, if you stand in terms of Christian orthodoxy and conservatism, you can be sure you are going to be abused and slandered if you acquire any position of prominence in such a stand, or if you aggravate anyone around you for such a stand, this is a certainty. (Audience unintelligible) Right, but they were good and Godly men, and the faults ascribed to them definitely were not there. Luther was a marvelous and loveable man, he certainly was not guilty of these weird things that are ascribed to them, and the same is true of Calvin, the same is true of Athanasius, the same is true of Augustine, of a host of great men of the church. Yes. (Audience unintelligible) No, the Duncards (?) are one of the Anabaptist groups from two or three centuries ago, there still are Duncards in I believe the Middle West, but it is not normal for them to become Unitarians. Yes. (Audience unintelligible)

Except as you go to the original sources. Now, the problem of course of our time is that humanism is busy rewriting all of history, and as a result, history is and has been for a century at least very markedly per century, and much longer than that but on a gradual break been subjected to a rewriting. We do have the original documents of (?) such as for example, the counsels, the church fathers; we have their records of the events, the minutes of the meetings, so we can get to an accurate writing of history, but this is not what men are interested in. [Audience] Well that brings up a (unintelligible) [Rushdoony] Yes, exactly. (Audience unintelligible) Yes, what you’ve had increasingly in the past few generations is a deliberate suppression of evidence. Previously there often would be bitter factionalism, but now there is the deliberate suppression of evidence, so in many respects its harder to know, far harder to know what’s going on today than it is to know what happened a thousand, two thousand years ago.

I would like to read something now to you on the remaining minutes, this week I was in Bakersfield speaking at a luncheon at the Americanism center, and before that I was for an hour and forty minutes on the call in radio program Oakland Line, and I found that vastly interesting and delightful, the announcer was conducting a program on (?), he was a good man, and it was quite entertaining, we were talking about education. And he took a little time to describe one of his experiences; he said his oldest child is a girl of five years old, in kindergarten. The child was disappointed on going to school because she expected to learn how to read, so he sat down and taught her, so she reads, and he has been given all kinds of static by the school administration, supposedly he has done something terrible, the child at that age he is told cannot learn how to read, it warps the child and stunts it and so on and so forth and he said now this is a curious thing. He said you know I was a commercial pilot until two years ago and I may go back into it, I got weary of being away from home so much and that’s why I skipped out from time to time, but he said I have my own plane and I fly regularly, and from the time my little girl could walk I took her up, and now at the age of five she can take that plane up, fly it around and land it herself, but they tell me she’s too young to learn how to read. Now, one of the women there brought me the teachers edition of I believe it’s the first grade reader, Our Town, and she said take it and read it, and you’ll see what is being done to the morality of our children. Now here is one story that I think is short enough and yet revealing enough to give you the idea: the funny little man. One morning the funny little man was hurrying down the road, he was dressed all in yellow from his hat to his shoes. He sang and sang and sang I am a little man, I am I am I am, I can do anything, I can I can I can. The little man met a hen, why are you singing asked the hen? You cannot do what I can do. The hen made a nest of grass, she sat down on the nest and soon there was an egg in it. The little man sat on the nest and when the hen was not looking he took a ball out of his pocket, he let the ball drop into the nest, look at that egg he said, it is five times as big as yours! Next the little man met a cat, the cat was playing with a ball, first she hit it this way, then she hit it that way, once she hit it too far, she had to go and look for it. Why look? Said the little man, why not make the ball find you? Sit down and I will show you how, and while the cat was not looking he took an orange from his pocket. Here is your ball he said, see I made it find me. The little man came to a house, I hear a happy sound he said, I hear the sound of someone fixing dinner. Then he looked in the window and saw a girl at work, he saw her put an orange, an egg, and some milk on the table. Why don't you have some cookies for dinner too? asked our friend. If you will let me come in and sit down I will make them for you. The girl let the little man come in and sit down, he put his hat on the table and said bring me five eggs, bring me five oranges, bring me five peanuts and we will make the cookies in my hat, I can make them faster that way. The little man put the oranges eggs and peanuts into his hat then he put on the hat. They will be ready soon he said, and when the girl was not looking he took two cookies from his pocket. The cookies are ready he said, why don't you eat one today and one tomorrow. I saw you take those cookies out of your pocket said the girl, give me back all of those eggs and oranges and peanuts, if you don't I will hit you with one of my shoes. But the little man did not hear, he was much too far away by that time, much too far, and he sang as he ran with his dinner in his hat: I can do anything, I can I can I can. Now this little man who is called our friend of course is a good con man. Then in the guided reading suggestions for discussion, the children are to say what made the little man funny.

And so on and so forth, why did he sing as he ran, which trick was the funniest, which person or animal was the silliest? In other words, this little man, our friend, is to give them a standard and they are to judge these other people in terms of the conduct of our friend, the little man. Now for little children this is a very plain indoctrination into something that we cannot call biblical morality. This is from the leader “Our Town.” (Audience unintelligible) What? (Audience unintelligible) I think it is Allen and Bacon yes, from the Sheldon basic reading series. [Audience] What year? [Rushdoony] 1957 (audience unintelligible) First grade and still in use. The first reader program. (Audience unintelligible) Whats that? Oh yes, and I pointed out exactly what is taking place today, namely that (?) is threatening the class (?) school board that if they will not adopt it he is going to sue them, and I think it is significant that a liberal (?) in San Francisco when he reported it, concluded with this observation: “The land of the free?” (Audience unintelligible) No, Max Rafferty is one of the few genuine honest civil rights champions in the state of California, he has criticized the civil rights movement for its excesses, more plainly than others but he has approved of it more than others as well. This is an honest conviction on his part, and the book of course is written from the civil rights revolution perspective, it was written to order at the request of the state board of education to fulfill that function, it does it beautifully. He is therefor for it, now you may think he is wrong here but I do believe he believes this as other politicians do not, I think also he is very wrong at this point. (Audience unintelligible) Oh yes, their record is clear cut (Audience unintelligible) And a humanistic perspective. It is a very beautifully written book as I said before and it will be deadly in its effect. A number of school districts are hostile to it, the Bakersfield district I understand is against the book, but they are going to be compelled to use it, and it does not look as though the present administration is going to do anything to prevent it from adoption.

(Audience unintelligible) Oh, but we don't have any civil rights. [Audience] Do you remember that Rafferty's friends (unintelligible) [Rushdoony] No I don't know anything about that. [Audience] I can't remember the tape (unintelligible) [Rushdoony] Well I dont know that, but I think we can rejoice in this, what this book is doing is to settle more clearly the destiny of the public schools. There is going to be a major exodus because this book is a little too raw for many many parents, and in every area there is an increasing interest in private education, in Christian education and (?) schools in rebellion against the implications of this book, because it is such open indoctrination. [Audience] The indictment that I found against this book was even more serious was the fact that they know it. The authors admit that they spent a tremendous amount of time on the early history of the country, but they have no description of our formal government, in fact they even left out a phrase of the declaration of independence which shows that our government is (?) on the concept of endowed rights, and there is nothing of that in the bible, nothing about (?) in the government. There's actually no exhibition of our form of government. [Rushdoony] No, you're absolutely right, what they do is to take the civil rights revolution and to go back to the pilgrims and read everything from that time to the present in terms of the civil rights revolution, so naturally there's no place for the Christianity of early colonial and constitutional America, there is nothing for the limited powers concept of the government, no room, it's all in terms of statism.

A great friend of man is the all powerful state. This shows from beginning to end. It would be possible to write ten volumes correcting the errors of the book, because its perspective is so warped, but it is the textbook of the state now, for eighth graders, there's no getting around that, I see no possibility of it being withdrawn. (Audience unintelligible) (Laughter) Well that's very true, its getting more and more absurd, and it will continue until it breaks down because as long as people are finding that this feeds them and make them rich they'll go along with it, that's a sad fact, and its going to have to fall apart before they wake up, and it will, and they'll find then that they have been fed not the bread of life, but stones. There's a good verse in the scriptures that to a sinner the bread of deceit is sweet in the mouth, but afterwards it shall be as gravel under ones feet. And that's the way it shall be. [Audience] Speaking of education (?) told (?) that we rearrange our standards because there are too many students dropping out because they couldn't actually get enough of the new (?) [Rushdoony] Well I think it is significant that the state in the union which has the least problem of discipline in the schools is new Mexico. Now it isn’t that they have a superior population but it is this: unless they changed it in the last year or two new Mexico has a very low compulsory education age, I believe they can drop out at twelve. This means that any child in the upper grades who misbehaves can be kicked out of school, so that if they are going to stay they have to behave, otherwise they are bounced. Well of course they stay and behave, but in our state and elsewhere where they know they cannot be kicked out they misbehave and they disrupt the whole educational process so that they frustrate the very purpose of compulsory education, and this is the way it always has been, if your going to have compulsory education supposedly for the education of children, what you're doing is to destroy the education of children. You have put it on the wrong basis. Well our time is passed due so we stand dismissed.