That is the key to history. Terrific energy is expended—civilizations are built up—excellent institutions devised; but each time something goes wrong. Some fatal flaw always brings the selfish and cruel people to the top and it all slides back into misery and ruin. In fact, the machine conks. It seems to start up all right and runs a few years, and then it breaks down. They are trying to run it on the wrong juice. That is what Satan has done to us humans.
What Satan put into the heads of our remote ancestors was the idea that they … could … invent some sort of happiness for themselves outside God, apart from God. And out of that hopeless attempt has come nearly all that we call human history—money, poverty, ambition, war, prostitution, classes, empires, slavery—the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy
If joy itself be continually dampened by the thought of its own continuous annihilation, then only fleeting pleasures remain, unconnected in time. … When pleasures become disconnected, the intense ones stand out in prospect like branches stripped of leaves. They are thus sought directly; raw experience as such becomes the goal. Work becomes drudgery, nature becomes boring, humor falls flat, melodious music fades, children are nuisances (which they then become), sympathy and affection are perceived as ‘sticky,’ … chastity is no longer worth the sacrifice, and freedom isn’t worth a fight.
When men cease to aspire to the ideal, the good, to self-restraint—whether in their arts or in their lives—they do not just stand still, but actually turn the other way, finding self-fulfillment in self-indulgence, and in an obsession with those three ultimate expressions of the totally self-centered life: sex, violence and insanity.
Because eternalism sees man in just that perspective—eternal—it of necessity concerns itself with things that appear to be either trivial to—or which fall within—secularism’s zone of indifference. In a sense, eternalism sees the individual and his potential as one might view an acorn and the subsequent forest. Secularism sees the individual as a very important and very real, but temporary, phenomenon in the cosmic landscape—which leads inevitably to other values and emphasis. When life-style takes the form of “me” and “now” rather than “us” and “always,” apparent consequences are inevitable.
We rightfully worry about taming our technology so that it serves us, rather than dominates us. But we cannot tame our technology without taming ourselves. We are rightfully concerned about taming our cities so that they are habitable and desirable to live in. But we cannot tame our cities without taming ourselves. We are rightfully worried about the swelling bureaucracies of government, which need to respond to us—not to regiment us. But we cannot tame those bureaucracies unless we first tame our appetites, for a bloated bureaucracy is merely a manifestation of citizen appetites, demands, and the subsequent need for external controls.
If we are not able to build into ourselves and our families the brakes of self-restraint and self-discipline, we are apt, unwittingly, to create tyranny in our government or anarchy in our citizenry. If we push onto the government the management not only of our economy, but also the management of our morals, the civil servants of the future will be neither civil nor servants.
Eternalism looks at long-range outcomes as well as temporary needs; it places great emphasis on the shaping influences at the front end of life—on love, correct principles, wise discipline, and on a nutritive home atmosphere. Good homes are still the best source of good humans.
Without the Church, revelation, and its absolute doctrinal anchors, Church members would also probably follow the fads of the day—as some churches have done—but as Samuel Callan warned, the church that weds itself to the culture of the day will “be a widow within each succeeding age.
Whereas eternalism strikes a balance between self-denial and asceticism on the one hand, and sensualism and the celebration of feeling on the other, secularism seems to slide into one or the other of these crevasses of consequence.
Eternalism focuses on values and behavior which, where followed, result in either enlightened use of wealth (the individual truly feels he is the concerned custodian of wealth in behalf of others and so behaves) or in those remarkable but few episodes (the City of Enoch, the small branches of Middle-East Christians in the apostolic area, and the brief but happy period, A.D. 36–201, on the American hemisphere) where the lines between rich and poor were dissolved by the warmth and righteousness of practicing Christians.
Secularism often seizes upon a single, true principle and elevates it above its peer principles. This act of isolation does not make the principle seized any less true, but it strips that principle of its supporting principles. One can be incarcerated within the prison of one principle.
The new secular “moral geometry” with its fluid lines, alien angles, and restless points, rejects the idea of divine design in the universe, but then naively seeks to muster righteous indignation in behalf of the disadvantaged—but without any corresponding concern over the need for non-economic morality—the very values necessary to make indignation righteous!
Eternalism focuses on the individual and on those processes in which the individual is taught correct principles and then is given optimum opportunity to govern himself. Indeed, nowhere does the contrast appear to be more stark between the basic approaches to man’s problems than in the focus of eternalism on the individual as the basic human reality (and next the family). Where reform and desirable change are concerned, eternalism opts for conditions that facilitate true individual growth, letting the consequences of any successes ripple outward. Secularism tends to want to deal increasingly with systems, governments, labels, groups, etc.—with adjustments in the things outside man, apparently hoping that, somehow, changing the external scenery will change the things inside man.
For those of us who see the human condition as one in which there is more stupidity than cupidity, more apathy than conspiracy, there is no real place to begin but with ourselves!