Even so, there would be enough left to provide for millions of planetary pupils in perpetuity.
It would be the greatest foundation ever established upon earth for the salvation of civilization.
Many years ago, when as a young college president in this valley I was speaking at a real-estate dinner in Chicago, I recalled how an ancient city was saved by the fact that it had so many score thousand children who could not tell their right hand from their left hand—and also much cattle. Innocent children and cattle saved Nineveh for a time, but not permanently. If the prophet Jonah were alive to-day he would know that the doom he preached finally came upon the city. He sleeps (or so the tradition is) in a village but six or eight miles from Bethlehem, that might have seen the star if it had been awake on the night when it came and stood over the place where the young child was. He would know if he, himself, were awake that it is only children who have learned the lessons of the race who have the power of world salvation—children who have also learned by heart the lessons of the two great commandments.
Years ago I was ploughing corn on a hot June day on an Illinois prairie when I heard a sound in the air above me, which one unused to the country might have thought the thrumming of a choir celestial. But with a farm boy’s instinct I divined that it was a swarm of bees, even before I saw the little cloud moving over the field toward the woods two or three miles away. I did what any farm boy would have done if he could leave his team. I followed the swarm, throwing up dust and clods of earth, and making all possible noise, with the result that I brought the swarm down upon the branch of a tree at the edge of the field. Then at evening I got a hive, lured them into it, and then carried them home, where they made honey for the season.
So if we follow these ideals, which may seem at first but some millennial rhetoric, and bring them down to earth, we may find a way to sweeten the bitter bread of millions of children in other lands—and yet have enough and to spare for our own, in spite of the reports which I have been hearing to-day from those same corn-fields, whose bountiful crops the farmers cannot sell, though others are starving.
But let us take courage of the way we have already come, since Enoch reared his pillars in the pre-Noachian days. The children of Israel were required to keep each year the feast of the tabernacles, during the seven days of which they were commanded to leave their homes and go out and live in booths or tents, not for a holiday, but that they might be kept mindful of the fact that their fathers came out of captivity. I have often thought that it would have a very wholesome effect if all the world could keep such a feast, and this would be its proclamation, as I have drafted it, though not in the usual form:[2]
“This shall ye do, O men of earth,
Ye who’ve forgotten your far birth,
Your forebears of the slanting skull,
Barbaric, brutal, sluggard, dull,
(Of whom no portraits hang to boast
The ancient lineage of the host)—
Ye who’ve forgot the time when they
Were redolent of primal clay,
Or lived in wattled hut, or cave,
But, turned to dust or drowned by wave,
Have left no traces on Time’s shores
Save mounds of shells at their cave doors
And lithic knives and spears and darts
And savage passions in our hearts;
This shall ye do: seven days each year
Ye shall forsake what ye hold dear;
From fields of tamed fruits and flowers,
From love-lit homes and sky-built towers,
From palaces and tenements
Ye shall go forth and dwell in tents,
In tents, and booths of bough-made roofs,
Where ye may hear the flying hoofs
Of beasts long gone, the cries of those
Who were your fathers’ forest foes,
Or see their shadows riding fast
Along the edges of the past;
All this, that ye may keep in mind
The nomad way by which mankind
Has come from his captivity,
Walking dry-shod the earth-wide sea,
Riding the air, consulting stars,
Driving great caravans of cars,
Building the furnace, bridge and spire
Of earth-control and heav’n desire,
Rising in journey from the clod
Into the glory of a god.
This shall ye do, O men of earth,
That ye may know the crownéd worth
Of what ye are—and hope renew,
Seeing the road from dawn to you!
Then turning toward the pillared cloud
Ahead, or pillared fire, endowed
With prescience of a promised goal
See still a highway for the soul.”
And along the way at intervals stand the Enochian schools, colleges, and universities, giving instruction in the best that the human race has learned “from generation to generation and from nation to nation.”