Miscellaneous

From the Easy Chair – Living by Faith

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels, and Sermons

Lesson: 1-1

Genre: Talk

Track: 1

Dictation Name: From the Easy Chair – Living by Faith

Location/Venue:

Year: 1985

This is R.J. Rushdoony, Easy Chair 109, November the 16th 1985. As you will recall from out previous sessions together, I have often discussed books with respect to the Medieval Era. There is a reason for this. We, like Medieval man are facing a crisis, the crisis of civilization. We are in the last days of humanistic statism, and it is difficult for us to see the power of the state give way to something else. On the other hand, it was very difficult for Medieval man to see the church give way to something else, to the power of the state.

To appreciate what was happening in the Middle Ages, we need to realize this: first of all, and I quoting here from an older work dating back to 1947, Frederick Harrison Medieval Man and His Notions. This book perhaps could be better titled ‘English Medieval Man and His Notions’ because its data is essentially English. But he calls attention to the fact that in the later Middle Ages, probably one in every ten adult males was in the service of the church.

That is an interesting fact, not comparable the Federal Bureaucracy today, but certainly resembling it. Let me cite further from Harisson’s work, so turning now to page 263 following he writes and I quote: “There were at least twenty seven altars in York Minster, that for centuries in most cases had been set apart for holy things, each having its chaplain, some having two chaplains; whose chief work was to intercede for the souls of the departed every day. In each Parish church there was at least one such chaplain, apart from the incumbent of the church. The total number of these Chaplains or Parsons was for the whole city 150. The property set aside for their maintenance and the maintenance of the chapels and the altars, brought in an annual income of more than 810 pounds; in the whole county of York the annual income from this source was nearly 6,250 pounds. To arrive at the value of this income in terms of modern currency, it is necessary to multiply these sums by at least 30, in the opinion of one distinguished scholar, 35-40 times.” (let me say parenthetically, these data were given in 1947- with inflation you would have to double that two or three times.) to continue: “To arrive at the comparative value of these figures, they must be placed not against the astronomical figures of the cost of the war of 1939-45, but against the wages earned and the amounts paid in rents of houses. A skilled craftsman would earn at this time nor more than 5-6 shillings a week, and a reasonable house could be rented for the same amount for half a year. It must be remembered also that the total population of this country of England was probably not more than a million and a half of people. No suggestion of compulsion or even of undue influence is made to explain the prevalence of simple faith.”

The fact is, as he goes on to say, that York had a population of not more than 15,000 people, but it had, and I quote again: “A cathedral church with a staff of not fewer than 80 clergy, a number to which 13 may be added for the clergy attached to an adjoining chapel. Second, the great Benedictine Abbey of Saint Mary, presided over by a Mitered Abbot, and containing at the most about 60 monks. Third, another large Benedictine Priory, the staff of which cannot have been fewer than 30. Fourth, a Dominican Friary, with nearly 20 Friars- which, incidentally had library of more than 600 volumes. Several smaller religious establishments for women as well as men. Sixth, a large hospital for the sick. And seventh, quite fifty Parish Churches, an average of one church for 240 to 300 people. As all these religious foundations were without difficulty staffed, endowed, and maintained; and the clergy and others attached to them, not fewer than 350 in number, supported and maintained; it would be realized that in York more was spent on the maintenance of the Christian faith than on anything else, perhaps not excepting even bread and butter and dwelling houses.”

Now I cite that for a very good reason. First, the fact that Harrison stresses is that this was voluntary, it was not a tax; but it was a bureaucracy, a very great bureaucracy. Man since then has swung to belief in the state as the means of salvation, and until recent years has been willing to pay his taxes and to speak of the privilege of paying taxes. Just as Medieval man spoke about the privilege, no doubt, of giving to the church. Only in the later Middle Ages did men begin to rebel at giving to the church, and only in recent years since WW2 have men rebelled against the payment of taxes.

The reason in both cases was a disillusionment with the growing cost of first the church, and now of the state. Now to an extent this was unjustified. When we remember that the Medieval church provided health, education, and welfare, we have to say that one in ten providing those things was not unreasonable. However, what happened was that men were shifting their hope of salvation, their hope of bettering their lives in this world and the next from the church to the state, from a Christian perspective to one that was, although in embryo form then, a humanistic one. As a result, the church increasingly could do no right, and the state for many could do no wrong.

We have now the reverse situation. The state, which for a long time was the object of man’s hope is now increasingly hated and detested by modern man.

Well, what is the answer? Men have in Western history moved from the bureaucracy of the church, to a hope in the state and the bureaucracy of the state as the implementing agency of social salvation. They have been disillusioned, both time, rightly or wrongly is not my concern at the moment. What are we going to say to this? What is going to happen in the future? Because we are faced with the end of an age, we are faced with a growing breakdown of Western Civilization and all cultures the world over.

Sometime back, in Chalcedon position paper number 15, I wrote on the meaning of Theocracy. I want to read just about a, oh, a portion of one column of that position paper, and if you want the whole of it, write for a copy and we will be happy to send it to you, and we will be happy to receive any gift you send with your request.

Now, to quote: “Few things are more commonly misunderstood than the nature and meaning of ‘theocracy.’ It is commonly assumed to be a dictatorial rule by self appointed men who claim to rule for God. In reality, Theocracy and Biblical Law is the closest thing to a radical Libertarianism that can be had. In Biblical Law the only civil tax was the head or poll tax, the same for all males twenty years of age and older. This tax provided an atonement or covering for people, that is the covering of civil protection by the state as a ministry of justice. This very limited tax was continued by the Jews after the fall of Jerusalem, and from 768 to 900 A.D. helped make the Jewish princedom of Narbonne in France and other areas, a very important and powerful realm. This tax was limited to half a shekel of silver per man. All other functions of government were financed by the tithe: health, education, welfare, worship, etc were all provided for by tithes and offerings. Of this tithe, one tenth, that is one percent of one’s income went to the priests for worship. Perhaps an equal amount went for music and for the care of the sanctuary. The tithe was God’s tax to provide for basic government in God’s way.

The second and third tithe provided for welfare and for the families rest and rejoicing before the Lord. What we today fail to see and must recapture is the fact that the basic government is the self government of covenant man. Then the family is the central governing institution of scripture. The school is a governmental agency, and so too is the church. Our vocation also governs us and our society. Civil government must be one form of government among many, and a minor one. Paganism and Baal worship in all its forms made the state and its rulers into a God, or God walking on earth, and gave them total overrule in all spheres. The prophets denounced all such idolatry, and the apostles held: “We ought to obey God rather than men.”

From the days of the Caesars to the heads of democratic states and Marxist empires, the ungodly have seen what Christians too often fail to see, namely, that Biblical faith requires and creates a rival government to the humanistic state.”

And so on. If you want to read the rest of that paper on the meaning of theocracy, write to us for Chalcedon position paper number 15.

You see the point. If we are going to have true freedom we cannot surrender ourselves to institutions. We ourselves must govern under God according to His law, and God in His law provides the framework, so that people on the grassroots level can do the basic government. This was by the way that early Medieval Europe was governed, it was essentially by Christians, working in a variety of agencies. And this is why in no other church than perhaps the Catholic church has there been a more persistent strain of anti-clericalism, that is hostility to the clergy in the name of the Catholic faith. A good many years ago when I was definitely much younger, I recall being with another scholar at a major Catholic university, this was a Jesuit university. One of the professors there who rightly had the reputation of being one of the strongest Catholics around was discussing a number of things with regard to the church with some passion and intensity; and he saw the amazement and shock on my face at his blunt language concerning certain aspects of the church, and he turned to me and he said: “What you don’t understand is that anti-clericalism is a Catholic duty.” Well, that represented the older strain, the strain that saw the Christian faith as the basic responsibility of the laity, and this is what we must recapture, all churches.

I mentioned earlier Medieval and Feudal Europe. Turning to another work, this one published in 1976 and I believe out of print, Geoffrey Barraclough, The Crucible of Europe, the Ninth and Tenth Centuries in European History. It was published by the University of California press. Barracloughs name is spelled Barraclough.

Now Barraclough had some interesting things to say which concern us here. Quoting from page 97: “For this reason feudalism has been described, not as a source of anarchy, but as a reaction against anarchy. For the old principle of government which had perished had substituted a new principle, the subordination of man to man in a long hierarchy through vassalage, a society based not on equality of all under the state, and a direct connection between each individual and the government, but on classes and class gradations, a hierarchical society.”

Now Barraclough has some very interesting things to say on the nature of that gradation, vassalage as it was known. He says and I quote: “Vassalage, which in origin had contained elements of servitude, service in return for land was ennobled and became the typical relationship of the higher ranks of French society. Time and time again, almost without exception, the same man was Lord and Vassal, and the result was the growth of a sense of social equality and solidarity within the noble class. Because a lord was so often someone else’s vassal, he had no interest in suppressing the rights of vassalage; because a vassal was himself lord over others, he had every interest in maintaining the rights of lordship. In France therefore, vassalage although it meant dependence on others, did not imply subordination, but denoted freedom or nobility. It was a relationship into which only a free or noble man might enter, and so from the anarchy produced by the Viking invasion, a new free class emerged, a class which was at one and the same time free and noble, and which claimed its freedom and nobility because it could devote itself entirely to the profession of arms. Thus France saw in the 9th and 10th centuries a profound social revolution, the creation of a new society, long before such a social revolution was completed elsewhere.”

And so on. You get the point; vassalage, subordination from our perspective, actually meant that you had a place, that you had an obligation to others, but it was a chain of obligation, and it established you as a free man. It was free because you were a responsible creature.

I think that helps us to understand something in the Bible, because this kind of thinking does appear in scripture. For example, Paul tells the Corinthians that the woman should have her head covered, because it stood for power in the sight of the angels. Now every kind of weird interpretation has been given to that text, except to take it at face value. What did it mean? Well, the reference was to a woman who was under the authority of a man, her husband, or prior to that her father. And her covered head meant she was in a position where she was under authority and yet had power.

The modern mind doesn’t grasp that, and yet within the past century, within my lifetime in some areas of the west, this still had meaning. It meant this: women wore a bonnet when they worked in the garden, they wore it when they went to town, they wore it whenever they were outside; and if they were working in the house and going and coming outside, even if it were in an isolated farm or ranch house, they wore their bonnet. They wore it because it meant they were under authority, and therefore had power. It signified that they were under the protection of a man, and that every good man who respected that and wanted respect for it for his wife and daughters would honor the bonnet or the head covering which they had. So it was protection. Both in the days of Paul and on the western frontier and in many, many places over the centuries as a result of this text and before Paul ever made this statement, a woman with a head uncovered was taken to be a prostitute, one who was not protected. In fact, Rome made it illegal for prostitutes to have their head covered.

Well, this is akin to the whole concept of vassalage. Vassalage implies a hierarchy of people who have [tape skips]

Are free, they are under authority and therefore they have authority, they are a part of a chain of authority. We have lost all sense of this. As a matter of fact, the state worked to destroy this because the state wanted to create only one authority, itself. Thus in the 18th century in more than one Catholic country, as witness the Austro Hungarian Empire, the Imperial policy was very definitely against the church and against Feudalism; it was trying to destroy any concept of hierarchy. It ended serfdom, not because it saw an evil in serfdom, but in order to destroy status, to reduce all citizens to an equal level before the state, and therefore to free them from mutual responsibilities.

Now granted, serfdom was wrong in many respects. But the reason why Austro Hungary destroyed it, and other countries as well, and why they seized monasteries and destroyed the whole system of hierarchalism was to make all men equally slaves, ultimately, to the state. And freedom was destroyed when a hierarchical society was destroyed, it led in time to anarchy. This was very real, it can be documented in one country after another, in Europe on revolutionary scales, but in this country also.

For example, turning now to a book dealing with something in this country: Lefferts A Loetscher, Facing the Enlightenment and Pietism: Archibald Alexander and the Founding of Princeton Theological Seminary. A book published by the Greenwood press in Westport Connecticut, and published in 1983, and still in print.

It is a very interesting account of the founding of Princeton seminary by Loetscher, who died a few years ago and was a professor of Church history there. Archibald Alexander was the key man in the founding of Princeton seminary, and one of the great Calvinistic scholars, albeit he was heavily influenced by the rationalism, the common sense philosophy of Reed, the Scottish philosopher.

The point that concerns us here in this book, and there is much of merit in it, is this: that after the French Revolution and after the rise of Revivalism in this country, there was a growing denunciation of the ministerial profession; in other words, of a professional clergy. One response to this was to create seminaries and make ministers all the more professional than the old apprentice system had been. Under the apprentice system a prominent theologian pastor would have a number of students who studied under him. Then they would go out and work on the field for a year, but while they were with the man studying, reading theology, they also assisted in the work of that parish.

This gave way to the seminary system, which was hardly an improvement. But in the process, during the Great Awakening, some insane things occurred: the rejection of any kind of professional clergy. Groups pulling aside, each man feeling that the Holy Spirit had created them into the true pastor, and others voting them down because each one felt that the Holy Spirit had endowed him to be the pastor. So that all kinds of problems resulted.

We have had, as a result of the forces that have been at work since the Renaissance, a rebellion against authority, and a rebellion against anyone having authority over us, against any chain of command. And this is why we are less and less a free people, because freedom and vassalage go hand in hand. Vassalage was the system of mutual responsibility, and in any system of mutual responsibility, there are some who have somewhat more authority than others. What the state did by leveling all men was to destroy that, so that authority in the home, in the school, and in the church have been eroded.

To illustrate this, let me turn to a book by Gail Thain Parker. This is an older work, published in 1979 and out of print. The title of the book is: The Writing on the Wall, Inside Higher Education in America. Dr. Parker was president of Bennington college from 1972 to 1976, and she was prior to that assistant professor of history at Harvard.

This is a book about her experiences as a faculty member, and especially as a college president; and it is an interesting account of faculty unreasonableness. And she writes about how everyone feels they are the best authority around in a college faculty. For example, and I quote, page 17: “As uncomfortable as I am about the willingness of many administrators to imagine they’re doing their job if the numbers add up, it makes me more unhappy to think of faculty members who insist on fine distinctions in their own fields, trying to argue that a reduction of 2.7% or 7.2% in faculty size portends the end of Western Civilization. I have watched the executive committee of one faculty spend three hours a week for a full semester refusing either to approve cuts suggested by the administration, or to make counter proposals; because they did not want to go on record as having acknowledged that the college was going broke. It was not that any of them believed the deficit was manageable or that judicious reduction in the size of the faculty couldn’t be made without violating contracts and damaging programs. But they knew that if they acknowledged the necessity for decisive action they would be implicated in those decisions and would be accused by their colleagues of treachery.”

Well, she goes on to describe how so many of the faculty feel that they know what is best for everything in the university, and she quotes Walter Coffman to the effect that what they feel is a diffused and free floating resentment in search of an object, and every time an administrator rightly or wrongly does something, then they feel that the end of the world has come.

Well, all this is a part of the decline of authority, the decline of a sense of responsibility; everybody wants to play God over all others. But to go back again to the Medieval Era. One of the things that contributed to the decline of the church and is doing it again, and has done it in the last century dramatically, especially in Protestantism, was the kind of thinking that arose in the church especially among the monks. Some of this is described in a variety of works, and let me cite just one, Eleanor Duckett. Duckett, Death and Life in the Tenth Century, published in 1967 and again in 71, and now out of print.

She describes what happened, how the eschatology of monasticism became increasingly very pessimistic. The last days were on the brink of coming, so that the end of the world was very near; end of the world thinking began to dominate the world of that day, especially among the monks. This of course made them less interested in the world around them, it led to antinomianism on their part, they were no longer interested in Biblical law because the world was coming to an end.

As a result, the monks became less and less relevant, and the center of the church shifted from the monks and their work to the parish priest and his work. But as this kind of thinking spread it weakened the parish church as well.

Well, we have seen something similar. We have seen as premillenialism and aumillenialism have arisen in Protestantism, the church has withdrawn from the world, has become less and less relevant to the world around it, and more and more concerned with waiting for the end, not bringing the world under the dominion of Christ.

The early church had a very different perspective- this is not to say that this type of thinking was not present in the early church, but in much of its ritual it had a radically different perspective as well as in its faith and action.

When a person was baptized in the early church, and I cite this from Walter Oetting, The Church of the Catacombs, again an out of print work from 1964. When someone was baptized, they were immediately given milk and honey, to symbolize that they were babes in Christ, but also to show that they were now in the Promised Land, the land flowing with milk and honey. As a result, just as Moses and Joshua told the Israelites, the land before you is a land flowing with milk and honey, go in and possess it. So the new convert was told: “You are now a new creation, and the world before you is the new kingdom, the promised land, and you are to go in and possess it.”

Let me quote a statement on this very briefly from Hippolytus, one of the early church fathers: “And milk and honey mixed together for the fulfillment of the promise to fathers, which spoke of a land flowing with milk and honey, namely Christ’s flesh which He gave, by which they who believe are nourished by faith; he making sweet the bitter things of the heart by the gentleness of his word.”

The milk and honey therefore was an important part of the service of the early church whereby a Christian became a Christian, was baptized into the faith.

Well, I have taken quite a bit of time to deal with this subject because I do believe it is important; and we as Christians have a paramount responsibility in this, not only to believe and obey and to act, but to finance kingdom activities, to finance those men, whether in church state or school, or elsewhere who are doing the Lord’s work. We are not going to turn the world around by waiting for someone else to do it, nor are we going to be of any help if all we can do is to pat someone on the back and tell them: “God bless you.”

In recent years we have had a number of men run for political office, and Christians have told them, and these men have told me of this again and again- “I think it is wonderful,” they say, “that a Christian like you is running for office, or for state office. I am all for you brother, and I will certainly pray for you.” And they don’t support them. And he winds up a pile of debts, having lost because the Christian community did not support him.

We are not going to turn the world around with that kind of evasion.

Well, on to something else now, to a book just recently published, 1985 by Anchor Press, the division of Doubleday, Jonathan Kozol: Illiterate America. Jonathan Kozol is a man who has written a number of books on the subject of education and illiteracy, some of them fairly good. This one I cannot recommend, it has some good things to say in the first chapter, but after that it gets weaker and weaker. But what he does say, and he is passionately concerned, is that we are becoming an illiterate people- the first chapter is titled: “A Third of the Nation Cannot Read These Words.” When he says a third of the nation he is talking about a third of the adults, but with the growing illiteracy it will be more than that in time.

Let me cite some of his data. I quote: “25 million American adults cannot read the poison warnings on a can of pesticide, a letter from their child’s teacher, or the front page of a daily paper; and an additional 35 million read only at a level which is less than equal to the full survival needs of our society. Together, these 60 million people represent more than 1/3rd of the entire adult population- the largest number of illiterate adults are white, native born Americans. In proportion to population however the figures are higher for Blacks and Hispanics than for Whites. 16% percent of white adults, 44% of blacks, and 56% of Hispanic citizens are functional or marginal illiterates. Figures for the younger generation of black adults are increasing. 47% of all Black 17 year olds are functionally illiterate- that figure is expected to climb to 50% by 1990.”

He has more statistics like this, and the statistics are bad for example in the state of Utah, where less than 5% of the population is Black or Hispanic. It is possible for someone to quarrel with Kozol and to say- and Kozol would probably agree, although most would not- that we have always had a high illiteracy rate in this country. Possibly, to a degree there is truth in that in that we had at one time a large slave population that was illiterate, and we had every year a flood of immigrants, who as far as English was concerned were illiterate. Even then however, these people, the immigrants in particular, were very quickly taught in night schools and by church agencies, and became literate. But more, there is this factor: when you look at the situation in the past, it was the outsiders who were the illiterate, the slaves and the immigrants.

Today, in the best schools in the best neighborhoods we have more and more students who are functionally illiterate. In fact, in recent years we have seen a marked change in presidential campaigns: Herbert Hoover was the last candidate for President or Vice President who wrote his own speeches. Well, you can say with modern campaigning it is necessary for a man to have a ghost writer because he has so much coverage, and with television he can’t use the same speech over and over again in one place after another. And that is true. On the other hand, many of the presidents and vice presidential candidates have not been capable of writing a good speech. As a matter of fact the speech writer of one presidential candidate who became later a vice president, this in fairly recent years, said that it was necessary to write the speeches with very simple words because the man was barely literate. This was a very wealthy, powerful man.

Now this kind of thing is not uncommon. So, instead of illiteracy being on the borders of our culture, or among the outsiders, it is at the heart of our culture, it effects every segment of our society, and it is a growing problem. The irony is that we are so stupid, as a civil order, that the very people who are doing something to remedy this situation, the Christian schools and the homeschools, are being persecuted and are in the courts constantly over this.

Well, on to something else. Sometimes we Americans seem to think that every kind of stupid thing ever done by any Civil Government is done by the United States. Well, I have news for you: I just discovered the most stupid law I have ever heard of, and it was not passed by Congress or any one of the fifty states, or any board of county commissioners, or any city. It is a French law. It is a law which says that if you have been a psychiatric patient over a given period of time, and also been in a psychiatric hospital over a given period of time, you can qualify yourself as a psychiatrist! I am not kidding, that is literally true. Let me quote from Fenton Bresler, the Mystery of George Simenon, a biography. Speaking of Simenon’s second wife from whom he has been separated many years, the author writes: “Denise now occasionally practices as a psychiatrist from her second house at Avignon. By a quirk of French law, if someone has been the patient of a psychiatrist long enough, they can take on patients themselves.”

Now, if I were a French Psychiatrist, I would feel impelled to advertise that I was not an ex-patient, but I had a diploma from an institution. But perhaps they have some civil rights law that says it is illegal to advertise that way. I would say however that a good runner up to this French law for absurdity is our law in several states in this country which require insurance companies to make no examination for aids for health insurance; and given the fact that the average health insurance company has to pay out a $140,000 before an aids patient dies, this can destroy the health insurance programs. More states are thinking of passing such laws. Now that is hardly an intelligent law.

This book on Simenon is an interesting one, but hardly one I would recommend, Simenon was a very able writer, but scarcely anything but an existentialist who was decadent. He and his wife describe themselves as sacred monsters, which gives you an idea of the way they live.

Now on to another item briefly which one of you sent and I neglected to jot down your name on this, it is from the New Republic for November 1985, and I quote: “At a meeting of the Inter-American Indian Conference at Santa Fe early this month, 800 Indian leaders from North and South America gathered with scholars of Indian affairs to deplore violations of human rights and threats to native cultures by white people. (Vaksimo Amadias?) a specialist on the Shuar Indians of the Amazon, complained that government officials and missionaries had compelled the Shuars to stop the practice of head hunting because it was not civilized, and according to the Boston Globe: “(Amadeo?) said that the tribe traditionally had shrunk the heads of its victims, displayed them on the roofs of their huts, and buried then the heads in the earth. Head hunting,” he said, “was an integral part of their religious life and their understanding of agricultural cycles. Now the Shuar culture has disintegrated, when they stopped head hunting they lost everything,” he said; “just as the sub continental Indians lost everything when the White man forced them to stop burning widows.”

Well, I have a suggestion for these bleeding hearts: why don’t they go to South America and volunteer themselves to the Shuar Indians to have their heads shrunk so that the Shuar Indians can perpetuate their culture?

Well, now on to something else. One of the finest magazines in this country is one which gets too little attention, it is the Lincoln Review, a quarterly journal, edited by one of our strong Chalcedon friends, J.A. Parker. It is a periodical to which I have contributed, it is published by the Lincoln Institute for Research and Education, at 1735 De Salles Street, NW Washington D.C., 20036. The subscription is twelve dollars a year.

The magazine is primarily one written by black intellectuals who are militantly conservative. J.A. Parker is himself a strong adherent of Von Miesian Economics, as well as of the Reformed Faith. The articles in this particular issue for Summer 1985 include a fine one on the Foundation of National Security by Ambassador Allen L. Keyes, then one on Trashing Free Speech, a review of a book by Benjamin Hart on Poisoned Ivy; a very interesting book, I won’t say more about that because our time is running out, and I want to deal very briefly with another article by (Betty Newkirk Simms?) Entitled the DAR Marian Anderson Incident, Another View.

Those of you were are old enough to remember what happened in the 30’s and how the Daughters of the American Revolution were slandered because they supposedly denied Constitutional Hall to Marion Anderson would find this article interesting. The point is, the whole thing was manufactured by the press. Marion Andersons agent insisted on a particular date; the hall was already engaged for that date, and they would take no other. But the Liberal Press played it up as though the DAR was racially prejudiced. Moreover, nothing was said and I quote: “The fact that Constitutional Hall was the only private auditorium which did not practice segregation in a segregated city was ignored by the news media. To cast the DAR in the role of villain still makes a good story, even if it is years old. The truth is irrelevant to the purveyors of sensationalism.” An excellent journal, I commend it to you, it deserves our support.

Moreover, J Parker would like to have gifts because what he wants to do is to take strong Conservative and Christian Black leaders, and circulate them across the country at college and university campuses, to give the students another perspective on the black community and the issues of life in this country.

Well, our time is nearly up, I have enjoyed this session especially, it has given me an opportunity to develop in particular some ideas I have been giving more than a little attention to with regard to our culture today. I hope you like it if I take time, from time to time, to concentrate on a subject as I did most of this hour. If so, let me know and I will be ready to do it from time to time. I have a number of subjects that I have in the back of my mind to give a like treatment, but I’ll do so if you feel it will be of interest. Thank you for listening, and God Bless you all.