Angels, or those who call themselves Angels, or would have me conclude that they are Angels come to me in the long years. They come to me as I lay in bed. It seems we have established some link with these beings, and I could tell you a tale of them, but now is not the time. I think it is my eyes which give them the claim on me, the ability to reach down to me, in this realm, and take me—it is the vision, stolen in another dominion and then returned on Earth to its rightful entity. You might say that as they looked down from their lofty Heaven, if Heaven is, they could see, through the mists of Earth, these bright shining eyes. My visions give them their compass to find me, their opening, as it were, between the dominions, and down they come to enlist my spirit against my will. How can I accept a World full of injustice, along with their august designs? As worker and consumer beings are increasingly alienated by the power of machines which regulate their daily life, even determining their values. The technology which produces machines, however, is but the offspring of a science which, as it developed the means to transform our planet or destroy it, has become ever more remote from the lives of ordinary citizens and perhaps the ultimate factor in their alienation. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18

To such citizens science appears magical and mysterious in its capacity for and neutrality toward good or evil. Is this entirely due to faults in education which, separate beings of humanistic learning from beings of science? Undoubtedly, Western education has failed to help rising generations of non-scientists to understand science. However, the fault is possessed in beings of science, too. Scientists have enjoyed acting the mysterious stranger, the powerful voice without emotion, the expert and the god. They have failed to make themselves comfortable in the talk of people in the street; no one taught them the knack, of course, but they were not keen to learn. And now they find the distance which they enjoyed has turned to distrust, and the awe has turned to fear; and people who are by no means fools really believe that we should be better off without science. Science and society are out of step. Can their mutual alienation be overcome? We can answer affirmatively, but with proviso that both sides make the necessary effort. Against the guardedly optimistic view is the more pessimistic outlook of philosophers who see beings as unable to live with and control the extraordinary knowledge and power which fertile brains have devised. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18

It is not merely the hydrogen bomb itself which threatens our existence, but a bureaucratization of mass destruction and an incapacity for fear. The first of these factors deprives even the participants in mass destruction of any sense of responsibility for their acts. As for the second, the helplessness with which contemporary humankind reacts—or rather fails to react—to the existence of the superbomb bespeaks a lack of freedom the like of which has never before existed in history. This marks the freezing point of human freedom. We all know the story of the sorcerer’s apprentice; or Frankenstein which Mary Shelley wrote in competition with her husband and Byron; or some other story of the same kind out of the macabre invention of the nineteenth century. In these stores, someone who has special powers over nature conjures or creates a stick or a machine to do his work for him; and then finds that he cannot take back the life he has given it. The mindless monster overwhelms him; and what began as an invention to do the housework ends by destroying the master with the house. These stories have become the epitome of our own fears. We have been inventing machines at a growing pace for about four hundred years. This is a short span even in our recorded history, and it is not a thousandth part of our history as beings. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18

In that short moment of time we have found a remarkable insight into the workings of nature. We have used it to make ourselves far more flexible in our adaption to the outside World than any other animal has ever been. We can survive in climates which even germs find difficult. We can grow our own food and meat. We can travel overland and we can tunnel and swim and fly, all in one body. More important than any of these, we have come nearest to the dream which Lamarck had, that animals might inherit the skills which their parents learned. We have discovered the means to record our experience so that others may live it again. The history of other animal species shows that the most successful in the struggle for survival have been those which were most adaptable to changes in the World. We have made ourselves by means of our tools beyond all measure more adaptable than any other species, living or extent; and we continue to do so with gathering speed. Yet today we are afraid of our own shadow in the nine o’clock news; and we wonder whether we shall survive so over-specialized a creature as the Pekinese. Everyone likes to blame one’s sense of defeat on someone else; and for some time scientists have been a favorite scapegoat. I want to look at their responsibility, and for that matter at everybody’s, rather more closely. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18

They do have special responsibility; do not let us argue that out of existence; but it is a complicated one, and it is not the whole responsibility. For example, science obviously is not responsible for the readiness of people, who do not take their private quarrels beyond the stage of insult, to carry their public quarrels to the point of war. Many animals will fight for their needs, and some for their mere greeds, to the point of death. Bucks fight for females, and birds fight for their territories. The fighting habits of human beings are odd because they display them only in groups. However, they were not supplied by scientists. On the contrary, science has helped to end several kinds of group murder, such as witch hunting and the taboos of the early nineteenth century against disinfecting hospitals. Neither is science responsible for the existence of groups which believe themselves to be in competition: for the existence above all of nations. And the threat of war today is always a national threat. Some bone of contention and competition is identified with a national need: Fiume or the Polis corridor or the dignity of the Austrian Empire; and in the end nations are willing to organize and to invite the death of citizens on both sides in order to reach these collective aims. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18

Science did not create the nations; on the contrary, it helped to soften those strong national idiosyncrasies which it seems necessary to exploit if war is to be made with enthusiasm. And wars are not made by any traditional groups: they are made by highly organized societies, they are made by nations. If the day was thirsty, most of us have seen Yorkshiremen invade Old Trafford, and a bloody nose or two. However, if her had been told that Lancashire had the atomic bomb, no Yorkshireman would have grown pale. The sense of doom in us today is not a fear of science; it is a fear of war. And the causes of war were not created by science; they do not differ in kind from known causes of the War of Jenkins’ Ear of the Wars of the Roses, which were carried on with the modest scientific assistance. No, science has not invented war; but it has turned it into a very different thing. The people who distrust it are not wrong. The man in the pub who says, “It will wipe out the World,” the woman in the queue who says “It is not natural”—they do not express themselves very well; but what they are trying to say does make sense. Science has enlarged the mechanisms of war, and it has distorted it. It has done this in at least two ways. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18

First, science has obviously multiplied the power of the warmakers. The weapons of the moment can kill more people more secretly and more unpleasantly than those of the past. This progress, as for want of another word I must call it—this progress as been going on for some time; and for some time it has been said, of each new weapon, that it is so destructive or so horrible that it will frighten people into their wits, and force the nations to give up war for the lack of cannon fodder. This hope has never been fulfilled, and I know no one who takes refuge in it today. The acts of men and women are not dictated by such simple compulsions; and they themselves do not stand in any simple relation to the decisions of the nations which they compose. Grapeshot and TNT and gas have not helped to outlaw war; and I see no sign that the hydrogen bomb or a whiff of bacteria or fentanyl will be more successful in making beings wise by compulsion. Secondly, science at the same time has given the nations quite new occasions for falling out. I do not mean such simple objectives as someone else’s uranium mine, or a Pacific Island which happens to be knee-deep in organic fertilizer. I do not even mean merely another nation’s factories and her skilled population. These are all parts of the surplus above our simple needs which they themselves help to create and which gives our civilization its character. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18

And war in our World battens on this surplus. This is the object of the greed of nations, and this also gives them the leisure to train and the means to arm for war. At bottom, we have remained individually too greedy to distribute our surplus, and collectively too stupid to pile it up in any more useful form than the traditional mountains of arms. Science can claim to have created the surplus in our societies, and we know from the working day and the working diet how greatly it has increased it in the last two hundred years. Science had created the surplus. Now put this year’s budget beside the budget of 1750, anywhere in the World, and you will see what we are doing with it. There are at least five recognizable kinds of violence. There is, first, simple violence. Some people dream of violence, in which they ward off knives and guns, and this is simple violence. This is characteristic of many student rebellions, and carries with it the muscular freedom, the surging up of pent-up energy, and the freedom from the restrictions of individual conscience and responsibility of which we have spoken. It is the general protest against being placed continuously in an impotent situation, and it typically carries highly moral demands. However, very little violence stays at this first level. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18

There is, second, calculated violence. Many, if not most, of the student rebellions were surrounded by calculated violence. He rebellion of French students in Paris was taken over by professional revolutionaries on the second or third day, and the leadership, which began with moral demands, changed as the leaders exploited the profound frustration of the students and their energy. The third type I call fomented violence. This is the work of a Himmler or of the rabble-rousers of the extreme right or left in any country. It is a stimulation of the impotence and frustration felt by the people at large for the purposes of the speaker. Modern history is full of illustrations of how treating people like beasts in the process. Fourth, there is absentee violence (or instrumental violence). Obviously all of us who live in society partake to some extent of the violence of that society, although most of us do it from our own vantage point of moral elevation and hide behind zombie-like unawareness of conscience. The war on our boarder with Mexico cannot continue expect that our taxes are paying to shelter unidentified immigrants who are looking for a new place to live; in this sense we all are part of the war on the boarder, whether we are for or against national security. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18

There is a fifth category of violence, different from those above, which occurs when the party in power, threatened with encroachment on its power, strikes out with violence to stave off these threats. This we may call violence from above. Its motive is generally to protect or re-establish the status quo. The police are taken out of their rightful roles as apprehenders and are made punishers. Such violence is said to be regularly more destructive than other violence—partly because the police have the clubs and guns, and partly because they have a large reservoir of inner individual resentment on which they can draw in their rage. The age-old assumption, especially in the American dream, is that the government is instituted for the protection of the weak and less affluent against exploitation, as well as for the strong and the rich. The police officer on the corner, who is everyone’s friend and will direct you when you are lost, is the ideal model, as the law-loving sheriff bringing order to the West. However, in this fifth kind of violence, this is all thrown aside and situations like the death of Stephan Clark by the hands of two police officers in Sacramento, California and the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, unfortunately more people are starting to view the police department as the army of Hitler. And the violence becomes the more destructive precisely because it is a perversion of previous protectiveness. Government itself is then reduced to battling on the level of combatants. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18

However, keep in mind that a few bad incidents do not spoil the entire law enforcement team and turn them into the type of law enforcement we see in the 2009 film Brooklyn’s Finest. There are still wonderful police officers like Jamie Reagan who we see on the hit television series Blue Bloods. And there are wonderful officers like Oliva Benson and Odafin Tutuola who star on Law and Order SVU. And now, in turning to what religion may have to say to the situation, I come to what is the soul of my discourse. Religion has meant many things in human history; but when from now onward I use the word I mean to use it in the supernaturalist sense, as declaring that the so-called order of nature, which constitutes this World’s experience, is only one portion of the total Universe, and that there stretches beyond this visible World and unseen World of which we now know nothing beneficial, but in its relation to which the true significance of our present mundane life consists. A being’s religious faith (whatever more special item of doctrine it may involve) means for me essentially one’s faith in the existence of an unseen order of some kind in which the riddles of the natural order may be found explained. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18

In the more developed religions the natural World has always been regarded as the mere scaffolding or vestibule of a truer, more eternal Word, and affirmed to be a sphere of education, trial, or redemption. In these religions, one must in some fashion die to the natural life before one can enter into life eternal. The notion that this physical World of wind and water, where the Sun rises and the Moon set, is absolutely and ultimately the divinely aimed-at and established thing, is one which we find only in the very early religions, such as that of the most primitive Jewish people. It is this natural religion (primitive still, in spite of the fact that poets and beings of science whose good-will exceeds their perspicacity keep publishing it in new editions tuned to our contemporary ears) that has suffered definitive bankruptcy in the opinion of a circle of persons, among whom I must count myself, and who are growing more numerous every day. For such persons the physical order of nature, taken simply as science know it, cannot be held to reveal any one harmonious spiritual intent. It is mere weather doing and undoing without end. Now, if I can in the short remainder of this hour, I wish to make you feel that we have a right to believe the physical order; if only thereby life may seem to us better worth living again, that we have a right to supplement in by an unseen spiritual order which we assume on trust. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18

However, such as a trust will seem to some of you sadly mystical and execrably unscientific, I must first say a word or two to weak the veto which you may consider that science opposes to out act. There is included in human nature an ingrained naturalism and materialism of mind which can only admit facts that are actually tangible. Of this sort of mind the entity called science is the idol. Fondness for the word scientists is one of the notes by which you may know its votaries; and its short way of killing any opinion that it disbelieves in is to call it unscientific. It must be granted that there is no slight excuse for this. Science has made such glorious leaps in the last three hundred years, and extended our knowledge  of nature so enormously both in general and in detail; beings of science, moreover, have as a class displayed such admirable virtues,–that it is no wonder if the worshippers of science lose their head. In this very University, accordingly, I have heard more than one teacher say that all the fundamental conceptions of truth have already been found by science, and that the future has only the details of the picture to fill in. However, this slightest reflection on the real conditions will suffice to show how barbaric such notions are. They show such a lack of scientific imagination, that it is hard to see how one who is actively advancing any part of science can make a mistake so crude. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18

Think how many absolutely new scientific conceptions have arisen in our own generation, how many new problems have been formulated that were never thought of before, and then cast an eye upon the brevity of science’s career. It began with Galileo, not three hundred years ago. For thinkers since Galileo, each informing his successor of what discoveries his own lifetime had seen achieved, might have passed the torch of science into our hands as we sit here in this room. Indeed, for the matter of that, an audience much smaller than the present one, and audience of some five or six score people, if each person in it could speak for one’s own generation, would carry us away to the absolute unknown of the human species, to days without a document or monument to tell their tale. Is it credible that such a mushroom knowledge, such a growth overnight as this, can represent more than the minutest glimpse of what the Universe will really prove to be when adequately understood? No! our science is a drop blood and our ignorance a sea of salt water. Whatever else be certain, this at least is certain,–that the World of our present natural knowledge is enveloped in a larger World of some sort of whose residual properties we at present can frame no absolute idea. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18

It is a mistake to imagine the sage as a weakling. We can be powerful in our public addresses as well as in private capacity. When hostile critics of our own race slander us behind our backs, we must liken ourselves to an elephant treading down worms in its path. “Not that we are sufficient of ourselves to claim anything coming from us; our sufficiency is from God, how has qualified us to be ministers of a new covenant, not in a written code but in the Spirit; for the written code kills, but the spirit gives life,” reports 2 Corinthians 3.5-6. Nobody can look into the innermost center of another being, nor fully into one’s own heart. Therefore, nobody can say with certainty that anyone else shares in the new state of things, and one can scarcely say it of oneself. However, even less can one say of another, however distorted the being’s life may be, that one does not participate at all in the new reality, and that one is not qualified to serve its cause. Certainly, nobody can say this of oneself. Perhaps it is more important in our time to emphasize this last—namely, the qualification of ourselves and those around us to serve the new creation, our ability to be priests in mutual help towards achieving it. Not long ago, many people, especially members of the church, felt qualified to judge others and to tell them what to believe and how to act. Today we feel deeply the arrogance of this attitude. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18

Instead, there is a general awareness of our lack of qualification, especially among the middle-aged and younger generations. We are inclined to disqualify ourselves, and to withdraw from the service of the new creation. We feel that we do not participate in it, and that we cannot bring others into such participation. We decline the honor and the burden of mutual priesthood. Often this is caused by unconcern for our highest human vocation. However, it is equally caused by despair about ourselves, by doubt, guilt and emptiness. We feel infinitely removed from a new state of things, and totally unable to help others towards it. However, then the other words of our text must become effective, that our qualification is from God and not from ourselves, and the all-consoling word that God is greater than our heart. If we look beyond ourselves at that which is greater than we, then we can feel called to help others in just the moment when we ourselves need help most urgently—and, astonishingly, we can help. A power works through us which is not of us. We may remember situations when words rose out of a depth of our being, perhaps in the midst of our own great anxiety, that struck another in the depth of one’s being and one’s great anxiety so strongly that they helped one to a new state of things. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18

Perhaps we remember other situations when an action of a person, whose life we knew was disrupted, had a priestly, awakening, and healing effect upon us. It did not come from one, but was in one, as it did not come from us, but was in us. Let us not assume the task of being mediators of the new creation to others arrogantly, but it personal or ecclesiastical terms. Yet, let us not reject the task of being priest for each other because of despair about ourselves or unconcern about what should be our highest concern. Against both arrogance and despair stands the word that our qualification does not come from us, nor from any being or any institution, not even from the church, but from God. And if it comes from God it is His Spiritual Presence in our spirit. “Yea, and that same God did establish his church among them; yes, and that same God hath called me by a holy calling, to preach the word unto this people, and hath given me much success, in which joy is full,” reports Alma 29.13. There is no single path to enlightenment. Life itself is the great enlightener. I met a man once who, after the shock of hearing his wife tell hm that she had ceased to love him, that she had for some time had a secret lover, and that she requested a divorce so as to be able to marry him, felt a collapse of all his hitherto confidently held values and beliefs. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18

For some days he was so affected the he could not eat. However, his mind by then had become so extraordinarily lucid concerning these matters and himself, that he experiences moments of truth. Through them he came into a great peace and understanding, an inner change. What was the morning Sun which awakened him? He did not pray, entered no churches, was too intent on his Worldly business to read the Bible. This brings me back to the theme: do not submit to the pressure of those who say there is only a single way to salvation (the way they follow or teach), do not let the mind be trammeled or narrowed. The truth is that the ways are many, are spread out in all directions, are individual. From the clues, hints, and indications which search and experience give us, we learn in the end what is the true way to God within us. The quest is too individual a matter to fit everyone in the same way, like a ready-made suit of clothes. Each being has one’s own life-problems to consider and surmount. In trying to do so wisely nobly and honestly one does precisely what the quest calls for from one at the time. Each quest thus has its own character and its own personality. This it shapes by the act of dedicating itself to the incorruptible integrity of the higher life. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18