PREFACE TO VOLUME 19

Among the world figures that I most admire is Aleksander I. Solzhenitsyn. I have the distinct honor of having arrived in this world on exactly the same day he did. It was unlikely, way back in 1918, that one newly born baby in one part of the world would grow up to refer to the other one in another part of the world in a preface like this, and even less likely that we should both be writers, he a novelist and I an editor. We also hold common ground in that we are writers in protest, men who call for reform in those systems and institutions that by their very nature tend to enslave, denying people of their right to think, to question, and to grow. He was destined to spend much of his life in prison and exile in that he was born in a country that dogs his trail and haunts him even in foreign lands. My country provides couriers to bear what I write to thousands of villages, towns, and cities in all our 50 states, while his country forbids the circulation of what he writes, making it necessary for his works to move underground. My country would be proud should I win a Nobel Prize, while his country forbad him to receive the one offered him.

That is why his country builds walls to keep people in, while my country has to build walls to keep people out, which it does not do very well, the Mexican border being one witness to that fact. But we both have concern over the walls that men build, for some walls are erected even within free societies.

But it is more than the circumstance of birth that has made Solzhenitsyn the great writer that he is. Like the prophets of Israel, fire burns in his bones. He is an angry man. He does not take pen in hand that he might write well and win literary prizes, but that he might say what burns within him. It is not literary skill that makes him great, but that he summons words designed to set men free. It isn't simply that he has the right word but that he has the right cause.

It is one thing to be a Faulkner or a Hemingway and do one's work in the comforts of sunny Mississippi or romantic Cape Cod, troubled only by the irregular flow of inspiration, and quite another to be a Solzhenitsyn who has to write in secrecy, hiding himself as well as his notes, realizing that the police might knock at his door at anytime. Indeed, what measure of liberty the Russian novelist ever had came through the fame he gained through writings that were smuggled into other countries. He became too famous to arrest!

Many of us hardly ever say anything worthwhile even to our captive audiences, while he has produced some of the world's greatest literature as a captive and with no audience. Many of us say the things we do only because men are free, while he says what he says in order to set men free. Many of us speak so as to preserve the system, while he speaks to protest the system. Many of us act as if we supposed people are made for the system, while it is evident that he sees the system as made for people.

It is ironic that the most dramatic voice in behalf of freedom in our time should emerge from behind the Iron Curtain. The most oppressive nation in the world has produced the most effective voice for human rights and liberty. It says something for man's fundamental drive to be free. This is what gives Solzhenitsyn hope for the future of his own people. Though he now lives in exile, he has hope that he will someday return ‑ as a free man in a free land. When people are sorely oppressed for long enough, they will finally protest and demand to be free, he believes.

That he believes in man's basic drive to be free is a mark of his greatness, and it is this that inspires his pen. This gives a spiritual dimension to his message. There is an urgency to his appeal only because he believes that man can do something about his enslavement. I especially like one of his illustrations: if the whole earth, land and sea alike, were covered with concrete, that concrete would have a few cracks here and there, and from those cracks grass would grow; that is freedom. And that's faith!

It is with something of this spirit that we commence our l9th edition of Restoration Review. Counting its forerunner, Bible Talk, it is really our Silver Anniversary volume. This calls for something special, so in this volume we will have an extra 40 pages of material. We intend that every page probe still more deeply into the vital areas of the Christian faith, especially in reference to principles of unity and fellowship, which is our theme for the year.

We realize that the church is not immune to the concretizing influences of our secularistic and materialistic age. The concrete often lay uneven before us, as well as thick, obstructing our way. But thank God that there are many cracks here and there. The task of the Christian editor is to help make things grow in those cracks. Finally there will be more and More cracks and more and more growth, and less and less concrete. He must believe that God not only supplies the seed, but the sunlight as well, "The sun of righteousness shall rise with healing in its wings," cried the prophet at the twilight of a new age. May that light be reflected in every page of this our 25th year of publication, and may you the reader be blessed thereby, is our prayer.

No ray of sunlight is ever lost,
     but the green which it wakes into
          existence needs time to sprout,
and it is not always granted to the sower
      to live to see the harvest.
All work that is worth anything
     is done in faith..
                              ‑Albert Schweitzer

Communion with the celestial universe, and most especially with him that created it, and for whom it was created and tenanted, is the highest honor and the greatest happiness humanity can by any possibility achieve.

— Alexander Campbell, Millennial Harbinger, 1861, p. 393