Salvation and Godly Rule

Causality

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Doctrinal Studies

Lesson: Causality

Genre: Speech

Track: 12

Dictation Name: RR136F12

Location/Venue:

Year: 1960’s-1970’s

Put on the whole armor of God that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the Devil, for we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places. Wherefore, take unto you the whole armor of God that ye may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all to stand. Let us pray.

Our Lord and our God who reignest in heaven and on earth. Whose hand rules and overrules in all things, we give thanks unto thee that thy wisdom has governed us all the days of our life, that thou has brought good out of our folly, that thou hast overruled us in our waywardness and brought forth good out of all things according to thy word, and so, our Father, in gratitude we come to thee rejoicing in thy government, confident in thy grace, delighting in thy mercies, and to praise thee as we ought, and to beseech thee for thy mercy sake, for those of our number who are in want, for thy suffering saints all over the world, and for the prosperity of thy kingdom. Bless us in thy service. In Jesus’ name. Amen.

Our scripture is 2 Kings 19:32 following. Our subject: Causality. Really, the conclusion of two chapters dealing with the siege of Jerusalem by Sennacherib. “Therefore thus saith the Lord concerning the king of Assyria, He shall not come into this city, nor shoot an arrow there, nor come before it with shield, nor cast a bank against it.  By the way that he came, by the same shall he return, and shall not come into this city, saith the Lord. For I will defend this city, to save it, for mine own sake, and for my servant David's sake. And it came to pass that night, that the angel of the Lord went out, and smote in the camp of the Assyrians an hundred fourscore and five thousand: and when they arose early in the morning, behold, they were all dead corpses. So Sennacherib king of Assyria departed, and went and returned, and dwelt at Nineveh. And it came to pass, as he was worshipping in the house of Nisroch his god, that Adrammelech and Sharezer his sons smote him with the sword: and they escaped into the land of Armenia. And Esarhaddon his son reigned in his stead.”

Our subject this morning is Causality. A cause is that power or agent which produces a thing or event. The idea of a cause implies the idea of a purpose, a goal, or an end. It has reference, therefore, to persons, and to God ultimately. This is why the causality concept has been abandoned by modern philosophy and by contemporary philosophers of science. They have no desire to imply that there is a personal power behind events, ultimately, the power of God, and therefore, they have replaced the idea of causality with the probability concept. Thus, instead of saying that gravity is a law, there is a probability that falling bodies will act in certain ways. There is a probability that the sun will rise in a certain area and set in a certain area. They will not speak of laws.

This is quite logical. In a universe of chance, in which God is denied, no causality can exist. Only chance prevails, because first of all, in such a realm there is no universe. The idea of a universe implies, because the word “uni” means one, a one world law and a one world of operation. There is no reason to believe in this if you deny God. This is why Clark Kerr{?}, very logically, a decade ago, said that we must abandon the concept of a universe for a multi-verse, and the idea of a university, a unified body of knowledge, for the concept of a multi-versity, in which anything goes except the idea of God. Scripture. A unified world of law.

Then second, we must say that where causality is denied and only chance prevails, no history is possible, because we cannot say there is a direction, a meaning, a goal in history. This is why, in one of the major universities of this state, a professor of history two years ago began the school term by saying the idea of history is a myth, there is no such thing as history. To believe that there is such a thing as history, a meaningful, purposeful, direction to events is to believe in a myth, but the State of California, he continued, “is paying me a salary to teach you history, and so we will proceed.” Now, he was very logical and he was honest. God denied history disappeared. A cause is a sequence of meaningful events, and it is set in a sequence and a context of total meaning, and as Christians, we must insist that this world of total meaning is precisely what we face, that many of our problems, of course, at the hands of scientists, are due precisely to the fact that meaning is so total and so complex.

To illustrate, a Canadian scientist, A.C. Custance, has said, “In physiology, for example, we dissect the body, or we experiment with it only as an electrochemical machine, and our findings confirm the effectiveness of our tools of research, and our own methodology by giving us the only kind of information we were looking for. But, as Paul Weiss, recognizing this aspect of the inherent information of the scientific method observed, ‘Maybe our concept of our nervous system is equally inadequate and insufficient because so long we you use only electrical instruments, you get electrical answers, and if you determine numerical and geometrical values, you get numerical and geometrical answers. So perhaps we have not yet found the particular kind of instrument that tells us the next unknown.” Very well put. Reality is so complex, and is such a great network of interlocking laws and structures, and design, that it does present a problem, and this is why, if you look for an electrochemical machine in the body, you find it, and if you look for a numerical and geometrical answer, you find it. In fact, almost any kind of tool you design will tell you, “This is it,” but reality is more complex than any of these machines.

A very simple illustration of this kind of problem, of course, occurred in medicine some years ago. A good many years ago, I recall a doctor saying that in his day, many, many years ago, a sure way to get kicked out of his medical school was to infer that ulcers had a psychological cause. Why? Well, at his particular school, there was a specialist who had proven that it was a chemical reaction. He was right, but he was also more than that. He had looked for a chemical answer and he had found it. Since then, they have looked for a psychological answer and they have found it, and this does not mean that they have exhausted the subject.

One of the problems, of course, that still perplexes us is that with Newtonian science, men began to look at causality in terms of a collision, a next-to-next thing, one atom hitting another, one body colliding with another, a one-to-one thing. But causality is much more complex. Everything exists in a total network of everything, and so the number of causes that come to focus on a single event on a single effect is so multiple that it is really beyond description.

Now, in terms of this, let us look at our scripture, and then back away from it to look at the problem of causality again. Our scripture gives us an incident that two chapters in full, 2 Kings 18 and 19, describe for us. The same events are given to us in Isaiah 37 and 38. It is one of the best attested events in ancient history. Thus, we are dealing with something that even secular historians will recognize to have occurred, of course, not in any biblical sense. What happened? Sennacherib began to move against the Palestinian world, against Syria and Israel, Judea and the adjacent areas. Judea, which supposedly had undergone a reformation at the hands of King Hezekiah, immediately moved to make an alliance with Egypt. The reformation was not treated as serious by either the prophet Micah, or the prophet Isaiah, both of whom were present and wrote at that time. As a matter of fact, while the supposed reformation was underway, Isaiah in his first chapter, gives a bitter indictment of its hypocrisy and its meaninglessness. Moreover, Isaiah thoroughly condemns the alliance with Egypt. Alliances in the ancient world were also religious alliances, and scripture always declares, and it speaks for all time, that an alliance is not only a political union but a religious one. You fight for a common cause because you believe in certain things in common, and therefore, there should be an avoidance of alliance unless there is a common faith.

This is why, for almost two centuries, there was an avoidance in the United States for religious reasons for what George Washington called entangling alliances, and I submit he was right. What religiously as well as politically, we had no business in World War 1 or 2, or in Korea or in Vietnam. The Bible is right about alliances. Then we have been wrong.

Now, Sennacherib moved against Hezekiah and Judea, and we have Sennacherib’s inscriptions as to what happened. “As to Hezekiah, the Jew, he did not submit to my yoke. I laid siege to forty-six of his strong cities, walled forts, and to the countless small villages in their vicinity and conquered them. I drove out of them 200,150 people, young and old, male and female and considered them booty. Himself I made a prisoner in Jerusalem, his royal residence, like a bird in a cage. Hezekiah, himself, {?} terror inspiring splendor of my lordship had overwhelmed and whose irregular and elite troops had deserted him, did send me later to Nineveh, together with thirty talents of gold, eight hundred talents of silver, precious stones, and {?}, large cuts of red stone, conches inlaid with ivory, elephant hides, ebony wood, box wood, and all kinds of valuable treasures, his own daughters, concubines, male and female musicians.” But after this, Sennacherib decided it wasn’t enough or that it was not safe to recognize any kind of peace with Judea. Jerusalem was too powerful a fortress, too dangerous to him as long as there was any unfriendliness there, and so he decided after all this, to take and destroy Jerusalem. He besieged the city, and his commanded, when he came to the walls to negotiate, insisted on speaking in Aramaic, which was Hebrew, the modern dialect, and Hezekiah and his associates nervously said, “Don’t talk Aramaic, please. We’ll talk in Assyrian,” and the commander laughed and revealed in what he had to say, it’s well worth reading in the four chapters in the two books, that his intelligence service was excellent, that the defections of troops had been so great also from Hezekiah, and he said, “If you have men to ride cavalry, we’ll supply the horses. We know what your situation is, and how close you are to radical starvation, and before long,” he said, “people will be resorting to the most extreme kind of measures to sustain life.” Sennacherib felt confident in this situation because of the appalling weakness of the city, nothing but the walls really to defend it, and a handful of men. To issue terms of the most radical and humiliating sort, at this point, those who had not deserted, turned to God humbly, and by faith.

Hezekiah sent to Isaiah and asked his counsel, and Isaiah responded by saying that the Assyrians would not take the city. They would be destroyed by the Lord, and that Sennacherib would return to his own city and perish there, and that night, 185,000 Assyrians died and the limited number of survivors, which included Sennacherib, rode out of there in a hurry. They headed back for Nineveh, where a conspiracy of his sons led to the execution of Sennacherib. This is a matter of record, a matter of history, and of course, there have been all kinds of attempts to explain what happened, that ostensibly the plague struck Sennacherib’s army. This is a little difficult to swallow because there was no evidence of any plague striking any other area and to say that a plague would have struck an army and wiped them out overnight, and not affected any of the surrounding cities or countries, or Jerusalem where the people were weak with hunger is really asking us to believe in a greater miracle than scripture reports. This happened.

Now, how shall we view it? The concept of causality is something we need to understand, and this is as good a place to understand it is as good as any. Here, the only way we can understand this event is to say, “Yes, God did work a miracle,” but then every event was a product of God’s providence, God’s government. The very fact of the invasion was by God’s design. It was judgment on Judea. Grim, brutal? Perhaps, but it was very clearly ordained of God, so that it wasn’t just what happened to the 185,000 that you have to deal with in terms of the concept of causality, you see? Now, a world without God, there is no explaining anything, and everything is a mystery or a miracle, but once you introduce God and the concept of causality, you have to say it is total. You cannot say, “There is a cause here, but while here, God isn’t operative.” A world of causality, and here, the contemporary philosophers of science are right. It implies God, and you either face the fact that every cause is ultimately God-caused. He is the first cause, or you eliminate Him and say, “There’s no explaining events. We’ll just use the probability concept.” You have to say that God was operative in every step of that invasion as well as what happened that night.

Now, let’s turn from that to examine reality as the ancient world saw it. Apart from the world of scripture, the Hebrews and, of course then, the Christians in the New Testament, men in ancient times saw reality as basically made up of two substances; spirit or mind on the one hand and matter on the other. There were three possible views then, for them, as they faced reality; how to bring these two worlds together?

The basic underlying one which we have everywhere in Antiquity and which has survived to this day in Western Civilization is the dialectic method. In the dialectical method, the two spheres, the two worlds, the two substances are seeing, yes, as opposite, as basically hostile to one another, but they recognize somehow they have to maintain the two together, and so you have this dialectical tension, whereby two things which are mutually exclusive of one another, nonetheless, are maintained. A dialectic, however, tends to break down. You are affirming, whenever you affirm a dialectical philosophy, two mutually contradictory things, and sooner or later, one or another of these destroys the other.

As a result, very early you had, in Aryan, or Iranian, or we would say now, Persian thought, dualism. Zoastrianism, Mazdaism, and a variety of other positions, whereby they said that, “Yes, there is a world of spirit and a world of matter, a good god and a bad god, depending on which you decided was good and bad, but ultimately they are going to separate, and the whole process of history is the separation of these two substances that have somehow gotten mixed up, and of course, this is disastrous, because if you say spirit is the good substance, then you lose your interest in the whole materials world, and history becomes a matter of indifference, and in some forms of this, it becomes a contempt of this world. Mysticism has tended to that in the Western tradition.

On the other hand, if you say the world of matter is the real world, then you deny the whole world of mind and of spirit, and you treat man like another animal, or the third alternative is Monism, which triumphed especially in Eastern thought, in many Western mystics, and in the Greek Cynics. In Monism, you say the world is only spirit, and matter is an illusion. Mary Baker Eddy was a Monist, a logical product of Hegel, related incidentally, philosophically to Karl Marx, in the same tradition. Marx was a Hegelian. Mary Baker Eddy was a Hegelian. They just took somewhat different turns, but they’re first cousins, intellectually.

Now, you can deny the world of matter, or you can deny the world of mind, and you can, as many scientists and psychologists have done in this country, say that the mind is an epiphenomenon. It’s nothing really. It’s an illusion. You can reduce man entirely to drives. There’s no such thing as mind. It’s an illusion. You eliminate one segment of reality. This is why, of course, the Cynics of Greek philosophy, said that man, and Cynic comes from the same word as I pointed out before is canine, canus, dog. Man is just a dog of another kind, another animal, and therefore, they demanded the right and exercised the right, so-called, to copulate in the streets like dogs, and you have this sorry spectacle of Greek philosophers doing this deliberately which, of course, was the same demand made in Berkeley ten years ago in the early stages of the free speech movement. You had a strong vein of Monistic thinking in a group of students there.

Now, of course, depending on which of these positions you hold, your view of causality will be affected thereby, because first of all, in the early stages before they pursued the matter to its logical conclusion as modern thought has, to say, “Well, you cannot hold to the philosophy of causality, or the idea of causality,” in the ancient world because they still had a background of recognition of God, the insisted that there had to be causality. Now, they separated causality into the sphere of mind, or spirit, and into the sphere of matter. What happened? Causality in the sphere of the material world became something mechanistic, but a machine without a mind, or without a maker, ultimately ceases to be a machine, and so mechanism collapses a philosophy in the last century.

In the sphere of the mind, what is causality? Well, without a god, it has to be self-caused, causality. Man has to be the cause. Man has to be his own god. This is why Plato, in this tradition, said we must have philosopher kings who will become the source of pre-destination and causality in all of society. They must totally plan the life of man, and this is why today, whereas, on the one hand in the material world, the concept of causality is denied, because they will not admit a god behind that material world. In the world of mind, they affirm a radical, humanistic causality. Man is his own god. Man is the total planner, the totalitarian state, and this is inescapable. It’s the logic of their position. You cannot have anything but totalitarian statism in the humanistic world. Any kind of rebellion and protest against it is futile and sterile. The logic of a humanistic position requires that the concept of causality in the world of mind becomes self-cause causality, man as the predestinating agent, or collective man, in the form of the state.

Sartre, the existentialist is seen as clearly, and he has said, “My freedom is a choice of being a god.” Sartre denies that there is any unconscious in man’s psychology. Of course. If man is self-caused, and if man is going to be the total predesinator and planner, then man must say, “No unconscious. Nothing that can make me a product, an effect. I am the absolute cause.” Man must be free to make his own essence, to define himself, to make himself. This is what Sartre says, and he declares, “The world is human.” If I am self-caused, and if I am my own god, the only world I can exist in is one I have made. So, the world is human. It’s a product of my mind. I made it out there, and the logical conclusion, too, which I pointed out on other occasions, is that then he has to say about you and me, because we make the same claim for me, my neighbor is the Devil. If I am god, you cannot exist as a god. You are the Devil.

Now, of course, Sartre was preceded a long time ago in this kind of thinking. Oriental philosophy {?} reached the same kind of existential impasse centuries ago, and developed that impasse to its horrible conclusion, the doctrine of Karma. For oriental philosophy, the world of matter is, at best illusory, and probably all an illusion. The world of the mind is the only area of causality, the only area of reality, and man is totally self-caused. Therefore, man is totally a product of his own Karma, his own creation, and he is {?}. His freedom to be his own god winds up as a total trap. This is why life in oriental countries is so merciless. If you’re born crippled, obviously you were a scoundrel in a previous reincarnation and you’re just working it out. If anything bad happens to you, well, you see, it’s your own Karma. You’re totally self-caused. There is no causality of God. There is no world of secondary causes. Having denied, God they cannot admit anything like that. Man is totally self-caused. He is his own god, his own world. The world is entirely human for him, and therefore, his Karma binds him and everything that happens has happened because he determined it. Too bad. You made your own bed, lie in it. If you got robbed, it’s because you brought it on yourself. If you are sick, you brought it on yourself. This is why, in oriental countries, life is so pitiless, so merciless, and this is why, too, the goal then is to escape from Karma, to die, to find Nirvana.

Sartre himself has seen the end result of it, and he says in his book Being and Nothingness, towards the conclusion, “Man is a useless passion.” You see, the idea of causality is one which, when divorced from God and scripture, becomes a monster or an illusion. Denied in the material spirit to affirm it in the mental sphere, it destroys you. There is no way of coping with it. Now, scripture is hostile to dialecticism, to dualism, and to monism. It sees the division that not between areas of the world, between mind and matter, but between God and man. God is the uncreated, eternal being, and the universe and man as created being. God is the total cause of all things.

Now, we have some very interesting things about causality in scripture. In Genesis, we are told that God created the heavens and the earth in six days, and on the seventh day, He rested. We tend to think of rest as a time of relaxation and the withdrawal because we’re weary from work, but this is not the meaning of the Hebrew word. The Hebrew word means “disengaged himself, terminated active involvement in, ceased from.” So, what does it say? God disengaged himself from the work of creation, and then, having created man, told him to exercise dominion and to subdue the earth, that now, in a sense, there was another cause under God which was to be operative in the world; man, as a secondary cause, but having the image of God was to exercise dominion and to subdue the earth, to exercise the aspects of the image of God: knowledge, righteousness, holiness, and dominion, to explore every area in knowledge, to exercise power, to exploit (in the good sense) all things under God, so that now God was using man as the secondary cause whereby all things were to be developed as the kingdom of God, but man fell.

Now, let’s skip over the centuries to our Lord, and we find another interesting comment, which parallels this in Genesis. In John 5, we have our Lord going by the pool of Bethesda, on the Sabbath, a sick man there, a crippled, and He heals him. Very interesting how often our Lord healed on the Sabbath. It was deliberate. Again and again He healed on the Sabbath, and at this point, when he is accused of violating the Sabbath, His answer is, “My Father worketh hitherto, and I work,” John 5:17. Very interesting statement. What he is saying thereby is that God is continuing the work of creation and I am now doing it also. Why? Because man fell and now the work of creation was re-creation, regeneration, the restoration of man into that creation calling and mandate, that God who had created all things now told man who was now created in His image to exercise knowledge, to subdue the earth, to exercise dominion over it, and to function now as a powerful cause under God, and man fell, and so God is again engaged in the work of creation, regeneration. “Behold, I make all things new,” and so we see something of the goal of creation, and something of the nature of causality. Creation is total. It is entirely the work of God, and causality is total. It is entirely from God. There are secondary causes, but God is the absolute cause, and also the immediate cause. He is not a deistic God, not an absentee landlord, but very present, the ultimate first cause of what happened to Sennacherib, and the immediate present cause. The secondary causes were real, but the absolute presence of God ultimately and immediately, also real.

All facts, thus, are God-created, God-ordained, God-governed facts. There is no division in scripture between the mental and the material. God rules all things and is the cause of all things. Now, this fact looks grim if you look at all that happened to Judea, and to Hezekiah; the invasion, the fearful {?}, and if you look at history in our time, and to some it seems the very ugly, grim fact, but the alternative is an absolute meaninglessness and purposelessness. Under God, every fact has reference to a total plan of creation and regeneration, that God created all things and is busy now as the absolute, ultimate, and proximate cause of recreating all things, judging all things, moving all things to a glorious end. So that every cause and effect does, imply purpose.

The Dictionary of Philosophy is correct when it calls attention that it does imply a purpose, it does imply a logic. We must say it does, indeed, and that’s why we affirm it, and the logic and the purpose of causality is God’s ultimate plan of creation and recreation, the salvation and the triumph of all things under Him. The doctrine of causality, therefore, is inseparable in scripture from creation and salvation. Let us pray.

Almighty God, our heavenly Father, who of thy grace and mercy hast created all things, and art now working to re-create all things in Jesus Christ. We thank thee that thou hast made us to function under thee to the end that all things may be subdued, developed, known, and thy majesty set forth in and through them. Make us, our Father, more than conquerors, through Christ who loved us. In His name we pray. Amen.

Our time is very brief, but we do have opportunity for just a couple question, two, three quick questions if there are any. Yes?

[Audience] Is there any {?} between creation and reality?

[Rushdoony] Well, the world of God’s creation is the world of reality, but the idea of reality means that which is real, true existence.

[Audience] Would that be materialism then?

[Rushdoony] No, it would be material, mental, spiritual, whatever. Today, the idea of reality, of course, is a diminishing idea. In the world of mind and matter, mind is denied by many and the world of matter has become more and more illusory to many, so that reality is really disappearing, and this is why there is such a popularity in many quarters of Buddhist ideas, because Buddhism says that nothingness is ultimate. All is illusion. So, there is no reality in Buddhism. Any other questions? Yes?

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] No, you remember when this was a question raised to our Lord, “Is this man sick because of his sin, or blind because of his sin, or the sins of his fathers?” our Lord denied it, and also he called attention to the wall that fell and killed eighteen people, not because of their sins, you see. It’s when you have the oriental idea and now the existential idea of absolute, personal, self-causation, that you have to say, “What has happened to me is because of my sin, and I’m sick or I’m blind, or I had this or that accident happen to me, because of my sin.” You reduce the world then to personal dimensions, and everything is understandable only in terms of yourself, and the Bible says, no. Everything is understandable in terms of God.

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] There are rewards and punishments, but we cannot read all events in terms of personal things{?}. The rewards and punishments are not because we have done it, but because God has chosen to bless us that way, you see. In other words, the causality is not in terms of ourselves. This is the point that God makes to Job when Job tries to see what has happened to him in terms of himself, and his friends tell him, “All this trouble happened to you because you sinned,” and Job says, “I didn’t. I haven’t been a godly man. Therefore, why did it happen to me?” and God says, “You’re not the yardstick, Job. I caused it to rain where no man is. Rain falls from the ocean. It falls on uninhabited lands.” You see, you cannot reduce the world to a humanistic dimension, and of course, this is what Sartre has to do. The world, for me, in human. Now, that’s really insane, but it’s logical, and insanity is always logical. It’s a logic that departs from reality. Yes?

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Oh yes. There remaineth therefore, a rest for the people of God. Now, he says that the goal of man is rest. That rest was not achieved in Canaan, although the promised land was, in a sense, a type of that rest. The rest comes, therefore, in Christ, and as we triumph in Christ and as we subdue all things in Christ, it does not mean inactivity, it means that we are disengaged. We have things under control. Everything is proceeding beautifully. So, we are not engaged actively in the creative process, but are in the reaping process, as it were, so that we are then resting. We are reaping. We are rejoicing in that which we have done. It is the time of completed conquest. So, the new creation is spoken of as a rest, as a Sabbath, an eternal Sabbath, and also a time of work. I don’t want to go too much into that, because next Sunday probably, and if not next Sunday, the Sunday after, we will be dealing with the idea of the Sabbath in relationship to what we have been discussing today.

Well, if there are no further questions, first, an announcement and then just a brief report. The Chalcedon Guild annual meeting and tea will be held this Saturday, May 13th, at 2 p.m. at the home of Peggy and Don Taylor, 1201 S. Holiday in Santa Ana, and I will be speaking on the Christian Family. Please let Gloria Bizard{?} or {?} Edwards know if you are coming, and they are both present, and they Taylors do have a map showing directions to their home, in case you need to have help on that. So, please see Donna or Peggy after the service.

Now, the week before last, a week ago Saturday, I returned from my trip in Indiana, it was suggested I give a brief report on it because it was remarked it would be encouraging to know how the work is progressing. Well, it was a very encouraging trip. In fact, it was a thoroughly successful one. The meetings were remarkably well attended at all the schools and universities where I spoke, and one of the very pleasing things was to see the number of faculty members who had been influenced by my books. In fact, I went to one college I didn’t know existed until they contacted me to go there and lecture, has 1,000 students, and some of the key members of the faculty had been very profoundly influenced by my books, and were responsible for my going there, and on Thursday, I spent all day lecturing with scarcely a break, at Hillsdale College, in Hillsdale, Michigan, and was very agreeably surprised to find the same thing there, where I didn’t expect it, to find that the new chairman of the economics department had been profoundly influenced by my books, and a couple of men in the administration, and a good many others as well. In fact, as a result of my lectures, they decided to set up a seminar for a week in December, of lectures from morning to evening, a special course for all students, honor students in particular, and graduates, a credit course on the politics of Babel. The title is derived from one of my talks, and there will be five of us lecturing; Deitze{?} from Johns Hopkins, Rice from Notre Dame, Percy Greaves the economist, and Monar{?} from NYU. So, I think it’s going to be quite an interesting seminar, and I spoke also on Tuesday noon to a luncheon, which was by invitation only, to some of the top officials in the State of Indiana, and top men in the community and every day I was driven around by one or another state official of Indiana, which was quite a pleasure, and one day, it was entirely with the use of the Pace car for the Indianapolis 500, which wasn’t entirely a pleasure because it’s almost a terrifying car. It will go from nothing to over 100 miles in a few seconds, and cruise at 130, and it did, and as I say, I got home last Saturday and then Sunday night, someone stopped by who was here in Santa Monica with the Rand Institute, and is with the Dutch government, and he brought over a Dutch magazine and had translated into Dutch the January or February “Chalcedon Report”, which I didn’t know about. The entire issue of this magazine was on the United States, an examination of trends in the United States, and the “Chalcedon Report” had been translated in its entirety, and included, and at the same time, I found a letter awaiting me when I returned from South Africa from Rhodes University, asking for another article. So, the work of Chalcedon is getting recognition. I was really amazed at how much our things are read and are circulating in areas where I didn’t know they knew we existed. So, our work is having an impact and that was very gratifying.

Well, our time is up. Let’s bow our heads now for the benediction.

And now go in peace. God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost bless you and keep you, guide and protect you, this day and always. Amen.

End of tape