Editorial May 3, 1941 Issue

Destiny

Evelyn F. Heywood

"Character is destiny," declared the great Greek philosopher Heraclitus. Many centuries later one of the French encyclopedists of the eighteenth century pronounced the same verdict. But of recent years there has been apparent among leaders of thought, among writers and politicians, a wave of fatalism, not new certainly in the history of mankind, but emphasized and encouraged by the trend of events. Intellectually detached, and consistently objective in its analysis, it is distinguished by an absence of moral backbone, by cynical irresponsibility, by a determination to remain, whatever happens, on the side of expediency and self-interest. This attitude is summed up by a modern writer as the admission "that the individual is helpless in the face of 'historic' forces, that the individual indeed is of little account in the march of collective destiny."

He who accepts this verdict abandons the fundamental divine Principle of Christianity; he abandons the right of the individual to find the kingdom of heaven within, a spiritual force, which will ever continue to reveal itself in ways of spiritual courage, steadfastness, and high resolve.

"Ye are the salt of the earth," said Jesus to his disciples, "but if the salt have lost his savour, wherewith shall it be salted? it is thenceforth good for nothing, but to be cast out, and to be trodden under foot of men." "To be trodden under foot of men" is exactly what is accepted as the predestined fate of the humanly weak and defenseless in this modern doctrine which makes no demands of the individual but submission to the inevitable domination of material force.

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