SHOULD WE KILL THE CHILD?
Robert Meyers

That bizarre question grows out of a fine church bulletin note written years ago by my friend John Paul Hundley, who was then minister for the Westlink Church of Christ in Wichita, Kansas. Mr. Hundley found a parallel to our contemporary church life in Aldous Huxley’s story about Hercules in Crome Yellow.

Hercules, the story says, weighed only three pounds when he was born. Fully grown, he stood only three feet and four inches. Since his parents died when he was twenty-one and left him a fortune, he began remodeling his home to suit his size.

He needed special furniture because he was so diminutive. To salve his ego, he made sure that no servant was employed who stood over four feet tall. He bought only Shetland ponies and the smallest breed of dogs. In short, he tailored the world to suit his own dwarfishness.

In marriage he was lucky, because he found a woman of noble birth who was only three feet tall. He and his bride retired to their artificially tiny world after their marriage and happily blotted out all reminders of the vaster life going on about them.

Their joy was unbounded when a son, Ferdinonda, was born in their fourth year of marriage. But the happiness soon turned to sorrow as the boy began showing clear signs of growing to normal stature. By the time he was three, he was taller than his mother. Unable to face the child’s outstripping them, the parents prayed for strength to bear their cross. Not finding it, they decided to kill themselves rather than accept the physical superiority of their son.

The church, says Mr. Hundley, should rejoice in the health, strength and beauty of its children. Instead, it is disturbed if they stand taller. “We are suspicious of our children who want to achieve academic excellence; we become disturbed at [their] examining passages of scripture not commonly taught in ‘standard’ causes and sermons; we become fearful of [their] examining a new translation of the Bible based on more ancient manuscripts; we wish we could just ‘hold services’ and not have to think about the twentieth century and the dynamic relevance of the gospel to it. A world aflame with revolution and social change frightens us. How we wish we could withdraw into the ‘good old days’ and avoid thinking about these things. Like Hercules and his wife we have a decision to make about the problem of our brilliant children. But here the parallel ends. Rather than accept their solution or another solution, it seems that the modern church prefers infanticide!”

This is writing as provocative and relevant as it was when my friend first printed it in a bulletin of very limited circulation. I have lost track of him, but I hope that wherever he is there is some congregation making use of his talents.—Wichita State University, Wichita 67208