Contemporary Cultural Ethics

Anatomy of the Future

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Culture

Lesson: Anatomy of the Future

Genre: Speech

Track: 11

Dictation Name: RR134A2

Location/Venue:

Year: 1960’s-1970’s

Our subject is the Anatomy for the Future, and before we go into that, I’d like to read just a few sentences from Benjamin Charles Milner Jr.’s study, Calvin’s Doctrine of the Church. This is a book from the seminary library, and it speaks of the overarching importance of law, God’s demand for righteousness is therefore, not to be minimized in Calvin. The conception of the church as the restoration of order in the world, means that the church cannot be thought of apart from the world, or as a secure corner of redemption in it. That is so because the order which is being restored in the church is nothing else than the restoration of the image of God in man and the three spheres of order are interrelated. The restoration of man will thus entail the restoration of order in the world. Calvin’s political activism then, may be traced directly to his conception of the church, as that movement which stands at the frontier of history, beckoning the world towards its appointed destiny.”

I think that sums up beautiful what I’ve been trying to say this week.

Now, in dealing with the anatomy for the future, I am not going to indulge in that kind of thinking that you find so often in certain circles where they give you charts and tell you about the seventy weeks, and where we are in the course of that, and what is happening, or to go as far as one person who resides in Southern California and has a great deal to say about the very short duration of the planet earth, and a great deal about the very great and omnipotent power of Satan, but nothing about the omnipotence of God, who incidentally, also feels that the end will come by 1980.

I intend to indulge in no such nonsense.

The word anatomy will give you the key. Anatomy means the structure, the bones, the muscle. Not the life, not the living, actual body. So that our concern will be something of the anatomy of what the future offers. Moreover, my title is a borrowed one. It is the title of a book by Roderick Seidenberg who is also the author of a work I referred to earlier in the week, Post Historical Man, Man Beyond History. Roderick Seidenberg, in dealing with the future, sees it, of course, in light of a totally non-Christian perspective, and therefore, he sees it as a world in which the, to use theological terminology, the predestination of God is supplanted by the predestination of man, of the state. It is a world in which a beehive society exists, in which man is scarcely aware that he is man. So that like the bees, or the ants, he functions automatically, hardly aware of himself, living and dying, and being replaced by others, and having no history, society being frozen, endlessly repeating itself.

Now, Roderick Seidenberg gives his anatomy of the future, because he does not believe in the sovereign God. Therefore, for him, there is no given structure, no required order that man cannot depart from. For example, to give an instance of that order, there is a geneticist in California who has been the winner of, I think about eleven international prizes in the field of genetics, and he remarked to me at one time that his was made easy for him because of the doctrine of creation. He said those who are evolutionists hold to a world of impossibilities, so that when they begin their experiments, they have a total realm of possibility, and as a result, they are wasting an enormous amount of time trying experiments that I know, by definition as a six-day creationist, are an impossibility. So that my range of experiment is limited because I recognize God-imposed boundaries, and I do not try to make a rose into a cabbage.

Now, of course, this indicates for us something of the anatomy of the future. For Roderick Seidenberg, because it is a realm of total possibility, and because the order that God has created is gone, and because man is in process of moving towards a worldwide totalitarian regime as the logical replacement of God’s order, the anatomy of the future is precisely a beehive state, a dehumanized man. But for us, the world has fixed limits. We are not able to go one step beyond that which God permits. Our lives have boundaries. We do not, for example, grow a day younger when we choose to. Each day we are a day older. We cannot leap over time, nor can we husband time and say, “I will save up time for sometime in the future.” We are totally limited in these areas. The structure of our life is God-given.

Moreover, that anatomy is basic to God’s law. God’s law provides a guide to the anatomy of the future. As a matter of fact, I’m going to give you a few little hints as to become biblical prophets. It’s a very simple matter. We are forbidden, in scripture, to attempt to divine the future by ungodly or anti-God means such as the stars, or such as a recourse to spirits, or to sorcerers, or mediums, or to any occultist means, but we are specifically told that we can know the future in terms of the law of God. We are told what the wages of sin are. That’s a means of prophesying, of prediction. We are told that if we depart from the word of God there are certain consequences, that these consequences apply to men and to nations, so that we are told how to prophesy, to speak the word of God, which is what prophesy means, and to predict what will take place now. Just as with the Second Coming, we can declare that God, who created all things will, in due time, bring all things to their appointed end when his only begotten son reappears in history as our judge, and as our Lord and Savior. We cannot, however, declare the day nor the hour. We can declare that what God ordains will happen to men and nations who depart from his word, but we cannot declare the day nor the hour. The time span is beyond us, but we know the event. “Except the Lord build the house, they labor in vain that build it.” This is very clear, and to believe otherwise is to doubt God. To believe that a world such as exists around us today, that is anti-God to the core, that denies the word of God, that says it will establish its own do-it-yourself law, that will make man ultimate, to believe such a world can prosper and succeed, is to deny that God is God. It is to declare that man can establish an area of autonomy and independence from God in which he can build an anti-God culture and get away from it. This we cannot believe. So, as we look at the anatomy of the future, we must see it in terms of either God’s blessing or judgment.

Our Lord makes it very clear as he concludes the Sermon on the Mount that, the house that is built upon the rock, this is how it is literally in the Greek, as you know, and by rock he meant himself. Whenever we meet with the word “rock” in scripture used in anything other than of a physical sense, it has reference to God. The only instance is when it once refers to false gods. Their rocks as not as our rock. This is why, when our Lord declares to Peter that, “Upon this rock (myself) I will build my church,” and upon the confession such as you have made. The reference there, too, is of course, as I’ve indicated, clearly to God.

Now, unless a man builds his house, personal life, or social life, or national life, or church life, upon the rock, God the Son, he cannot survive. But if he so builds, the storms of life may come and beat against that house, but it stands. But the house that is built upon the sand rather than the rock, upon man, great is the fall thereof, our Lord says, when the floods, the storms of history come.

As a result, in terms of these facts, we can be prophets. We must be prophets. We must declare to men that there is a certainty, an inevitability, in history. The blessing and the cursing of God, that there is no way that men and nations can repeal the word of God.

Moreover, we must say that as the end of an age, when man works out the implications of building on the particular sand pile that he may have built on, the storms inevitably come. God sends them. Some few years ago, a scholar in the Netherlands, a scientist, did an extensive two-volume work to which I make reference in my Myth of Overpopulation. Others have done like studies, but his is the most extensive study, and his thesis is simply this, that at the end of an age when an idea of man and society begins to crumble, man himself begins to crumble. He becomes suddenly, radically vulnerable to disease, that there is a correlation, he says, between social confidence, personal confidence, the feeling of a society that it is successful and triumphant and able to meet its challenges, and its inner disintegration, when that disintegration sets in, there becomes a psychological proneness to disease, and to ailments of various sorts, and at such times, plagues predominate.

Instances of this, for example, the most dramatic are, of course, Rome before the end, and the Middle Ages before the end. In both eras, sanitation was at a higher point than it had been previously. In both eras, before the Fall of Rome, and before the collapse of the Medieval world, everything should have indicated that man should have had more resistance to diseases, to epidemics and plagues, but in both cases, they struck more forcefully than ever before, and the decimation, for example, the latter part of the Middle Ages, shattered, to a great extent, the culture of the day. Rome was depopulated before it fell. To a great extent, it was depopulated, and we would have to say that, again, there is again a vulnerability. As a matter of fact, if you’re not aware of it, the federal government as well as various other governments are aware of this vulnerability at the end of an era, and they are deeply concerned about the possibility of large scale epidemics, and it is an area of considerably concern, major expense and study, because there is this psychological, we would say religious, vulnerability of man, when his house, built upon sand, begins to feel the storms of life.

Moreover, it is an interesting fact that the inner conflict in man leads to an outer conflict in these eras so that there is a higher incidence of war, and war becomes suddenly more dramatic, more intense, more bitter. We are, very definitely, in the age of totalitarian warfare again. Such warfare has existed before in history. We have, today, the threat of warfare such as the world has never known. Again, an end of the time phenomena. I don’t know how many of you have ever read Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich? Any of you? Yes, three, four of you. Very interesting, in that novel. Tolstoy traces very dramatically the dying of a man who, as he watches his family and other people, knowing they’re going on with life, they’re enjoying it, his own hatred of life, his own resentment of the fact that he is dying and the others are not, and they continue to live, becomes intense. This, of course, is the kind of feeling that leads to, where it is possible to so exercise it, a will to destroy those who are enjoying life, or who have life, under the feeling, “If I’ve got to go, you’ve got to go. If I can’t enjoy life, what right do you have to enjoy life?”

So that, not only does warfare become total in an era of collapse, and the decay of a civilization, it becomes brutal to the “nth” degree. More people have been killed by war, revolution, and famine in the twentieth century than in any other era of all history. “Well,” you say, “of course, there’s a higher population now than ever before. More people are living now than have ever lived before in all of history,” which is very true, but a higher percentage of the population in this century has been butchered by war, revolution, and famine, as well as prison camps, than in any other age of history. Very conservatively, it has been two at 200-300 million peoples, just since 1900, and very largely since 1914. It’s a very significant fact.

So that, today, at the age of the death of the state, which has been the church of modern man, and in the last days of humanism, humanism is dying in agony, and it is trying to pull down everything out of a radical hatred of life, out of a suicidal impulse, and suicide is another thing that marks and end of time. You can go back through civilization and see that there are eras where suicide is relatively rare. Other times when it begins to predominate to a startling degree. Moreover, the correlation between suicide and people is not where there is poverty and problems. There is a correlation rather between suicide, education, prominence, and wealth. The more the people are aware of their age, the more informed they are, the higher the rate of suicide.

It’s an interesting fact, that when the Black Death struck in Medieval Europe, it was on the first go around, it was the healthiest, the outstanding people that it leveled. Children and the elderly were not killed by it. Why? Because they were not involved in the current of their age. They did not feel that, “Well, the world’s falling apart. Things are wrong,” so they didn’t have a vulnerability. The children were enjoying life and playing, and the old, life was virtually over for them, and so they were sitting by the fireplace. It was only the second go-around when children and the elderly, shocked and shaken by the death of the strong, and therefore, in a psychologically disturbed situation, only then were they taken. So you see something of the psychological proneness to an age and its consequence in the form of disease.

Then, there is still another fact. There is a coincidence, I deal with this in The Biblical Philosophy of History, but it is not something that originates with me. It’s, of course, taken from scripture, but secular scholars have commented on it in the past, although now a days, they don’t say much about it. Perhaps they feel a little queasy. However, there is, in every era, when you have an end-of-the-age phenomenon, also a higher incidence of natural disasters. Flood, earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, and so on, and you can go to the book of facts or an almanac, and trace all these say, in the fifty years before World War 2, and then trace them since then, and it will startle you how they have greatly increased.

So, we must say that God, in his word, when he speaks of judgment, when he declares for example, in Deuteronomy 28, that with the faithless people, he will turn the skies into brass and the ground will become like iron before them, because they have departed from him. It is not indulging in hyperbole, nor was it something that only happened to Israel, but that it is his way of dealing with men throughout history.

What we must then conclude is that only one kind of order can survive in the long run. Roderick Seidenberg, in his book, Anatomy of the Future, because he believes in total possibility, believes in the possibility of this kind of anthill or beehive society such as he describes post-historical man, but for us, this is impossible. Man cannot create his manmade, anti-God order and survive. The builders of the Tower of Babel can no more prosper today or tomorrow than they did in the time of Genesis. It is an impossibility, and if we imagine it is possible, our faith is defective. We are imagining a vain thing. This is what the psalmist says. “The kings of the earth,” it declares, “take counsel,” or you can render that, “conspire together.” This is the essential, the running conspiracy in history, of man against God, and “they imagine,” the psalmist says, “a vain thing. And he that sitteth on the circle of the heavens shall laugh. The Lord shall have them in derision,” and we need to echo, in our preaching, in our thinking, in our living, the laughter of God. We need to recognize it is insane, and we should laugh triumphantly, knowing that God’s judgment is upon all such. This is the anatomy of the future. “Kiss the son lest he be angry and ye perish in your way,” because he is the one who can break them, smash them to pieces like a potter’s vessel.

Psalm 2 gives you an anatomy of the future. It confronts men and nations in every era with the challenge. They imagine a vain thing, and God is patient with them for a time. He lets the implications of what they do develop, but in due time, he smashes them like a potter’s vessel, unless they turn and repent. Unless they turn and repent. Unless they bow down and kiss the son, by which is mean, oriental fashion, that they abase themselves at the feet of the emperor and kiss his feet, placing them totally under his submission, being conquered by him. So that it was routine, and this is what from whence the imagery is drawn. When such an enemy approached the emperor, and abased himself and kissed his feet, the emperor would often place, if it were an implacable enemy, his foot upon that head, symbolically to indicate he was now under submission. He had triumphed over him, and he had one choice now only to obey. He had prostrated himself to that end.

Thus, the only kind of order that can prevail is God’s order, and this should give us a great hope. The anatomy of the future is one determined by God. It is not only the Second Coming that is established by his word, but every step of history from the first moment of creation to the last, and all eternity. With such a God, we have no cause for fear nor alarm, and we can rejoice with Luther in his hymn, as we face the enemy, “One little word shall fell him,” because this is our God, and he is our God forever and ever.

Are there any questions now? Yes?

[Audience] During the course of the week, you’ve said something about the implementation of certain aspects of biblical law presupposes regeneration.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Audience] Would you comment a little further on that, and then also, with that, where regeneration is missing, what aspects of biblical law are precluded?

[Rushdoony] The question, first of all, yes, regeneration is necessary before a man can implement the law of God and keep it, but the law of God is written in the tables of all men’s hearts, always, from the beginning of time to the end. So that even Cain says that he is now going to be a homeless wanderer and every man’s hand shall be against him. Now, even when Cain was in the city, he felt he was a homeless wanderer. He felt himself under the judgment of God. He built a walled city and tried to make it a new beginning, a new paradise on earth, but within the confines of that wall, he was its first prisoner, because the witness of God was, at all times, against him. As a result, men cannot escape the law of God. The law of God is the condition of life. To the extent, therefore, that men try to create and establish any kind of society, in some form of another, they want God’s law, but they want God’s law without God, and this is their problem.

For example, when I was on the Indian reservation, our Indians were a small handful, and the unregenerate Indians were in the overwhelming majority. It was about 9:1. The situation was roughly this in the eight and a half years I was there. The reservation would go from bad to worse until it would be virtual anarchy. Drunkenness, knifings, adultery, lawlessness to the point where nothing was functioning, and at such a point, the Indians would, in desperation, would turn around and elect our Christian elders to the tribal counsel and turn everything over to them, and immediately, you’d get a strong law and order program. You’d get a judge who would throw the books at all law-breakers among the Indians. You’d get a strong policing. You’d get a crack-down on everything, and in no time at all, the unregenerate Indians, instead of losing their money in liquor and in gambling, and in being up against it all the time, would find themselves with money in their pockets, and instead of going home frustrated without a nickel in their pockets, and beating up on their wives, and I do mean beating up on them, they were sitting down at the table, and living and eating, and prospering, but being sinners, they couldn’t take that, and so they would overthrow the elders. “We’ve had too much of this law and order nonsense. We want a little freedom,” and very quickly, everything would go down to anarchy, and then there’d be another election and they’d bring back the Christian elders because the situation was impossible.

Now, you see, this is the problem with the sinner, because he is unmistakably created in the image of God, he cannot escape that image. He has defiled it. He has denied it, but every fiber of his being witnesses to God. So, he continually wants that order. He wants the fruits of it, but he doesn’t want the order nor the God thereof.

So, unregenerate man is continually trying to reduplicate that which God offers and provides. He’s trying to develop substitutes for regeneration. He has all kinds of reform programs. He has all kinds of social legislation aimed at creating a new society, alleviating all ills and wrongs without regeneration, but it fails. Now, in the face of this, our task is relatively easy, because you see, he cannot live except in terms of God’s world, and this is his problem. So, we have to say, “Yes, this is your problem.” We worked to regenerate more and more of them, and as quickly as possible to establish this kind of law situation. So that we work a two-pronged approach. Insofar as possible, we try to arrest the de-Christianization of our social order. We work against abortion, for example. We work against prostitution and so on. We work to establish capital punishment, and so you, you see. But at the same time, we know that we’re not going to go very far with any of these things, even though a temporary revulsion on the part of the unregenerate is going to give us an edge or a toe-hold here and there, without regeneration, and with regeneration, we’ll not only have these minimum facets of the law, but we can develop and go further.

Does that help answer? Yes?

[Audience] I’m aware of the application of what you said. What would you give as a Christian answer to Toffler’s thesis concerning the coalescence of the future into the present, and the relationship of accelerated change to ethics, in his book, The Future Shock?

[Rushdoony] Yes, Toffler’s book, Future Shock, is a rather interesting one, as is his subsequent little book, the title of which I’ve forgotten, which has to do with the economic scene and the collapse of money, in which he almost changes directions in his thinking. Now, Toffler, of course, is telling us that change is so accelerating that this is creating a major problem for man, and he puts the shock aspect on change, that it is change that is creating the problem, and I believe he’s totally wrong there, because more than once in history we’ve had very dramatic changes, and men have not only accepted them, but welcomed them and moved very rapidly in terms of them. The shock element is not in the change, but in the soul of man, you see. It’s present shock that Toffler is really dealing with, the present shock of man who is finding the world has no meaning, and therefore, he is unable to face the future or the present. This is the real problem, but this is not what Toffler can face, because being a non-Christian, he wants to put the problem of man, the shock, in the environment. So he says, “Here, we’re changing the environment so fast and this is destroying man.” For us, that’s an impossibility. It’s not the environment that’s destroying man, but man’s sin, man’s apostasy. So, more than present shock, we would have to say it’s theological shock. Yes?

[Audience] There’s abundant evidence of which you have mentioned in your {?} Western society is prone to, but is there any evidence that a communistic Soviet or Chinese communistic society, is there evidence that that is crumbling as well?

[Rushdoony] Yes, there is a great deal of evidence that the Marxist world is crumbing. In Amalrik’s book, Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984? earned him a prison sentence. He felt, incidentally, in that book we were propping up the soviet Union, acting as a virtual ally and saving them. Solzhenitsyn’s books, The Gulag Archipelago, as well as From Under the Rubble, make clear the inner disintegration, and then a book by a Chinese author whose name I cannot recall, entitled The Thought Revolution, deals with the rapid inner decay in the Republic of Red China. Moreover, as more than one person who has gone inside the Soviet Union has reported to me, the most popular thing there among youth, on all levels, and especially on the level of the hierarchy, the polit bureau’s children and grandchildren, the children of the aristocracy, as it were, of the Communist party, is American hippy culture and rock music. Such things are worshipped there.

As a matter of fact, my ear doctor gave his son a trip to Europe as a graduation present a couple years ago, and the boy went over there, bought a VW, a beetle, and toured all over Europe, and decided he’s go to Moscow as well, and the trip was most interesting because when you drive, the service stations are rare. They are few and far between, and you are not permitted to stop anywhere in between. So that you have to time your restroom stops from one place to the other and to get there during the daylight hours, it’s a very short day span, or else you’re out of luck, and then in the brushes in between, they will have guard posts that are hidden and invisible, in shrubbery and what not, to report travelers and to report their passage, so that if you’re late in getting from one point to the other, it means you’ve stopped and you’re taking pictures, or you’re talking to people on the side, which can get you in very serious trouble.

Well, this young man started out, and he hadn’t done his planning too well, and he was beginning to get more and more desperate, miles from nowhere, for a restroom stop. So, finally in desperation, he figured he couldn’t go any further, and he pulled over to the side of the road, and headed for the brush. There was no one in sight. There was no car in sight, and he thought he was safe, and he suddenly heard a sound behind him of a voice, and he thought, “Oh, Siberia, here I come,” and it was the son of someone high up in the soviet hierarchy who had one purpose out there. To waylay a traveler like himself, to get his jeans, and that young man made enough selling the jeans that he had enough rubles for his entire stay there. It was a faded, patched pair of jeans, which represented the ultimate in the “in” thing, in the smart young circles in Moscow. So, about the only thing better than that would be to have an album of rock music. That’s the kind of thinking that prevails over there.

So, their not any different than we are, and they’re a lot worse off. As a matter of fact, the question is which country will crumble the fastest, because there is a disintegration in all the countries. Yes?

[Audience] Why does a pagan country like Japan do so well, {?} economic prosperity?

[Rushdoony] The question is why is a pagan country like Japan doing so well in its economic development and so on. Well, Japan represents a very interesting story, and it has not been properly written up, or documented sufficiently, but what very few people realize is that in the post-Reformation era, Catholic missionaries went to Japan. They converted a large segment of the country before the crack-down came and the missionaries were eliminated, and many Christians were killed, and the church went totally underground. Now, the church did not survive as an institution, but Catholic faith did, and it became a very stern kind of Puritanical faith, very much unlike what it had been in the beginning because of its underground status. A very, very large foundation for the present economic power and vitality comes from families that were prominent in that underground movement. So that there’s a long background of discipline in key families in Japan, and of a large segment in Japan. Now, nothing’s ever been done to bring those people together and to revive that, but they have that background and they very often still have a highly individual, unattached kind of faith that is an inheritance from the past, but it’s quite a remarkable story.

Among some of those people, even though they had lost knowledge of it, Hebrew survived. When I was a boy in San Francisco, I knew of some Japanese Christians who came from such a tradition and were in this country, and they would still repeat Hebrew prayers that came from that era. They no longer knew its meaning, but they had been taught those prayers and they’d handed them down, and since it was in the Bible’s language, it was in God’s language, this was their feeling, they retained them. So, that’s an aspect of church history that’s very dramatic and has not been dealt with. We don’t realize how much Asia was evangelized, but for example, I am Armenian. The church of Armenia had churches throughout central Asia and throughout China. It had bishops. It had churches, schools, a vast area of Christianity so that the far eastern branches of the church of Armenia far exceeded numerically the home church, because Armenians are a relatively small people, and these peoples, the Christians, were made basic by Genghis Khan and his successors, to their government because they trusted them. They found them very honest. Genghis Khan had one, almost certainly two, wives that he took who were Christians, and the key officials in areas that were most trustworthy, he choose Christians. Now, this had fateful consequences for the church throughout central and Far East Asia, in that when the Mongol dynasty was finally overthrown, the Christians were made the scapegoats and the churches virtually wiped out.

But there is a very remarkable and important history there. The Nastorian{?} churches also had very extensive influence in some parts of Central Asia. Yes?

[Audience] Should the death penalty be imposed for prostitution?

[Rushdoony] Should the death penalty be imposed for prostitution? No, the death penalty is not provided in scripture for prostitution. In fact, under normal circumstances, you wouldn’t have prostitution in a godly society so you wouldn’t need the death penalty. Yes?

[Audience] Is it also true, in Japan, that there is a Calvinist who is the center of the economic system there?

[Rushdoony] Ah, very good question. Yes. The question is, is it not true that in Japan, there is a Calvinist who is at the center of the economic revival. Yes. When I was with the William Volker{?} Foundation at the beginning of the sixties, one of the things that amazed that foundation was that there was such a tremendous economic resurgence in post-war Japan, and that there were such strong evidences of an adherence to classical economics in certain circles. So, they asked a Japanese professor to give them a brief history of the economic development and the influences that had created this situation. Well, he sent back a diagram with a long letter of historical data, and in the center of this large sheet there was a circle, and in the center was a name: The Reverend Robert Sutton, and out of that circle, with the Reverend Robert Sutton’s name, were all kinds of arrows pointing to this group and that group, and the whole of the economic movement there centered on that man. Now, that’s an interesting story. Reverend Robert L. Sutton was a missionary of the Christian Reformed Church who subsequently broke with it. The reason he broke with it is an interesting story in itself. He felt they were overpaying the missionaries. He said in view of the value of the yen over here, to pay us $450 is to put us on the level of the richest banker in Japan, and on $150 we can live very well, but meanwhile, we’ve been put on a basis which is so far above the common people that it is impossible for us to have any real contact with them. So, he asked the mission board to alter the pay and he said he would retain only $150 a month of it. This was immediately after World War 2, and he felt he could live very, very on that. What he did was to create a conference grounds near the ocean on a few acres of ground. He got a Quonset hut or two and made quite a center there, of study. Well, of course, you can imagine the kind of trouble this created with the other missionaries who didn’t want to give up $450 a month, and they voted him out, and he subsequently returned as an independent missionary, nominally connected with one or two OP congregations, and one or two CRC congregations, and went back to work and he is still there, and very, very influential. So, this gives you an instance of how powerful the influence of one man can be in Japan. The Reverend Robert Sutton, quite a remarkable man.

Now too long after that, I took him down to a ship when he was going to return to Japan, and he was taking all kinds of tools, as well as cartons of books and what not, back with him, and it was a good insight into the vitality of the man, because we got to the ship when the stevedores, or longshoremen and the personnel were going to leave. We were tied up in traffic, so in normal circumstances, they would have refused to load his trunks, cartons. We had the station wagon from the center, and we had it loaded with his things. Normally they wouldn’t have touched them, but within two or three minutes, he had them following him around, asking questions and he was talking to them about the faith. He had the ship’s crew and everybody in a circle. He was talking to them. An hour later when I had left, nobody had gone home. Quite a remarkable person.

Well, it is 5:00, so the hour of our adjournment has dome. Thank you very much for your attention.

End of tape.