Law and Life

Community and Faith

Professor: Rushdoony, Dr. R. J.

Subject: Law

Genre: Speech

Lesson: 18 of 39

Track: 129

Dictation Name: RR156J18

Date: 1960s-1970s

[Rushdoony] Our Scripture is Hebrews 11, verse 31, and our subject Community and Faith. Hebrews 11:31. Hebrews 11:31, Community and Faith. “By faith the harlot Rahab perished not with them that believed not, when she had received the spies with peace.”

Between 1880 and 1935, the bestselling book in the United States by a Topeka, Kansas minister. During those 55 years, no other bestseller came even remotely near this particular book in sales. The book published in 1896 was Charles M. Sheldon’s In His Steps. The book had a very important point. Sheldon was aware of the fact that the church was missing the vote. That the pressing problems of American life were not being dealt with by the church. That the social gospel was arising precisely because the church in its pietism had withdrawn from the world. And so in his book, he tries to deal with this from an evangelical Arminian perspective. A group of Christians, in a certain small city, meet with their pastor and they pledge themselves to deal with every situation that comes in terms of one question; what would Jesus do? Every problem that confronted them in their daily life was to be dealt with in terms of that question; what would Jesus do? Then they were to act accordingly. The book, incidentally, is still in print and enjoying a steady sale. Now of course we could criticize the question what would Jesus do and say it should have been more properly worded, what would Jesus have me to do? Because Jesus was the Christ, the Son of the living God. What Jesus would do would be to have us to obey Him. So the question began by equating the believer with Christ. So there was a certain amount of distortion. The book was a noble attempt but with respect to its purpose it was a failure. It sold well, no other book for 55 years even remotely approached it. But the book failed in its purpose because its purpose was invalid. It is ironic too that the book that succeeded it as a bestseller was Gone with the Wind. Nostalgia in the one, Gone with the Wind, looking back to a past that was gone, and In His Steps, trying to revive the centrality of Christian faith in society, to restore it to what it once had been. But again missing the vote. Because Sheldon had no doctrine of biblical law, his answer to the question, what would Jesus do, was experiential and very often sentimental. His purpose was to leave people with a glow, to enable them to feel differently and to go out and emote differently in relationship to people. He did not give them a substantial doctrine in terms of God’s Word, God’s Law, that they were to deal this way and that way with people.

The most telling evidence of the failure of the book is in one episode, a Christian girl takes a drunken prostitute into her home to save her. Now this was a very daring episode for a minister to include in his book in those days; 1896. Nowadays it wouldn’t be as daring because nowadays we have the bar association telling us that we must end all laws against prostitution, we’re discriminating against these poor girls, the prostitutes of America have organized and had a convention in San Francisco (in a church, mind you), so that now having had the blessing of a Methodist Church, they are not that far out. In fact, if anyone is far out in terms of modern culture, it is us who believe the Bible to be the Word of God and take it seriously in a Reformed sense. But in that day it was a most daring thing to include. It was the sensational part of the book. Here was a protected, lovely Christian girl, who takes in a drunken prostitute into her home.

Now, we can say Sheldon here is trying to take the Word of God very seriously, but is he taking it sensibly in its intended meaning. The next part of this episode brings out the failure of the book, because when the prostitute becomes converted, Sheldon did not know what to do with her, so he kills her off, gives him an opportunity for a deathbed scene, but what was he going to do with a converted prostitute in the community and in the church? There was no place for her, really. And so she’s killed off. So on both counts, his handling of the situation is bad. To approach a drunken prostitute and to invite one into your home is hardly good Christian common sense. To appeal to them, to try to evangelize them is one thing, but to say that there can be a union of the unredeemed and the unregenerate and all their sin and a Christian home, and that there has to be a place for them together, is sentimental nonsense. Again, the answer to the situation, when the prostitute is converted, is again sentimental, not godly. He simply could not visualize a place for her converted in the Church and community, so he kills her off.

The failure of this book is one that is common to evangelicals and to liberals in our time. They approach problems sentimentally. The liberal approaches the prostitute and the problems of prostitution sentimentally. He eliminates the fact of sin. And if you eliminate the problems of sin and say it’s social problems and this and that and the other thing, your approach is sentimental and not realistic, because sin is real. And Sheldon’s approach was again sentimental. Sin is real. An unregenerate drunken prostitute in your home, the two don’t go together. And this is not a Christian witness, the whole idea was that the purity of the innocent young girl was going to convert, touch the heart, of this unregenerate prostitute, which is not a Biblical doctrine. It isn’t love that wins people, it’s the grace of God working in their heart. And faith, how does faith come? By our loving witness? No, faith cometh, how? By hearing, and hearing by the Word of God. And so it is that we approach people, not in our love, but by the Word of God. Indeed, we must manifest the grace of God to them, the mercy of God, but above all, we must recognize there is a line of division. And so it is, today, as men face the problems of our day, the barrier between the prostitute and all else is gone. It was in a church that the prostitutes of America had their first national convention. It was a source of joy to all liberals; they have eliminated the problem by defining it out of existence. Why? Because neither of them have dealt with the fact of sin.

Glide Memorial Church today is a hangout of the worst kind of degenerates. It was, up to a few years ago, a ultra-evangelical church, the place for all the revival meetings. How did it go from the one to the other? Because it failed to take the problem of sin realistically. And so it was easy, yes it was infiltrated, but they had no ability to see the difference. In the name of love, in the name of winning people over, the church opened all doors. The problem was, when it opened the doors, they didn’t die or become converted, they took over. And the answer of people today is the same to problems, define problems out of existence. Then you have community, everybody is united one with the other. Supposedly, Denmark has had a phenomenal drop in sexual crimes since they opened up the country to pornography. All that has happened is that they have eliminated a vast amount of offences as criminal. Naturally, if you eliminate the vast amount of crime from your statute books, you have a phenomenal improvement in criminal statistics. And the same thing is happening not only in Denmark, but in one country after another. That’s why the real crime rate is rising far more rapidly in this country and in other countries where there is a criminal increase in the rate, far more than the figures indicate, because at the same time many crimes have been dropped either legally or to all practical intent. Misdemeanors are rarely included in the statistics now, whereas twenty or thirty years ago they were in the statistics. And if you had all the misdemeanors and all the felonies they don’t bother with included in the statistics, they would show a far more devastating indication of rise in crime than the statistics now indicate.

The problem you see is this, the modern world wants community. But it wants it not in terms of a faith, the faith, it wants it by obliterating distinctions. But it cannot do this. Any true community has problems, because it has people in it. There are no such things as perfect marriages, there are only working marriages, where husband and wife work together at their problems. A successful marriage is one with problems where people are working. Since people are sinless [He meant sinful] there’s bound to be tension between them. And since people are sinful, there are bound to be community problems. Every idea of community has its limitations because the faith at the center of that community has to be at war with those not in harmony with it. In a society of atheists, the Christian is an outcast. In a community of military men, a pacifist is certainly not going to popular. In the mafia, any son of any member who decides to become a police officer and an honest one certainly is not going to be popular, because community requires communion. Communion in terms of a basic faith. If the community is governed by wealth or social status, then a man who has wealth and social standing will be tolerated no matter what his faults may be. He is at the center. Every community has its center of power, its focus in terms of which it is organized. For us it must be Biblical faith, faith in the Triune God and in His Word. In terms of Scripture, community requires for its continuation the punishment, the execution of those who are out of line. “So shall ye put iniquity out of the land.” Restitution and restoration for the others. As a result, as we have seen previously, in a Biblical society there is no professional class of criminals. They are eliminated.

Now the Marxists have seen the validity of this principle, and only the atheistic socialist can live in their planned society, all others must be destroyed, either by reeducation or through the slave labor camps. But sin has causing them trouble. Ostensibly, the focus of their society is a faith also. The Marxists have done some remarkable studying of the Puritans and especially Cromwell’s regime. The best literature written on Cromwell and on the Puritans is by and large written by Marxists. Because they have said here is a society with power that worked. It worked in terms of a fundamental faith. Let us study it so that we can see how we can make it work for us. Their studies are really remarkable. But, they cannot deal with the fact of sin. And so instead of the faith in Marxism prevailing in their circles, it is power. A sinful urge to power. And so the struggle in communist countries is as much if not more against fellow communists as it against the Christians and the capitalists. The Soviet Union and Red China have indeed been busy destroying Christians and those who believe in the free market, but even more they have been busy destroying fellow communists. They have no answer to the problem of sin. And because they cannot answer it, sin in the form of the power struggle takes over. A Marxist society is continually, perpetually torn apart by the struggle for power, and there is no way of solving it. Their faith takes the back seat to their struggle for power. Community requires a common basis of faith, and without it, it cannot function.

A very interesting book was published by a man named Gilkey entitled Shantung Compound. It was a book by a man who was a prisoner in China in a prison of war camp when the Japanese declared war on us. It was not as popular a book as the many other books that were written by prisoners of war because it did not have a lot of horror stories to tell about how the Japanese treated them. As a matter of fact, he began by saying I’m not questioning the stories of any others, it’s quite likely that in many prison of war camps there was real brutality. But he said in the Shantung Compound we were well treated by the Japanese. They provided us our ration of food, which was fair, with whatever we needed, within limits, and simply guarded the camp. They turned the prison of war camp over to us to administer. He said that was where the trouble began. Because the prisoners of war included diplomats, they included missionaries, priests, monks, they included a popular jazz band that was caught in Shanghai by the outbreak of war, it included ships’ passangers who had docked there and were seized as the ship was taken by the Japanese. It included business men, it included tourists, it included a wide variety of people. and the problem was the prisoners were stealing one from another, they were stealing food, they were stealing everything they could from one another. They would try to set up rules, there would be an angry protest periodically as people were disgruntled at being robbed, but very often the people who protested were the most angry when the rules were enforced, because it was allright if they picked up something, or if they stole, but not if someone else did. Because there was no common faith in the community, it fell apart. The only thing that kept them from being at each other’s throats were the Japanese guards, they had the guns and they were not going to tolerate too much in the way of chaos. And the author says, and he’s a liberal, the irony of the whole camp was this, to the horror of the bishop and of the missionary parents, the daughters of missionaries and the young monks, they were in about equal numbers, in no time paired up. They felt close to one another because of their common faith. And so they were spending all their time together walking hand in hand around the camp, to the horror of the Catholic hierarchy present and to the horror of the missionary parents. Their relationship was entirely innocent and it was healthy for both of them, they found a community in terms of their common faith. And the most tearful, the saddest day, was when before all the rest, the young monks were picked up by ship boat by arrangement of the Japanese authorities and taken back to their destination. They had a common faith, and in spite of the fact that they were dyed-in-the-wool Catholics and dyed-in-the-wool Evangelical Protestants, they came together in terms of their faith against the lawlessness round about them.

Returning now to In His Steps, to consider it a little further, there was no community possible between the covenant girl and the unredeemed prostitute, except in terms of the Word of God. The Word of God speaks to all. It doesn’t say take them into your home and by love convert them. It says the Word of God must be the means of conversion. But there was a community between the redeemed prostitute and the girl, and this was evaded. Today the world wants community, but it wants a false kind of community. A community which disregards the fact of sin and denies the faith. One ex-madam wrote a book not too long ago which in considerable measure a diatribe against Christians. Why? She became a madam during the Depression, deliberately. It was too hard working for a living, and the pay wasn’t good. And so she decided to open a house. She did this with her eyes open, simply because there was more money in it. She lied to her mother, she lied to her pastor, about what she was doing. And yet she goes on and on in her book about how crushed she was when they rejected her. She writes, “The most soul shattering snub came a week or so after I had opened my first house on Small House Road. All my life I had been a faithful churchgoer, from Sunday School classes as a child to adult worship and the teaching of Sunday School. I was a good friend of the minister and his wife and admirer of his sermonizing on the need for Christian tolerance and forgiveness. One day I met the pastor and his wife on the street. In view of my new profession, I didn’t expect an enthusiastic welcome, but I wished them a pleasant day. They didn’t respond. They looked the other way and scurried across the street as if to avoid contamination. I hurried home and wept bitterly. Since that day I have never been inside a church. I still have my faith but I cannot tolerate the hypocritical attitudes of so many of the churches and the pastors who rarely practice what they preach.”

Now no doubt the pastor was asking for trouble because his type of preaching, from what little she says, laid him wide open to tolerating anything, because he was preaching in a vaguely Evangelical way the love bit. But this woman says, I still have my faith. Faith in what? Faith in what? After all, what did she expect under those circumstances. She had lied to everyone involved, she had produced a course, which if she had any knowledge of the book she professed to have taught, although she probably never opened the Bible, had Sunday School lessons of nonsensical character to teach, which condemned everything she was about to do. What did she want, for them to greet her and wish her well in her new vocation, or to invite her to talk to the Ladies’ Aid about her work? But this is the kind of absurdity that the modern world is guilty of. Did she want the Pastor to come and dedicate her house? The Bible very clearly says concerning prostitutes that men are forbidden to allow their daughters to become prostitutes; Leviticus 19:29. A priest is not allowed to marry even any ex-prostitute; Leviticus 2:7. The daughter of a priest who became a prostitute and thereby degraded her family was to be executed; Leviticus 21:9. The income of a prostitute could not be used in the Lord’s work; Deuteronomy 23:18. We have a number of decrees of expulsion of prostitutes from the land; 1 Kings 14:24, 15:12, 22:47, 2 Kings 23:7. Toleration of prostitution is declared by Hosea in 4:14 to be a sign of approaching judgment. The Bible says there is very clearly a line. But it also tells us by faith the harlot Rahab perished not with them that believe not, when she had received the spies with peace. It tells us that by faith, Rahab perished not. She accepted the Lord, she was not given a nice deathbed scene and eliminated from the Bible, as the girl in In His Steps, no. God decreed that she was to be saved from Jericho. When she was brought into the Israelite camp we are told in Joshua 6:23, for a time she and her family had to stay without the camp, quarantined, until she was sufficiently instructed in the faith and until her character gave evidence that she was not only redeemed but she understood the implications and lived in terms of them. Then she was a part of the commonwealth of Israel. She married well. She was now a member of the community of faith. And we are told emphatically in Scripture, culminating in Matthew 1, verse 5 that she became an ancestress of King David and of Jesus Christ. By faith, the harlot Rahab perished not. What was the thing that changed her? Faith. Not because someone showed her love or said, look, whatever you are come right into our home, we love you. Nor did any worker go up to her saying, God loves you, that’s the good news. No. Even after her conversion, she was without the camp for a season. Then when she was taken into the camp she was fully a member of the community. This is the Biblical position. It is not sentimental, but it recognizes that if anyone be in Christ they are a new creation, but also by their fruits shall ye know them, not simply on a verbal profession

Dr. Nisbet, perhaps the outstanding sociologist in the United States has said that the longing for community is perhaps the most menacing fact of the Western world. Why? Without faith the world is falling apart, it is beset by an implicit and an explicit anarchism. Every man is at war with everyone else, and the ungodly are fearful of what is happening, and they seek for an answer to the problem in pseudo-community, in community without faith, and the consequences of that are only totalitarianism. Pseudo-community, this is the yearning of the hippie youth, of adults, of everyone. This is why retirement communities, hippie communes, condominiums, and so on flourish and then fall apart. Men want, without faith, community; because they will not reckon with the fact of sin, and as long as they will not reckon with the fact of sin, no community is possible, but by faith the harlot Rahab perished not with them that believe not, and she became a part of the community of God and one of the greatest of women in the Bible. Let us pray.

Almighty God, our heavenly Father, we give thanks unto Thee for Thy Word. Establish us more firmly, O Lord, in faith, that we may be Thy beacon lights of grace to this starved world, that we may hold aloft Thy Word, by means of which men may be summoned into Thy presence; the Holy Spirit work their hearts, their redemption through the blood of Jesus Christ made manifest, and Thy kingdom established. Our Lord and our God, we pray for godly community; community in terms of Jesus Christ and His atoning blood. Use us mightily, O Lord, that Thy community may grow, flourish, abound, and become nationwide and worldwide. Grant us this we beseech Thee, in Jesus’ name, Amen.

Are there any questions now, first of all with regard to our lesson? Yes

[Audience member] You spoke of Cromwell, is there any justification for the confiscation of the church property {?}.

[Rushdoony] Yes. The question is, is there any justification for Cromwell’s confiscation of church properties. In reality, that is a myth. It was Henry the Eighth who confiscated church properties. Now some of Cromwell’s soldiers at times destroyed some church furnishings that they considered too high church, but even there Cromwell spoke out against it. Thus there was no confiscations of church properties by Cromwell. That sometimes the troops got out of hand was not his doing, he sharply disciplined them, and there was on the whole very little. What has happened is that what Henry the Eighth did has been transferred to a large degree to Cromwell erroneously. It was Henry the Eighth who confiscated vast amounts of church property, and the empty shells of cathedrals and beautiful chapels and churches that were confiscated by Henry the Eighth still dot England. Any other questions? Yes?

[Audience member] I was wondering {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes. First of all, in today’s world, one of the first things in approaching prostitutes, of whom we have more now than we did a generation ago, incidentally. The sexual revolution has not decreased their number, it has increased it. The first means of approaching them is that they have to recognize what they are doing is sin. This is why fewer of them are converted now or in any way reached than ever before. The idea of sin having been denied, and their work being justified on all hands, they certainly are not inclined to regard what they do as sinful. However, one continual fact about them that is very obvious is that they are masochistic. This week, I was talking to a man who was a ranking police officer in the LAPD, and he was telling me how sorry he felt during his career for these girls, because they were so thoroughly victimized. Some were not bright, many were. So thoroughly victimized by their pimps, who took all their money, beat them up, exploited them thoroughly, and the girls could never explain why they went along with it. Well the answer is obvious, the sinner is either sadistic or masochistic, and these girls were almost uniformly masochistic, they bring punishment upon themselves. This is one area where a witness can be made to them; their masochism, it’s most flagrant. Then on conversion of course, you cannot specify what their role or their place is to be, this will differ from person to person, but in terms of Scripture, what we have to say is that their place is where they feel they belong. Now some of these girls are college and university graduates, they certainly, you couldn’t tell them to go to a community or a church where they would feel lost intellectually. Some of them will be in churches where they will feel more at home.

Now, one of the problems in the modern church is that community has become provincial. In other words, people tend to congregate in terms of class, social status, and so on. Whereas, as few centuries ago, it was easy for example, and this has been documented in English history, for an English lord to talk to a common farmer or a laborer, and to feel very free about talking to him, he had more in common. Culturally, they were closer together because of a common Christian faith, common standards, a common respect for certain things. But, we have democratized our culture, and we have become anarchistic, every man doing his own thing. And as a result, there is nothing everyone holds in common. There are no tastes in common. When everyone felt that church music should be of a common caliber, it should have dignity, it should glorify God, it should be geared to worship, not to what beat youth likes you see; everyone was brought up in terms of that and so the person who was lowest socially had a common standard in music, a common standard in terms of art, culture generally, and in terms of ideas. But today, with our anarchism and our democracy, everyone says what I like is as good as what anybody else likes. And so the churches have no longer a catholicity. They represent a particular social strata, a particular level of tastes. So for the time being of course, a person finds themselves in terms of such a church. Now when we have a truly Christian society, it will again be catholic, in the sense that all men will share a common faith and common standard, and that today is simply non-existent. So, it would mean that they would have to find themselves in terms of a particular strata and congregation. Yes?

[Audience member] Is the link between law and forgiveness faith?

[Rushdoony] Is the link between law and forgiveness faith? It’s the first step towards it. Now, there are two kinds of forgiveness in the Bible, the one is civil forgiveness, in other words if I rob you of something I have to make restitution and then it is forgiven and I am restored to my proper status. I have to make twofold, in case of some things four and fivefold. Then there is theological forgiveness. Now theological forgiveness requires the civil restitution plus forgiveness through the blood of Christ. So, the law always enters in, you see, in either case. In the one case we make restitution to somebody, in the other if we have offended we must make restitution, but the basic restitution is through the atoning blood of Jesus Christ Godward. And only Christ can make the Godward restitution. We can make it manward. So, faith then is a link emphatically.

[Audience member] {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes. Now let us remember that our word “forgive” today is not Scriptural. We have changed the meaning. We have said forgiveness is something that you say, something that you feel. But forgiveness in the Bible is charges deferred because satisfaction has been rendered. In other words, you have no right to forgive me if I have taken one hundred dollars illegally, in terms of Scripture, until I restore the hundred, plus one hundred. Then you must forgive me. Similarly, against God we have sinned, we deserve the death penalty. God cannot forgive us without destroying the fabric of the universe; the justice in terms of which he built all things, unless that penalty is executed, put into effect, and it is in Jesus Christ. Therefore we have forgiveness. Yes?

[Audience member] Um, it’s somewhat a problem in our Christian schools, if I {?}. And they really aren’t individually Christian. {?} And this is kind of hard {?}.

[Rushdoony] Yes, they come in your terms, on your terms. You make it clear what your terms are. If they don’t meet it, you drop them. Because you are selling them a service, but that service is dictated by what you decide. If they don’t like it they don’t have to bring their child and their money to you, but you say this is what I give at this price. Now, if your child will not meet my requirements, rebels against them and is a problem, I don’t want to deal with you. So that you have the freedom to turn them away just as they have the freedom to say we’re not coming back or we don’t decide to come. So exercise that freedom. If there are no, yes?

[Audience member] Would you care to make any comment on your recent trip?

[Rushdoony] Yes, I was gone the last two Sundays, I was in Michigan teaching at the Hillsdale College Summer Institute on political economy. There were four of us on the faculty, plus one or two special lecturers during the course. It was Dr. Sennholz; an economist, Dr. Morehouse; also an economist, and Dr. John Sparks; also an economist. I was teaching a course on modern philosophy from Descartes to the present. It was a very interesting week, there were sixty-five to seventy students in the Institute, and they represented a very superior group. There were several outstanding businessmen and there were a number of professors from various colleges and universities, and a number of high school teachers, three or four clergymen, some graduate students, and some others. So it was a remarkably superior group to speak to. It was also interesting to listen to Dr. Sennholz and his account of the present state of the economy; nothing good, rather bleak, he felt that by the end of ’74, gold would probably hit two-hundred an ounce, he felt the most ominous news of late has been the fact that the politicians in Washington of both parties are in favor of the allocation of credit, which would mean there would be no loans available to business or to private industry or of any sort or to individuals for any purpose whatsoever without an allocation number. You would have to apply, the government would have top priority, and then you would say well I want to build a house or I want to add a room or I want to go into business, and you’d be at the bottom of the list and wait year in and year out for your credit to be approved. This, he said, would put us into socialism fully. We’d be on the road to Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. So he said that was very grim to think that they would even talk about it. If it is achieved, it will be the fulfillment of the kind of thinking that Wright Patman of Texas, a Texas Democrat, has been advocating for a long, long time, the total and utter control of the banking sector of the economy. So their report was anything but a congenial one. It was a very interesting week. One thing that interested me was how many of those people, I’d only met about four or five of them previously, have read the Chalcedon books and how many have listened to tapes. Let me add that I think when we speak here Sunday morning, we are heard by two or three thousand people to my estimation, and that’s conservative. I’m not figuring on those I don’t know about. Now I don’t think Dave Gray sells all that many tapes, but the tapes are passed around, I know one man in one state circulates them through the entire church and community and I was surprised how wide a circulation it has in that area. And I’m sure many people recopy them and pass them around, but we do have a tremendous audience every time we speak here, in the number of people who hear the tapes. I was very pleased to learn that one of the most important law schools in the country is going to use Biblical law this fall, so that was also very good news.

After Hillsdale I went to Holland, Michigan. There’s a new church, a Reformed church under a very fine pastor, outstanding pastor, Reverend Dale Dykema, beginning there. So I spoke there four times before I returned home. I have one announcement to make this morning. Greg Bahnsen, who is in Northern California speaking this weekend, will be ordained next Sunday afternoon, August 4th, 3:30 pm, at the Manhattan Beach First Orthodox Presbyterian Church, 500 Manhattan Beach Boulevard, in Manhattan Beach, and all of you are invited to attend this service of ordination, 3:30 next Sunday afternoon. Now, one of the happiest things about this ordination service is that, to me not only that Greg is being ordained, but that there will be present at the church, and invited or called to be the next pastor of that church is the Reverend Michael Stingley, a very, very dear friend and an outstanding man, and I think his coming to that church is going to be the beginning of great things for the church and a very happy opportunity for us to resume our friendship with Mike. One of the disappointments when we moved to Southern California nine years ago in August or thereabouts, was that we were looking forward to being near Mike Stingley, and the day we came down to look for a house he received word that he had been accepted in the chaplaincy, something that we had previously thought was out of the question, they had turned him down. So it’s wonderful to have Mike Stingley back here again and I think all of you will be seeing and hearing more of him because we intend to work very closely together. Let us 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]