I do not know what you could say about a day in which you have seen four beautiful Sunsets. A nation of humans exits, because each individual believes oneself inspired by the Divine Soul which also inspires all beings. Change yourself, ground yourself in your own instincts, and the huge World will come round. American is unique because it had a close connection with England and that enabled Americans to concentrate on developing the continent while drawing on the mother country’s distinguished humans of science, able artists, writers of eminence. This exclusive circumstance had enabled the former colonists to enjoy the treasures of the intellect without labouring to amass them and to neglect pursuits without relapsing into barbarism. However, this also marked the end of the beginning of the American intellectual journey because people would look back and think that a gang of uneducated poor people developed the nations, when it was intellectuals from Europe and African royalty and professionals who provided the labour. People do not focus on the quality of the people who made American so prosperous, instead people now come to America because of what the country can do for them, not for what they can do for the country. #RandolphHarris 1 of 22

The sweeping Enlightenment in the young nation that had given birth to the American Revolution and the Constitution—a vision tinged with grandeur and grandiosity that, although it inspired deep reverence, was poorly understood by most Americans in the 1890s as it is today. The men of science were the tiny minority who had been exposed to learning; to create the habits of mind that had preciously belonged only to an elite minority, it would obviously be necessary to extend learning to ordinary citizens on a scale undreamed of in societies based on the principle of aristocracy of birth rather than aristocracy of intellect. This vision was anything but anti-intellectual; in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the best educated Americans—those steeped in Enlightenment concepts—were most likely to favour the support of schools by general taxation as well as the creation of a national, publicly supported university for outstanding scholars from every state. Yet there was immense disagreement about what the role of government ought to be in promoting the education of both common and uncommon humans; and the victory of those in the revolutionary generation who wished the federal government to do nothing would cast a long shadow over American intellectual life, and contribute to the regional disparities in education that still exert a formidable anti-intellectual influence on American culture. #RandolphHarris 2 of 22

The founders of the American nation were, of course, anything but common humans. More than half of the fifty-five members of the Constitutional Convention had been educated at colleges in America or Europe, mainly England. Others, most notably Benjamin Franklin, were self-educated scholar of international renown. James Madison, wishing to enlighten his fellow delegates about previous experiments in federal unions, presented extensive material from his own studies of confederations in cities and states in both ancient and more recent times. The most influential and admired men of the era—Madison, Franklin, Jefferson, John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, and Benjamin Rush, to name only a few—were also polymaths at a time when it was still considered possible and necessary to comprehend every area of human knowledge and experience. The health of democracy, as so many of the founders had proclaimed, depended on an education citizenry, but many Americans also believed that too much learning might set one citizen above another and violate the very democratic ideals that education was supposed to foster. The sort of education most valued by ordinary Americas was meant to train a person for whatever practical task that lay at hand, not to one into a Man Thinking. #RandolphHarris 3 of 22

The Constitution’s secular provisions came into being with support from a coalition of freethinkers and devout evangelicals, who believed that any state involvement with religion was an insult to God as well as a threat to religious liberty. Outright atheists were probably nonexistent. Eighteenth-century American freethought appealed most strongly to the best educated members of society, including not only the minuscule number of college graduates but much larger numbers of the self-educated, while emotional evangelical revivalism had a much stronger appeal to the uneducated and the poor. A year after his American scholar oration, Ralph Waldo Emerson served his last ties to organized religion when he addressed the faculty of Harvard Divinity School and told the assembled clerics that a human could find salvation only through one’s individual soul’s search for truth and not through the teachings of any church. Thomas Paine famously declared, “My own mind is my own religion.” The more harsh the circumstances of daily life, the more potent are the simple and universal emotional themes of struggle, sin, repentance, forgiveness, and redemption that form the core of evangelical fundamentalist religion. The need for emotional solace explained the appeal of fundamentalism not only to settlers on the frontier but to enslaved Blacks in the south. #RandolphHarris 4 of 22

Ignorance is the greatest enemy of the common good. Thomas Jefferson’s interest in the diffusion of learning at public expense did not of course extent to enslaved people and women. In the 1870s and 1880s, various legislator from New England introduced bills to provide federal assistance to education for the poorest states and to hold them to some minimum, nationally determined standards. The proposals got no further in Congress than George Washington’s effort to establish a national university in the 1790s. Local control of schools meant not only that children in the poorest areas of the country would have the worst school facilities and teachers with the worst training but also that the content of education in the most backward areas of the country would be determined by backward people. In Europe, the subject matter of science and history lessons taught to children in all publicly supported schools has always been determined by highly educated employees of central education ministries. In America, the image of an educated elite laying down national guidelines for schools was and is a bete norie for those who considered local control of education a right almost as sacred as any of the rights enumerated in the Constitution. #RandolphHarris 5 of 22

Reverential images of self-education have been deeply embedded in the American psyche from the colonial period and persist today, in an era characters by a mania for specialized education credentials that Emerson could not have imagined. Yet these images have cut two ways in shaping American attitudes toward intellect and education: they combine respect for learning itself with the message that there is something especially virtuous about learning acquired in the absence of a formal structure provided by society. After all, Ben Franklin invented the lightening rod and bifocals without government support for his research, and Abe Lincoln grew up to become president without ever attending a university. That Franklin was a genius and that Lincoln bitterly regretted his lack of systematic formal schooling is left out of the self-congratulatory story of American self-education. Tinged with a moralistic romanticism, the American exaltation of the self-educated human is linked to the iconic notion of rugged individualism and has often been used to refute any idea that education is, for government, an obligation of justice. If the government does not provide you with an education, you still have the obligation to seek one in order to better your life and society. #RandolphHarris 6 of 22

In this version of American history, Lincoln was a better American, for having struggled to learn against the grain of his immediate environment. The triumph of the extraordinary self-educated human is transformed into moral and social lesson: If you want to learn badly enough, no one can stop you, and the community has no special obligation to create conditions that provide support for the intellectual development of its members. Intellectuals themselves were conflicted about the relationship between formal, systematic learning and self-education. There is a lot to learn from the past, but people must also be prepared to make their own contributions to the sum of cultural knowledge. Thee contributions are fed by the particular social and political circumstances of American life and are rooted in a broader concept of democratic individuality under which each person as the right and the responsibility to develop one’s capabilities to the fullest. The system of natural liberty assets that a basic structure satisfying the principle of efficient in which positions are open to those able and willing to strive for them will lead to a just distribution. Assigning rights and duties in this way is thought to give a scheme which allocates wealth and income, authority and responsibility, in a fair way whatever this allocation turns out to be. The doctrine includes an important element of pure procedural justice which is carried over to the other interpretations. #RandolphHarris 7 of 22

Allocative efficiency is a principle not originally intended to apply to institutions but to particular configurations of the economic system, for example, to distribution of goods among consumers or modes of production. The principle holds that a configuration is efficient whenever it is impossible to change it so as to make some persons (at least one) better off without at the same time making other persons (at least one) worse off. Thus a distribution of a stock of commodities among certain individuals is efficient if there exists no redistribution of these goods that improves the circumstances of at leas one of these individuals without another being disadvantaged. The organization of production is efficient if there is no way to alter inputs so as to produce more of some commodity without producing less of another. For if we could produce more of one good without having to give up some other, the larger stock of goods could be used to better the circumstances of some persons without making that of others any worse. These applications of the principle show that it is, indeed, a principle of efficiency. A distribution of goods or a scheme of production is inefficient when there are ways of doing still a better for some individuals without doing any worse for others. I shall accept this principle to judge the efficiency of economic and social arrangements. #RandolphHarris 8 of 22

Natural liberty permits distributive shared to be properly influenced by adding to the requirement of careers open to talents so people have a fair equality of opportunity. Those with similar abilities and skills should have similar life chances. More specifically, assuming that there is a distribution of natural assets, those who are at the same level of talent and ability, and have the same willingness to use them, should have the same prospects of success regardless of their initial place in the social system, that is, irrespective of the income class into which they are born. In all sectors of society there should be roughly equal prospects of culture and achievement for everyone similarly motivated and endowed. The expectations of those with the same abilities and aspirations should not be affected by their social class. To accomplish this end it is necessary to impose further basic structural conditions on the social system. Free market arrangements must be set within a framework of political and legal institutions which regulate the overall trends of economic events and preserves the social conditions necessary for fair equality of opportunity. Motivation, or value generally, is part of the dynamic experience itself, and is intrinsic to the experience and is not superimposed by some drive or force external to the experience. Experience itself is forceful and self-driven. #RandolphHarris 9 of 22

The emphasis, however, in this description of naïve experience is not on either the objective reality of the alleged referent of experience or the subjective reality of the experiencer. This dichotomization of experience into organism and environment is legitimate only from the point of view of an external observer during the experience or before and/or after the experience relative to the experiencer. The absoluteness of experience concerns the immediacy of the dynamic experience. The experience is absolute as long as the object is not identified as such and the perceiver is not conscious of one’s relationship to the object as perceiver; or it is absolute as long as the relation of the simultaneousness of object and perceiver itself has become the absolute experience. The absolute s that which is called the immediately apprehended differentiated aesthetic continuum with both terms, the object and subject, reduced to one, experience. Whatever you may wish to call this absoluteness of dynamic experience, this statement of immediate relationship, is irrelevant. James Joyce has suggested the use of the term “epiphany” in the brief discussion of aesthetics in Stephan Hero and this may well be accepted because of the seemingly miraculous element in all experience. Recognition must be given to this existential consciousness. #RandolphHarris 10 of 22

Of all that which from a relativistic aspect could have been the particular relationships of organism and environment, only the experience did in fact occur and that is the given, that is the condition of existence and for good or bad you are stuck with it. Perhaps the thinker could have had other thoughts and perhaps other contents were available yet the particular thought as the combination of specific thinker and content was absolute and irrevocable. The particular experience experienced, the experiencer goes on from there. This absoluteness of immediate apprehension, or the epiphany of aesthetic reality, this dynamic experience in itself is easy to recognize in one’s response to inventions, scientific discoveries, moral statements (categorical imperatives), political or economic principles, historical events, the act of love, and to works of art, for these have a discreteness, a standing alone quality which frequently tends to prevent comparisons or other types of relational activity with other areas of experience. In a sense no continuum or choice scale is immediately recognized. These events have the arresting and numbing quality of a thorough seduction. For the moment, the individual is captivated and encapsulated from all the rest of the World. #RandolphHarris 11 of 22

One becomes selfless and seems to exist neither in time or space, are not likely to arise. One is the experience and vice versa, and seems to move in a relatively effortless way towards—satiation. This is most frequently called the aesthetic experience. And  yet it is but an aspect of the whole of experience and as such can be treated as noncorrelative. It is but one factor in the matrix of experience, a factor which enables the uniqueness of each experience, a moment of exact time and space which makes the past past and the object always that object, the subject always that subject, and no other. Such is the dimension in which all experience is discrete, unique, and limited in time and space. By such is meant the absolute. In order to take up God’s word as a sword, we must have it at hand, in our hearts. We must be like the psalmist who said, “I have hidden your word in my heart that I might not sin against you,” reports Psalm 119.11. To hide God’s word in our hearts is to store it or treasure it in our own hearts against a time of future need. It is akin to our expression “to day for a rainy day.” This principle of storing up God’s word has a much wider application than only keeping us from sin, especially as we tend to think of a more narrow description of sin as immorality in pleasures of the flesh, lying, stealing, and the like. #RandolphHarris 12 of 22

The word, stored in the heart, provides a mental depository for the Holy Spirit to use to mediate His grace to us, whatever our need for grace might be. I had a significant experience of this myself. A phone call from a distant city brought some very disturbing news about someone I am close to. I went to bed that night feeling as if I had just received an emotional “kick in the stomach.” The next morning, however, I awakened with 1 Peter 5.7 going through my mind, “Cast all your anxiety on him because he cares for you.” As I was getting dressed, the verse kept going through my mind, and I was given grace by God’s Spirit to believe that He did care in this specific situation. I was thus able to cast that particular anxiety on Him, because I had received grace to help in time of need through His word. That one specific incident comes to mind because it is so recent. However, it is only in a series of incidents occurring frequently in my life—and I am sure in the lives of all other believers who store up God’s word in their hearts. “The divine utterance, the product of the Spirit, lends itself readily to the believer who has laid it up in his heart for effective use in the moment of danger against any attempt to seduce him for allegiance to Christ,” reports Ephesians 6.17. #RandolphHarris 13 of 22

So, if you desire to appropriate God’s grace, you must have the sword of the Spirit—the word of God—available in your mind for the Spirit to use. In fact the structure of Ephesians 6.17 provides a very instructive insight into the interaction between the Holy Spirit and the believer. Paul said we are to take the sword of the Spirit. That is something we must do. And yet it is the Spirit’s sword, not ours. He must make it effective. The bare quoting of Scripture does not make it effective in our hearts, only the Spirit can do that. However, God will not make His sword effective unless we take it up. Often God’s word is not made effective immediately. In fact, there are many times when I struggle over an issue for a period of days, mulling over several pertinent passages of Scripture and crying out for grace, before the Holy Spirit finally makes them effective and gives His grace, helping in time of need. The Spirit of God is sovereign in His working, and we cannot squeeze Him into the mold of our spiritual formulas—id est, pray for grace, quote some verses, and receive a guaranteed answer. God not only has His own ways of working, but also His own timetable. Sometimes God grants grace to help almost immediately as He did in my most recent experience with 1 Peter 5.7. #RandolphHarris 14 of 22

At other times, God allows us to struggle for days, perhaps even weeks or month, years or decades before we receive the grace to help. However, regardless of the delays God may impose of us, we must continue to come to the throne of grace believing His promise to grant grace to help, and we must continue to resort to appropriate Scripture until God makes it effective in our hearts. It is our responsibility to take up the sword of the Spirit; it is God’s prerogative to make it effective. “And behold, not it came to pass that our next object was to obtain the city of Manti; but behold, there was no way that we could lead them out of the city by our small bands. For behold, they remembered that which we had hitherto done; therefore we could not decoy them away from their strongholds. And they were so much more numerous than was our army that we durst not go forth and attack them in their strongholds. Yea, and it became expedient that we should employ of men to the maintaining those parts of the land which we had regained of our possessions; therefore it became experience that we should wait, that we might receive more strength from the land of Zarahemla and also a new supply of provisions. And it came to pass that I thus did send an embassy to the governor of our land, to acquaint him concerning the affairs of our people. #RandolphHarris 15 of 22

“And it came to pass that we did wait to receive provisions and strength from the land of Zarahemla. However, behold, this profit us but little; for the Lamanites were also receiving great strength from day to day, and also many provisions; and thus were our circumstances at this period of time. And the Lamanites were sallying forth against us from time to time, resolving by stratagem to destroy us; nevertheless we could not come to battle with them, because of their retreats and their strongholds. And it came to pass that we did wait in these difficult circumstances for the space of many months, even until we were about to perish for the want of food. However, it came to pass that we did receive food, which was guarded to us by an army of two thousand men to our assistance; and this is all the assistance which we did receive, to defend ourselves and our country from falling into the hands of our enemies, yea, to content with an enemy which was innumerable. And now the cause of these our embarrassment, or the cause why they did not send more strength unto us, we knew not; therefore we were grieved and also filled with fear, lest by any means the judgments of God should come upon our land, to our overthrow and utter destruction. #RandolphHarris 16 of 22

“Therefore we did pour out our souls in prayer to God, that he would strengthen us and deliver us out of the hands of our enemies, yes, and also give us strength that we might retain our cities, and our lands, and our possessions, for the support of our people. Yea, and it came to pass that the Lord our God did visit us the assurances that he would deliver us; yea, insomuch that he did speak peace to our souls, and did grant us great faith, and did cause us that we should hope for our deliverance in him. And we did take courage with our small force which we had received, and were fixed with a determination to conquer our enemies, and to maintain our lands, and our possessions, and our wives, and our children, and the cause of our liberty. And thus we did go forth with all our might against the Laminates, who were in the city of Manti; and we did pitch our tents by the wilderness side, which was near to the city. And it came to pass that on the morrow, that when the Lamanites saw that we were in the borders by the wilderness which was near the city, that they sent out their spies round about us that they might discover the number and strength of our army. #RandolphHarris 17 of 22

“And it came to pass that when they saw that we were not strong, according to our numbers, and fearing that we should cut them off from their support except they should come out to battle against us and kill us, and also supposing that they could easily destroy us with their numerous hosts, therefore they began to make preparations to come out against us to battle. And when we saw that they were making preparations to come out against us, behold, I caused that Gid, with a small number of men, should secrete himself in the wilderness, and also that Teomner and a small number of humans should secrete themselves also in the wilderness. Now Gid and his humans were on the right and the others on the left; and when they had thus secreted themselves, behold, I remained with the remainder of my army, in that same place where we had first pitched our tents against the time that the Lamanites should come out to battle. And it came to pass that the Lamanites did come out with their numerous army against us. And when they had come and were about to fall upon us with the sword, I caused that my men, those who were with me, should retreat into the wilderness. And it came to pass that the Lamanites did follow after us with great speed, for they were exceedingly desirous to overtake us that they might slays us. #RandolphHarris 18 of 22

“Therefore they did follow us into the wilderness; and we did pass by in the midst of Gid and Teomner, insomuch that they were not discovered by the Lamanites. And it came to pass that when the Lamanites had passed by, or when the army had passed by, Gid and Teomner did rise up from their secret places, and did cut off the spies of the Lamanites that they should not return to the city. And it came to pass that when they had cut them off, the ran to the city and feel upon the guards who were left to guard the city, insomuch that they did destroy them and did take possession of the city. Now this was done because the Lamanites did suffer their whole army, save a few guards only, to be led away into the wilderness. And it came to pass that Gid and Teomner by this means had obtained possession of their strong holds. And it came to pass that we took our course, after having traveled much in the wilderness toward the land of Zarahemla. And when the Lamanites saw that they were marching towards the land of Zarahemla, they were exceedingly afraid, lest there was a plan laid to lead them on to destruction; therefore they began to retreat into the wilderness again, yea, even back by the same way which they had come. And behold, it was night and they did pitch their tents, for the chief captains of the Lamanites had supposed that the Nephites were weary because of their march; and supposing that they had driven their whole army therefore they took no thought concerning the city of Manti. #RandolphHarris 19 of 22

“Now it came to pass that when it was night, I caused that my men should not sleep, but that they should march forward by anther way towards the land of Manti. And because of this our march in the night-time, behold, on the morrow we were beyond the Lamanites; insomuch that we did arrive before them at the city of Manti. And thus it came to pass, that by this stratagem we did take possession of the city of Manti without the shedding of blood. And it came to pass that when the armies of the Lamanites did arrive near the city, and saw that we were prepared to meet the, they were astonished exceedingly and struck with great fear, insomuch that they did flee into the wilderness. Yea, and it came to pass that the armies of the Lamanites did flee out of all this quarter of the land. However, behold, they have carried with them many women and children out of the land. And those cities which had been take by the Lamanites, all of them are at this period of time in our possession; and our fathers and our women and our children are returning to their homes, all save it be those who have been taken prisoners and carried off by the Lamanites. However, behold, our armies are small to maintain so great a number of cities and so great possessions. However, behold, we trust in our God who has given us victory over those lands, insomuch that we have obtained those cities and those lands, which were our own. #RandolphHarris 20 of 22

“Now we do not know the cause that the government does not grant us more strength; neither do those men who came up unto us know why we have not received greater strength. Behold, we do not know but what ye are unsuccessful, and ye have drawn away for forces into that quarter of the land; if so, we do not desire to murmur. And if it is not so, behold, we fear that there is some faction in the government, that they do not send more humans to our assistance; for we know that they are more numerous than that which they have sent. However, behold, it matereth not—we trust God will deliver us, notwithstanding the weakness of our armies, yea, and deliver us out of the hands of our enemies. Behold, this is the twenty and ninth year, in the latter end, and we are in the possession of our lands; and the Lamanites have fled to the land of Nephi. And those sons of the people of Ammo, of whom I have so highly spoken, are with me in the city of Manti; and the Lord has supported them, yea, and kept them from falling by the sword, insomuch that even one soul has not been slain. However, behold, they have received many wounds; nevertheless they stand fast in that liberty wherewith God has made them free; and they are stick to remember that Lord their God from day to day. #RandolphHarris 21 of 22

“Yea, they do observe to keep his statues, and his judgements, and his commandments continually; and their faith is strong in the prophecies concerning that which is to come. And now, my beloved brother, Moroni, may the Lord our God, who has redeemed us and made us free, keep you continually in his presence; yea, and may he favour this people, even that ye may have success in obtaining possession of all that which the Lamanites have taken from us, which was for our support. And now, behold, I close mine epistle. I am Helaman, the son of Alma,” reports Alma 58.1-41. I send out words in praise of God, from whom all World flow. Mystery of mysteries, this continual creation, like a fountain forever bubbling up from the Earth’s darkness, He is a cup that is never empty. Generous One, eternally giving gifts I pray to you, I praise you, I remember you throughout my day. It shall come to pass, if ye shall hearken diligently unto My commandments which I command you this day, to love the Lord your God, and to serve Him with all your hearts, and with all your soul, that I will give the rain of your land in its season, the former rain and the latter rain, that thou mayest gather in thy corn, and thy wine, and thine oil. And I will give grass in thy fields for thy cattle, and thou shalt eat and be satisfied,” reports Deuteronomy 11.13-15. #RandolphHarris 22 of 22

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