Editorial April 24, 1920 Issue

The Federation of the World

Frederick Dixon

One of the most curious traits of the human mind is manifested in its perpetual effort to counterfeit the divine. Thus it preaches a material good which is the very antithesis of the spiritual; it strives, through marriage, to produce the perfect man; and so, by means of the lust of conquest, it aims blindly and wildly at a material federation of the world, the realization of the brotherhood of man.

This last effort may be seen perpetually germinating in the minds of the empire builders, those political imitators of the architects of Babel. Darius and Xerxes dreamed the dream, as did Alexander and Timur; the Caesars made a tremendous effort for its accomplishment, and even Paul was not above a natural pride in his Roman citizenship, and anticipated the "Civis Romanus sum" of Lord Palmerston by eighteen centuries. Perhaps the last European monarch to lay claim to world empire was the Burgundian who proclaimed the Pacific a Spanish lake and boasted that the sun never set on his dominions; for after this the saying of the Bourbon, even with all its implication, "There are no longer any Pyrenees," is a veritable anticlimax.

Really what all these men, without knowing it, were aiming at was the impossible. The only thing that is true about any lie is that no man can tell a lie about nothing, and therefore that a lie predicates the existence of a truth to lie about. Caesar could no more build a universal empire on foundations of a belief in a material law of inharmony, than the builders of Babel could carry their walls to the stars, while ignoring the physical law of gravity, even though it had not yet been stated by Newton. It took Christ Jesus' understanding of the nothingness of matter to break the law of gravity, just sixteen centuries before Newton got it stated, and so to prove it to be an illusion of the human mind; and, just in the same way, it took his knowledge of the spiritual facts to proclaim the fatherhood of God, and so to wean Paul from his boast of his Roman citizenship to a pride in his citizenship in heaven, his conversation in heaven, as the King James translators rendered it in language which has become archaic.

Enjoy 1 free Sentinel article or audio program each month, including content from 1898 to today.

Send a comment to the editors
NEXT IN THIS ISSUE
Editorial
Readiness to Write
April 24, 1920
Contents

We'd love to hear from you!

Easily submit your testimonies, articles, and poems online.

Submit