-
Since
this volume contains the 33rd and 34th years of my contributions as
an editor, it may be appropriate to ask once more why a man will
subject himself to such a long, painstaking ordeal, the rewards of
which are at best dubious. The question is not unlike to one asked
of an aged veteran of the American Revolution, long after that
immense struggle, as to why he had fought against the British.
According to Samuel Eliot Morrison in his
Oxford
History of the American People,
the
interview went something like this:
- “Did
you take up arms against intolerable oppressions?”
- “Oppressions?
I didn’t feel them.”
- “What,
were you not oppressed by the Stamp Act?”
- “I
never saw one of those stamps. I certainly never paid a penny for
one of them.”
- “Well,
then what about the tea tax?”
- “I
never drank a drop of the stuff; the boys threw it all overboard.”
“Then I suppose you had been reading Harington or Sidney and
Locke about the eternal principles of liberty?”
- “Never
heard of ‘em. We read only the Bible, the Catechism, Watts’
Psalms and Hymns, and the Almanac.”
- “Well,
then, what was the matter? What did you mean in going to the fight?”
-
Young
man, what we meant in going for those redcoats was this:
we
always had governed ourselves, and we always meant to. They didn’t
mean we should. “
- You
can read entire books about the American Revolution and not get that
much as to what it was all about. And this is the essence of
history: people get hipped on something, and the world moves. This
is probably what keeps an editor at his desk year after year, decade
after decade. He is hipped up on something. Like the Revolutionary
soldier, an editor doesn’t like the way things are going, so
he wants to help change some things. Or perhaps he wants to preserve
some things that others want to change.
-
The
veteran soldier did not have a dramatic or studied answer as to why
he fought in the Revolution. His was certainly no textbook answer.
It was simply that he didn’t like the British messin’
with his freedom. And we can believe he loved his British heritage
as early Americans usually did. It was hard for them to fight
against their motherland, and so in responding to the call of arms
they saw freedom as Charles Kingsley saw it: “There are two
freedoms, the false where one is free to do what he likes, and the
true where he is free to do what he ought.” And an editor,
like a soldier, might add:
free
to do what he has to do.
-
Speaking
for myself, I have a lover’s quarrel with my “motherland,”
the church that bore and bred me. I pay my people a compliment when
I insist that we can be truer to our great heritage, more honest
about what others think about us and why, and more realistic about
our place in the larger Christian world, which we must admit
does
exist.
A good way to look forward to better things is to look back to
abiding principles. This we have sought to do in this volume that
deals with some of the adventures of the early church.
-
We
look back to the early church, even the
earliest
church,
not because we suppose that we are to do precisely what they did,
but we are to do for our day what they did for theirs. Their
adventures are relevant to us because they were closer to Him who is
the greatest adventure of all. To follow Jesus Christ, wherever he
leads, is what it is all about. —Leroy Garrett,
Editor