Eliot House
Harvard University
"_In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth._"
So the Bible opens, so the world began. The historian, Arnold
Toynbee, has shown us how many beginnings there have been since
that time, how kingdoms rise and fall, one civilization succeeding
another as new life and inspiration take the place of death and
complacency. There never will be an end of beginnings or of ends so
long as the world endures.
A study of this historical cycle shows that mankind has never lost
its hope for a deus ex machina, a God who will save men at the last
moment from the effects of their own bad beginnings. It makes a good
story to tell how the Gods from Olympus intervened on the behalf of
their favorites on the plains of Troy but it is disastrous when men
mistake this day-dream for reality. Yet at the end of each age there
is to be seen a frantic scrambling for divine favor, a scurrying
to the churches when the Goths threatened the Roman Empire, for
example, or a bull market for indulgences as the Renaissance
replaced medieval society.
Men are forever trying to substitute faith in a last resort God for
faith in the "beginning God".
But seldom if ever has the substitution been successful. Once
an avalanche of events has been loosed by the criminality or
carelessness of men, God will not intervene until the tumult and the
shouting have died down, and his still small voice can once more be
heard.
No one can mistake the fact that we are at the beginning of a new
era now, an era in which events will happen more quickly and more
drastically than in any period in history. And these events may be
either for good or for evil depending upon whether we decide now to
follow the "beginning God" rather than to postpone our faith until
fear impels a grasping for a God of last resort, a deus ex machina
which does not exist.
To follow the true God, however, the God who is in the beginning,
means a sharp change in policy; it means junking our old habits of
procrastination and reliance upon self while the going is good,
for then is the time that inexorable events pile up to avalanche
proportions. It means starting right now to refer our decisions
to him for advice with confidence in his universal judgment and
never-ceasing care.
A great opportunity is open to us, for I do not doubt that the first
really successful age will take place when God is invited to enter
the human scene at the very outset and thereby to form the pattern
for the years that follow. It is a crucial opportunity, for the
neighborliness and love that proceed from him are no longer optional
courses but are the very conditions of survival.
Why not therefore make up our minds now that we will do everything
in our power this year, this month, today, to introduce the God of
the beginning to the problems of the now?