Article August 12, 1961 Issue

Signs of the Times

with contributions from W. Kee Maxwell, Ethel Tulloch Banks

W. Kee Maxwell in The Paramount Journal Paramount, California

One of the oldest and most impressive pictures of universal peace is the vision of the prophet Isaiah some 700 years before the Christian era. It is interpreted by exponents of Christianity as a prophecy of the coming of Jesus Christ and the final consequences of His advent. [See Isaiah 11: 1-9.] ... It is a beautiful conception, but an ideal which implies a revolution in nature—the triumph of the spiritual over the material world. This triumph perhaps is the supreme necessity in a world of peace.

The vision of Isaiah is perhaps the only foundation on which any lasting peace can be built—a vision which calls for the subjugation of elemental brute impulses by the ascendency of the spiritual force's in men.... War is the fruit of the unconquered, unpurged brute element in mankind. Peace can come only through the submergence of this element by the spiritual nature which is man's endowment and the mark of his supremacy over the beast.

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