Editorial September 8, 1945 Issue

"A new and living way"

John Randall Dunn

The human family today lives in an atmosphere of change, of overturning. It finds itself adventuring in new realms of discovery and experiment, discarding one outworn mode, testing and adopting another.

As they motored past Plymouth Rock in Massachusetts, in a comfortable, high-powered automobile, the conversation of the passengers once drifted to the changes which had occurred since the Pilgrim Fathers had landed three hundred years ago. Could those sturdy adventurers, in the widest stretch of imagination, have pictured the coming of a day when human beings would be whisked through space in a luxurious, heated car, propelled by an unseen power, and would be able to listen to a radiocast message from their homeland three thousand miles distant? In their crude log cabins, could the Pilgrims have visualized the miracle of electrical heating, lighting, and refrigeration; of the thousand and one refinements of latter-day invention?

Certainly, since 1620, human ingenuity has done much to ease the problem of material living; but let us turn a page and scan the record of mankind's mental and spiritual progress in the past three centuries. Can it be averred that the so-called carnal mind is less carnal, less selfish, less dictatorial than it was three or even six hundred years ago? Is there evidence of more spiritual-mindedness among men? Do the people of the twentieth century control their tempers better than did their ancestors? Are they less sensual, more temperate, more tolerant of others' religious beliefs, than the brethren of yesteryears? Can it be accurately stated that the Christianization of mankind has kept pace with the amazing material development of the epoch under consideration?

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