April 6

April 6 – AM          Page 51, We Agnostics, Chapter 4

This world of ours has made more material progress in the last century than in all the millenniums which went before.  Almost everyone knows the reason.  Students of ancient history tell us that the intellect of men in those days was equal to the best of today.  Yet in ancient times material progress was painfully slow.  The spirit of modern scientific inquiry, research and invention was almost unknown.  In the realm of the material, men’s minds were fettered by superstition, tradition, and all sorts of fixed ideas.  Some of the contemporaries of Columbus thought a round earth preposterous.  Others came near putting Galileo to death for his astronomical heresies.
We asked ourselves this:  Are not some of us just as biased and unreasonable about the realm of the spirit as were the ancients about the realm of the material?

April 6 – PM          Page 9-10, Bill’s Story, Chapter 1

But he did no ranting.  In a matter of fact way he told how two men had appeared in court, persuading the judge to suspend his commitment.  They had told of a simple religious idea and a practical program of action.  That was two months ago and the result was self-evident.  It worked!
He had come to pass his experience along to me—if I cared to have it.  I was shocked, but interested.  Certainly I was interested.  I had to be, for I was hopeless.
He talked for hours.  Childhood memories rose before me.  I could almost hear the sound of the preacher’s voice as I sat, on still Sundays, way over there on the hillside; there was that proffered temperance pledge I never signed; my grandfather’s good natured contempt of some church folk and their doings; his insistence that the spheres really had their music; but his denial of the preacher’s right to tell him how he must listen; his fearlessness as he spoke of these things just before he died; these recollections welled up from the past.  They made me swallow hard.
That war-time day in old Winchester Cathedral came back again.