Article July 1, 1939 Issue

Signs of the Times

Topic: Righteous Government

with contributions from William B. Bankhead, Herbert Hoover, Orien W. Fifer, David Lawrence, Ernest C. French, R. F. Duckworth, B. G. Jacobson

[William B. Bankhead, Speaker of the House of Representatives, Washington, D. C., in the Religious Digest, Grand Rapids, Michigan]

If today, all men in America in high positions and low, employer and employee, exalted and abased, could find the time to read the fifth, sixth, and seventh chapters of the Gospel of St. Matthew, the Sermon on the Mount, and ponder its wisdom, its clarity of moral standards, its implications of business square dealing, its appeal for sympathy and justice for the underprivileged, its admonitions of disaster to those who use power unmercifully—and remember these elemental things and fashion their conduct upon such standards—we would not need so many restraints and repressions in government; ... we would go a long way in reducing the sinister growth of class-consciousness, and attain a nearer approach to equality of opportunity and equality of benefit from their labors for every citizen under the flag.

With the utmost reverence, I venture to suggest that today no greater political or economic or sociological platform could be contrived than this: "Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them."

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