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