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CHAPTER I
What Will Tomorrow Bring?
What will tomorrow bring? That is the anxious thought which rules in every mind. It is the vital question which absorbs not only this country, but every country in the world.
What the morrow will bring lies in the power of humanity itself to effect. The future lies within the province of our will. But what is our will? A will to peace, or a will to war? A will to international anarchy, or a will to world unity and international organization?
In its New Year’s Letter of 1949 the WhaleyEaton Service proclaims this message: “There is one undisputed fact—that the old world is gone, never to return. A new world must be built with new objectives and new methods of reaching these objectives. What kind of a new world? Where are we at, and whither are we drifting?”
“The afiirmative attitude [the will-to-progress] can produce of itself only a partial and imperfect civilization,” says Albert Schweitzer.* “Only if it becomes inward and ethical can the will-to-progress which results from it possess the requisite insight to distinguish the valuable from the less valuable, and strive after a civilization which does not consist only in achievements of knowledge and power, but before all else will make
- Out of My Life and Thought. Albert Schweitzer; Holt, 1949.
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men, both individually and collectively, more spiritual and more ethical—” [and, Schweitzer might have added, more felicitous and happy].
This is a profound statement. It goes to the root causes of that chaos which now pervades our war-tom world. Humanity’s will-to—progress——now preponderantly secular and materialistic in its expressions—has arrived at a cul-de-sac. Progress is halted, detoured, threatened with extinction before the fated and fatal struggle of the masses the world over—both within and without the Iron Curtain—for greater privilege and prosperity.
This struggle——erratic and illusioned as it may be in many of its manifestations—is basically an ethical one, the quest of underprivileged and exploited humans for equity.
But since the curse of the age is its secularism, the urge for equity on the part of the masses is led down the wrong road. It has become an intense struggle for power. This errant route leads to no solution. Struggles for power will end only in still more chaos, still more inequities on the part of one side or the other.
Schweitzer gives us the right diagnosis and the right solution. The judgments and activities of world leadership must be exercised from the plane of ethics. The motivation must be spiritual. Then its expressionspractical, and beneficial on the material plane——-will sulfer no collapse from the struggling and combative wills of human groups.
Does it sound unpractical to state that resurging waves of spiritual motivation must pervade, buoy up and move forward the collective human activities upon
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What Will Tomorrow Bring? 3
this planet before the will-to-progress can operate again on secure and stable lines? What is needed is a spiritual renaissance to usher in that material millennium of planetary peace and prosperity which has now become the fond and hopeful dream of humanity.
And where is such a spiritual renaissance to come from, save from the world's leaders? Tolstoi in his “The Kingdom of God” wisely points out that in order to attain to that world pattern of loving fellowship and peace which is the concrete and ultimate goal of Christian effort it is not necessary to wait until all humans ——or even the major portion of them—become spiritually motivated. All that is necessary is for the preponderance of world leadership to become consecrated to this goal, and the masses will follow their lead as they have always followed inspired leadership throughout historic and epochal movements of humanity.
It is the leadership that has the responsibility. The commoners have no recourse but to depend upon their leaders. Even in our own highly literate and voluble democracy we can do nothing save through leadership. The wisest of us, as private citizens, can only wield the vote or agitate. We have neither the experience, nor expert and often secret knowledge, upon which to base wise judgments and actions. Even Congress itself is now dependent more and more upon the research of staffs of specialists connected with its committees or organized under the Library of Congress for Congressional research and aid.
Even when we dissent from our political leaders and seek to establish popular movements for the correction and improvement of their decisions, we have to rely upon leaders to so organize. '
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If such dependence upon leadership is evident in this advanced civilization of America, how much more evident is it in those countries where the masses are illiterate, ignorant and uninformed? They must perforce both submit to leadership and rely upon it to bring them that equity toward which they dumbly or vociferously aspire.
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Inspired leadership can mould whole nations, as it did our own in the critical and formative years of the forging out of that constitution and federal government which stands today as a model for the whole world.
Creative leadership, year in and year out, evolves and establishes within each nation new modes, practices and arts that advance its civilization. Sometimes —and this is desperately needed today—the influence of such leadership oversteps national boundaries and emanates an expansive inspiration over all humanity.
This is especially the nature and province of those great spiritual leaders whose messages tend to be universal and whose influence is planetary. These worldwide proclaimers of truth and righteousness envisage all humanity as their audience, and the entire planet as the theatre of their action. Their vision is cosmic and their message universal. Like Isaiah, they have preached a gospel of peace and brotherhood for the whole world; and like him they have looked forward to a time when “the knowledge of God shall cover the earth, as the waters cover the sea.”
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The influence of all leadership is forward-looking and progressive. But the influence of the world’s great
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spiritual leaders is not only futureward but even prophetic. They feel the pulse of humanity itself, to which their great hearts are dedicated in a love that is almost superhuman; and they sense, with a sensitivity that divides truth from error, the Cosmic Purpose which would prevail in the affairs of humanity as it prevails in the development of the entire cosmos. They see, as it were, the Blueprints of Destiny, to the fulfillment of which they dedicate their every energy and will.
It is not given to many humans, this power of planetary leadership. But the forward-looking vision and the dedication of ones will and ability and efforts to the improvement of humanity—this is a gift and privilege open to all men. One can tune oneself to those Cosmic vibrations which play upon humanity for its inspiration and advancement; and one can receive—in proportion to one’s abilities——a power of leadership, small or great, for the benefit of an ailing world.
We might ask as the writer has often done—is progress inherent in the universe? We have yet to receive from men thus queried an answer of negation. Do we not indeed all live and move in this faith, that existence is inherently progressive? Progressive not only for the material universe but also for human beings, both individually and collectively.
Yet if we further inquire as to how this Cosmic Will—to—Progress can infringe upon and effect the movements of humanity, we shall be forced to conclude that it can be only through the power of inspired leadership. Man has been given a will of his own and can move forward only under his own volition.
The Creative Will does not reveal Itself to the human world through messages blazoned on the sky; or through stentorious proclamations piercing the interstellar voids. No. It is the Still Small Voice that guides humanity, through the instrumentality of those who have the gift of cosmic hearing. “Those that have
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ears, let them hear!” This is the eternal way of the Eternal. And throughout all time there have been those who have responded and taken upon themselves the colossal task of relaying to humanity divinely inspired guidances for its benefit and crescent welfare.
Only thus can progress come to the living, sentient, thought-endowed mass of humanity. Our physical evolution is unconscious. But our cultural evolution is conscious—the result of conscious inspired leadership and of conscious and effective response to this leadership. That is the way humanity moves forward. That is the way of the past, as it will be the way of the future.
What a great responsibility, then, rests upon those humans who have the gift of leadership and the call to exercise its power! “Feed my sheep,” was Christ's last injunction to his disciples. For we are indeed as sheep, and we have to be led if we are to reach the promised land.
Today the call and need for leadership is greater than at any time in history. Every people, the world over, labor under great dislocations and dilemmas that threaten national disaster. They are looking bewilderedly for leaders to guide them to security and plenty.
But the problems of individual nations are as nothing compared to the problems of the world itself, as the arena of a planetary struggle which calls for planetary solutions. Particularistic solutions are not enough. No nation now can live unto itself. Solutions must be universal.
And as each national group is seeking desperately for leadership, so is the planet as a whole calling aloud for planetary leaders endowed with vision and with power of influence great enough to move the whole planetary mass of humanity forward out of its dilemma of chaos into a future of order and security. of peace and fellowship, of universal equity and love.
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Such a leader arose in the Nineteenth Century with
- 1 message both of secular and of spiritual progressprofoundly spiritual yet eminently practical——which has
subsequently evolved into a world movement.
