How, O Master, shall we overcome evil--is still the eternal question
of a war-ridden, hate-ridden, fearful world. Instead of any longer
listening, it is growing listless to the eternal answer--“Overcome
evil with good.” He never said to overcome it through governmental
suppression and the hate-breeding violence of forcible censorships.
That was the answer of Pontius Pilate. =And Pontius Pilate was the
first great censor= and Jesus Christ the first great victim of
censorship. On behalf of this nation’s childhood, whose destinies are
to be injured by such false remedies, I appeal from the gospel of
Pilate to the gospel of Christ.
But what shall we do, you may ask, to guard that destiny which we all
equally have at heart? It is not an easy thing always to know just
how to overcome evil with good. It is much easier for some parents,
teachers, unwise, if not ungracious pastors, to leave the job to a
board of censors or some new-fangled statute law with its abuses,
blackmails, grafts, persecutions, stupidities and tyrannies. Are we to
be a nation of dodgers, of weazened shirkers, putting responsibility on
laws, laws and more laws, bureaus, bureaucrats, censors and regulators
until we are glutted, choked and suffocated with laws to let any George
do it, but the right George?
Are we to become a nation of “squealers,” passing the buck from
parents, homes, schools and churches for their responsibility for
Youth, to some perfectly human-to-err censors who may be wise and good
but likely to be mostly foolish, if, as in the case of some of our
prohibition regulators, they are not crooks and grafters, to flounder
in their own helplessness because they do not know what is good or what
is evil or how to fight it.
Consider the fact that even now a picture that one governmental censor
board says is good, another in some other state, condemns as bad. And
consider the rank injustice of city or state censorship authorities
passing a “bad” picture as “good” in one such city or state, and this
same perfectly “good” picture as “bad” in another, as these different
censorship boards often do.