God and Culture . . .

GOD HAS A WAY WITH BOOKS

We promised that as part of our study of The Quest of God Ouida and I would share with you some of the riches that we discover as we read to each other, which usually is done after we retire at night. I will read to her until I am weary of it, then she will read to me. Sometimes we read the other to sleep! But this has come to mean so much to us that we thought it would prove worthwhile to share it with our most important friends, the readers of Restoration Review.

We choose to call this series “God and Culture” in that we are constantly made aware of God’s wisdom in all that we read in many areas of life, whether from the Bible, the Saturday Evening Post, our children’s school books, or Svetlana Alliluyeva’s Twenty Letters to a Friend. Convinced as we are that all truth is of God, we look to all those who write responsibly as our teachers, believing that Heaven may reveal itself through a historical novel as well as through science, and through art and music as well as through poetry and biography. We especially sense God’s presence in the lives of men who have struggled for answers to life’s most baffling problems, nearly always at great personal sacrifice. Biography is about God because it is about life with all its drama.

We trust that we will not only stimulate your thinking along the way, but encourage more married people to do as we do. Read to each other. To share wisdom in this way gives a couple a better perspective from which to view their own problems. For example, we read at length from “The Stranger, My Son,” condensed in Look, which is the true story of a mother’s frantic effort to understand her own son, finally diagnosed by psychiatrists as schizophrenic. I would read and Ouida would read, page after page we shared the parents’ anxiety for their sick boy, suffering with them as their nerves and finances wasted away, only to learn in the end that their little boy, now a man, would probably be a stranger to them forever. After reading the story of anguish about a family who seemed as close as a next-door neighbor, we were both less inclined to complain about the problems we have with our children, which in comparison seemed so insignificant.

Sometime our reading gets so dramatic and exciting that it virtually wrecks our night’s sleep, so perhaps one should choose his evening reading very carefully. I am thinking of the story in the Post about “The Tragic Scandal of Senator Dodd.” It was in three installments, and after we read the first, it seemed that the second would never come. The senator’s own office staff are the ones responsible for his finally being censured by the Senate, but, once he was aware of what they were up to, he fired them, so it was necessary for them to enter his office after hours and painstakingly go through all the files, gather their evidence, haul it out to be photographed and then to bring it back again.

We were of course pulling for the former employees, and I thought I was going to have to bring in oxygen for Ouida when the employees heard the door latch turn that Sunday afternoon they were gathering evidence from the Senator’s file cabinets. She was until the wee hours going to sleep!

If you and your wife or husband cannot find time to do some reading together, then give away your TV. If you are too tired, read anyway, if but for a few minutes. It will be good for your marriage.

Usually it is good for your marriage. As wonderful as Ouida is, she has her prejudices, and the theory of evolution is one of them. So when I recently read a delightful story of Charles Darwin, I had to read it by myself while Ouida was catching up on Mission Messenger and the Reader’s Digest. I found myself identifying with Darwin in his fight against the clergy for the sake of a new idea. After all, he wasn’t asking the world to agree with him, but only to give him a fair hearing. I bristled as the scientists and theologians teamed up to destroy a good and humble man who was sincerely seeking truth, but my sweet wife would bristle when I dared to defend Charles Darwin.

It was difficult for her to listen objectively to Darwin’s arguments. I explained that he did not believe that man carne from apes, but that apes and man came from the same primate, which may have been created by God for all Darwin cared. He did not concern himself with the origin of life, but with the origin of species, and the evidence he gathered from a lifetime of study convinced him that God did not create each individual specie. And is it impossible to your thinking that apes and men just might have the same ancestor?

Well, she wasn’t about to listen to stuff life that. She’d rather read the latest from Carl Ketcherside! Darwin pointed out that men and apes take each other’s diseases, thus resembling each other in tissue and blood, and as embryos they are hardly distinguishable, and even the development of the embryos in the womb are step by step the same. And even the brain, though man’s is larger, is similar in fissure and fold. “Sort of sounds like kin folk, all right, doesn’t it?”, I ventured.

“It shows that they have the same origin, that’s what it shows, and that means that God created them both, just like the Bible says,” she said as she finished with Carl and swept up the Digest, and I knew then that I’d better keep Darwin to myself if I didn’t want to sleep with Benjy and Philip. I wanted to recite some of Darwin’s questions for creationists, as to why, for instance, some species nearly have eyes (an optic nerve ending in a useless bulge) while others have perfect vision, but who was I to interfere with one of the Reader’s Digest’s 25 million readers? And besides, I wanted breakfast the next morning!

One important book we have been browsing around in is John Henry Newman’s The Idea of a University. Years ago I underscored a passage in this book which I thought expressed what a college should be trying to do, or what parents or a church should be trying to do, in the teaching of youth: “He apprehends the great outlines of knowledge, the principles on which it rests, the scale of its parts, its lights and its shades, its great points and its little, as he otherwise cannot apprehend them. Hence it is that his education is called Liberal. A habit of mind is formed which lasts through life, of which the attributes are, freedom, equitableness, calmness, moderation, and wisdom; or what I have ventured to call a philosophical habit.”

This impressed Ouida too, and we expressed hope that we might so educate our children that they will have that habit of mind to view particular problems within the framework of broad, sweeping principles. To realize, for instance, that crime in the streets or Vietnam cannot possibly be of simple solution, for they go back to more complex issues of economics and diplomacy. Or to see that in God’s community the tragic state of division is not simply a matter of doctrinal differences, that resolving such disputes would make no real differences; but that the real problem is psychological and sociological. Ah, for free and calm minds! Such should be the aspiration of every school and home.

But the passage that most impressed Ouida, perhaps because Newman was a Roman Catholic, was this one:

“Liberal Education makes not the Christian, not the Catholic but the gentleman. It is well to be a gentleman; it is well to have a cultivated intellect, a delicate taste, a candid, equitable, dispassionate mind, a noble and courteous bearing in the conduct of life. These are the connatural qualities of a large knowledge; they are the objects of a university.”

How successful have we been in training young men to be gentlemen with “noble and courteous bearing” and cultivated intellects? It is indeed well to be a gentleman, but children see so much crudeness and indelicacy right before their eyes, at home and at school, and sometimes even at church, that ideals like Newman’s are but empty words to them. When parents fuss and curse at each other and show disrespect for law and order they are hardly examples for others. And what shall we say of the church in helping to produce “candid, equitable, dispassionate minds” when it is afraid to practice what it sometimes dares to preach? The “credibility gap” can be in the pulpit and in the home as well as in high political office. A dishonest church or home is not likely to cultivate liberal minds.

Needless to say that the wisdom of Newman inspires Ouida and me to be more diligent in the education of these three precious orphans that God has placed in our care. If we can cause them to reverence God and to respect persons and their property, to be sensitive to the needs of others, to love life and to learn how to live and let live, we will be pleased, or “It is well to be a gentleman.”—the Editor