8/23/06 Immoral Coercion, a small book in my correspondence with Wm F. Buckley Jr. concerning the bounds that differentiate good governments from bad governments, using the Reagan-Bush estate as an example of a coercive government.
Copyright © 1994-2006 Mel West. All rights reserved.

This is intended as a ruler to help you assimilate the contents of the following discussion on Immoral Coercion.

The argument has a long history behind it. Its earliest beginnings appeared around 1500 B.C., perhaps, which grew into the Vedas of India, noteworthy of which are the Upanishads and the Bhagavad-Gita . The Gita is an Aryan word meaning, Life . It is framed around a character called Lord Krishna who stands in the chariot of a prince named Arjuna and counsels him at the moment Arjuna's troops are positioned in battle against his cousins. The name, Krishna , means Great Spirit . He counsels Arjuna on Duty, that he is an ineffable Spirit, and that no matter where you take your argument you will come back to him. Coupled with this are the Upanishads which continue the argument of the Ineffable Great Spirit. These and other teachings we packaged in a work called The Tapestry of One .

Apart from appearing in other places in the Fertile Crescent, China, and Egypt in various forms, about May 15, 1492 B.C., which is the Day of Pentecost to the Jews, the argument was clarified in a message to Moses, passed down from the Cloudy heights of Mt. Sinai. Since then most of the population of this world has engaged that message in one form or another. That message also was for Life, that all men would have it more abundantly, and it set a Way, an Eternal Truth, which it claimed would bring peace to all the world. At the foundation of that message delivered through the prophet Moses are precepts having to do with discerning and defending Liberty. The examples given in that message are the Jews, who become a people afflicted by slavery and then scorn, derision, and finally hunted down to almost extinction. The story of these people, who are forced to suffer all kinds of indignities, clearly defines all of those things which are evil, which produce persecution (another term for immoral coercion) and bloodshed. By what happened to them we know what not to do.

In this model there were promises, that one day the Jews would become a song of praise among the nations, for, say the Scriptures upon which the Jews were carried, one day God would redeem them to the land He had Promised them, and no man from then on would ever do harm to them again. Included in this Promise was the idea that the nations who persecuted them should be punished so to instill a universal idea of Judgment: that those who persecute others will be brought to judgment one day.

Having seen the Jews [Children of Israel] restored according to the criteria given them, which was May 15, 1948; we have living examples of a people who know without a doubt the meaning of Liberty. Through the process of the redemption of the Jews and the Judgment which follows it Peace comes to the world. The judgment is a vehicle of serving notice, that the Holy Spirit who delivered his Promise from Mount Sinai, is True to His Word. Within that Word is a thing the Scriptures define as The Word of God , which takes the form of a counselor who mitigates the effects of the Judgment. In fact, if the nations listen, there need not be the Wrath of Judgment. The thesis here is that their sins will be forgotten if people turn back to Him.

I became enraptured with the end of the argument from Sinai, particularly that part whose ideas pave a path to peace. I began encouraging it through a series of letters first, then books, which gained no audience. Then, in 1986, I saw multitudes of homeless people in our streets, who since then and still now are enduring the same kinds of persecutions condemned in the Holy Scriptures. We then published several Small Books protesting this indignity, which the homeless handed out on the streets of San Francisco. The works complained that the thousands of Homeless of that city were being put through the same trials the Jews had seen; and that Americans, above all people, should be above this. The works failed to get any attention.

Failing in San Francisco, and seeing the city of San Francisco prohibit the beggars a means to live altogether, we transplanted the complaint through the hands of the homeless on the streets of Berkeley. Realizing that the Small Book Series was too heavy for people to digest, we then trimmed the fat out of our argument and published it in Tiny Books which were designed to fit in the left breast pocket (sample – What Price Justice – is in the back pocket of this book). We did not know that the Berkeleyites were left handed..

Immoral Coercion is an evil thing which hardens men's hearts and brings ruin to others' lives. A failure to answer a call for help, for instance, can be as evil as the one who tortures a people. This example was verified in the Judgment of Nürnberg concerning the case of Nazi Germany. And it is the opening argument in the Scriptures given to Moses, that to save a people from slavery (either physical or mental) one must break through the hardened hearts of them who are persecuting them. In the story of the Jews we see that this is a hard thing to do.

Finally we struck gold – seeking a righteous man – and reached Mr. Buckley in December 1992, who took the time to answer our complaint. Out of that rich vein came a series of Small Books which continued the argument. These are: Against Leviathan , works associated with it, including Financial Institution Credit Watch and The Second Coming of the American Revolution ; then we delved into ethics and morality in On The Breakage of the Holy Catholic Church, Works and Days among the Hyperboreans , Planks towards Freedom , Quest for Human Dignity , The Mehl Commentary, Duty and Profit , this work, Immoral Coercion, and following it From Dust and Ashes to Joy , and Who is of the Truth. All of these build from the idea that the principles applied to set the Jews free from affliction (which still continues) will also set those Americans persecuted in our streets free.

In the debate I took a formless nature. The principal characteristic of my form was that I would assume the spirit of a gathering of the important sages in history, which we call a Great Troop ; and we would use their arguments to defend not only our poor but also others similarly treated around the world, as for example in Bosnia and Israel. We apply our Great Troop as an eternal, common body of knowledge, and these include the teachings of Jesus Christ and the prophets of Israel. Where you see the expression, "we" used in these texts, it refers to our Great Troop.

In our argument with Mr. Buckley, whose status as an informed American and leader is well known, we quoted sages and scriptures why our leaders are in default of every moral institution honored by man; that they are consuming us with their avarice and lies about our National Debt and its effects, causing homelessness and other ruptures in our lives; and pleaded for the case of a Wise Man to step forward to defend us from the indignity. We saw Mr. Buckley..

Mr. Buckley shifted the argument to fundamentals relating to his perceptions of duty; and this led us into an old argument among the early Christians which had to do with the obligations of their faith. In Quest for Human Dignity we draw a satire on the extent to which our state has been defiled, and then through Duty and Profit , we manifest tried values and profound concerns (as relating to our National Debt) which draw upon one's Duty to family and country. Now we continue our plea, focusing the moral principles of our Great Troop, upon the new perspective Mr. Buckley just introduced to the debate: that he is looking forward to the epiphany of Jesus Christ's Second Coming; and this returns us to some earlier questions we have raised in the debate.

Our Great Troop now explores some details Promised in that epiphany which are easy to perceive and reconcile to the continuing argument: where our Great Troop maintains that coaxing a spirit to defend the Homeless will lead to a spirit of reconciliation which can solve other problems which are currently blocking the epiphany Mr. Buckley is looking forward to.

Each member of our Great Troop speaks for himself, but, as will be seen in examining all of our works, they all have a common voice.

Understanding the Grand Finale

Fundamental to the epiphany are details relating to proving that the Holy Spirit, YHVH, spoke to Moses from His Cloud of Glory at Mount Sinai. The Grand Finale of that epiphany is described in Luke 21, which concludes with the Second Coming of Christ manifesting Himself with the Cloud of Heaven. We here point out that there are certain gates which were closed before 1948 --which Mr. Buckley thought to be still closed--which are now open, setting off, as it were, the Grand Finale.

Though the gate of the epiphany is open, there are some significant things blocking its manifestation which we discuss in this book. The Closed Hearts and Closed Minds, who have been consumed by avarice are blocking it, including Christian pastors who heretofore would not recognize it. If they can't recognize people perishing at the [American] gates [re: Amos 5.12], how could they recognize any epiphany sent to save the people from their tormenters? We argue that the people perish due to the lack of knowledge [Hosea 4.6] and would remind you that the LORD desires mercy, and not sacrifice; and the knowledge of God more than burnt offerings [Hosea 6.6]. It is by knowledge that the Epiphany which Mr. Buckley looks forward to is seen.

How materials close minds. This leads to the conclusion that Immoral Coercion, on many fronts, inhibits knowledge; and often this Immoral Coercion manifests itself over material things: money and the structures they build. A Specific material object which inhibits the epiphany of Luke 21 is, for instance, the Golden Gate in Jerusalem which was sealed up by Sulliman the Great several centuries ago. This gate was blocked not only with stones but also with an Iron Fence and graves of Moslems! Behind this blockage is the idea of the Moslems that the Messiah which the Jews have been waiting for will not walk over Moslem graves to approach the gate, and if he tries, the iron fence and stone wall sealing the gate will stop him. Atop the Temple Mount are guards positioned to assure no infidel touches the Golden Gate. Here we argue that Mr. Buckley could facilitate the epiphany if he were to help unseal the Golden Gate. But this will require some ability to reason with the Moslems and the Jews; and, furthermore, since the Scriptures of that epiphany provide for the support of many nations in the venture, we would also need the cooperation of Christians to open the Gate. To date that gate has been the focus of two thousand years of bloody crusades (going as far back as Caesar Caligula). Using a term we borrowed from John Stuart Mills, On Liberty, we ask that it is time now to address the gate with a civilizade and put the Crusader away.

The Golden Gate is the direct gate to the Temple Mount, where a Temple built by Herod the Great used to stand (it was destroyed in 70 A.D.). Part of the epiphany which Mr. Buckley says he is looking forward to includes restoration of that Temple in line with the Sealed Golden Gate .

The Messiah of the Scriptures has the requirement to go directly to His Temple [sic. He enters through the straight Gate]; and this presents not only a requirement for restoring the Temple, among other things, but also, because the Golden Gate is sealed, the removal of the stones which seal the Golden Gate! We, in our various books, have configured our self, the Great Troop, in front of that gate and have drawn the comparison that opening that gate is like opening the gate to heaven (righteousness). When the gate is unsealed, of course, it will allow the Jews, who are presently prevented from worshipping on the Temple mount, to join the Moslems atop the mount to worship in the restored Temple, called a House of Prayer for all people. The scriptures assure us that all people will rejoice in that House of prayer for all people; and this should be another factor attracting Mr. Buckley's attention upon the Golden Gate.

But there is Immoral Coercion blocking the opening: One fear is among the Moslems that the restored temple will force their Holy building, the Dome of the Rock, to be levelled; the other is a fear among Christians that once the Temple is built it will not be Christ who enters it but the devil himself.

To open the Golden Gate, so that the righteousness may enter, one must thus deal with the images which are causing the coercion-whose results are daily displayed in the bloody fighting between the Jews, Moslems, and Christians around the world and which are no less evident in our Halls of Avarice.

This fight has its first beginnings when the apostle Paul saw a vision of Jesus on the road to Damascus, as he was headed there to capture and persecute some disciples of Jesus Christ the Nazarene circa 34 A.D. In the vision, he says, Jesus said to him:

Acts 9.5..I am Jesus whom thou persecutest: it is hard for thee to kick against the pricks...

Paul concluded, rather inappropriately, that God hates [has abandoned] the Jews and their Law, which is an argument which ran contrary to Jesus' Gospel given to Saints Peter and James, which, by its nature, runs counter to the Promises in the Old Testament, all of which end in the epiphany summarized in Luke 21.

Now it was Paul who named the Holy Scriptures of the Jews, the Old Testament , presuming that since Christ had appeared there was no need to fulfill the rest of the scriptures (which is why he called it the Old Testament, old and therefore passed away ). Because of the conflict of opinion on this between Saints Peter and James, both being against Paul, Paul coined a new gospel which he called by his name [sic. My Gospel]; and he condemned anyone who taught any other gospel than his. As said, his gospel condemned the Jews and the Law, and the fruit of that condemnation we listed in What Price Justice . For it caused the Holocaust of 6 Million Jews. (See On the Breakage of the Holy Catholic Church ).

Putting God to the Test

The foundation of the Jewish, Christian, and Moslem faiths is a simple precept, that God cannot lie, neither can his prophets lie. Nor His Christ. A binder in that foundation is that the Christ carries God's Eternal Truth. If one comes with a message which contravenes the foundation delivered at Mount Sinai (as applying first to the Jews), he is a false prophet or false Christ.

Not Married to God? Christian belief, following the Gospel of Paul, has a closed mind to the idea that the Second Coming of Jesus should involve restoring the Temple, the House of Prayer for all people, and, incidental to this, changing the name of the Holy Land, from Israel to Beulah. Beulah means Married. Connected with this is the recognition that all people (whosoever lives there at the redemption of the Jews to the Holy Land) in Jerusalem are called Holy to God. This also is part of the epiphany Mr. Buckley said he looks forward to; and this brings us to a manifestation of charity and mercy in a Kingdom of Peace (Revelation 20 and 21 speak of this as lasting a thousand years).

We argue that a few small works can break down the closed gates and minds who are blocking the epiphany (see On the Breakage of the Holy Catholic Church and Philistia Triumph thou because of me ).

We ask Mr. Buckley, with the resources of his Bishop, to prove us wrong, whether the author of the Holy Scriptures, of that looked forward to epiphany is a liar, and, if so, what part of the epiphany is a lie. If he can agree that none of the things we list could be a lie, then we ask him to proceed with us allowing the Golden Gate to be opened peacefully, so the procession to build the Temple may enter. If there is any part of this process subject to dispute we need to know it.

Whilst Christians have an interest in Jerusalem, to protect their shrines, and have launched many a crusade to control Jerusalem, their interest--now led by America--is more rapacious, because of the strategic concerns they have in the area and, of course, the oil. Because of these interests America, beginning with President Jimmy Carter, has led the negotiations for a Peace in the Middle East. We argue that the Spirit which can open the Golden Gate, which is what the Spirit of Peace for Jerusalem must be, can only open it on moral foundations. At the moment America, where stands the leader of the party for the Peace of Jerusalem, is too immoral for that world. We must remove her corruption to understand the dais before the Golden Gate. Ultimately this reduces to our beginning: to ask Mr. Buckley if the thing he looks forward to also involves giving the Holy Land its rightful name. We drill together upon the field of marriage and true faithfulness here. Can God lie about a thing as fundamental as this? Our Great Troop says the idea of Beulah cannot be a lie; thus the original complaint Jesus said to Paul above still holds. Those who find our paladins' offerings here too much fat to chew should find What Price Justice more palatable.

Mel West
Berkeley, CA

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December 7, 1994,

Dear Mr. Buckley,

Thank you for your letter of December 1, 1994 in answer to our work Duty and Profit . I could answer you by challenging you to search my pockets (such as Philistia Triumph thou because of me ), that many of the things you say you have been looking forward to [sic. Isaiah 62.2,4] have already been accomplished. Prove me wrong that this is not so. We could leave our answer at that, but there is a Spirit which goes with those things we listed which seemingly requires more dialogue to convict you of the things you have overlooked; and seeing how Christians in particular have closed their minds to the Spirit of the Scriptures I wandered ahead, among the Hyperboreans , to sort through other things of the Spirit by the which we might more clearly manifest it to you. In so doing I spied The Old Man of the Sea down his walkway and saluted him, and he in an agitated sort of way said:

..the problem with you and Buckley is that you think you are channels of God!

– which brought me into sifting through his soul which is much like yours (which he just confessed before I posted this letter). In any event to ascertain the Spirit of the matter, the particulars in his soul embrace a conviction that you, kind Sir, and I have been communing with nothing [Hebrew, Ayn sof ?], . Then to top this off, he repeated a thought he had been haunting me with:

..that the answers I have been receiving from you, Mr. Buckley, have been crafted by a lackey in the lower cells of your high office, whom you ask to read and answer my letters; that I had been communicating with nobody [not to be confused with that character in Homer's Odyssey].

The Old man of the Sea  then apologized for the former comment, though he positioned himself on the latter which would, on the surface, appear to impugn the credibility of our work. For he argued that He knows you must be busier than he and therefore would not have time to digest the bulls I forward your way. He trashes letters over 1,200 words long, which is a practice (and not an altogether bad discipline) he apparently picked up from his early government service.

He's a good soul and stands firm on his convictions as you, and he is always gracious in offering his opinion (being direct like you). You both are reasonable men and have favored me with good will and food for thought. In spite of the inborn goodness in your hearts, you both have planted your feet on some rather insubstantial grounds, which I believe, if slightly moved to a firmer place, where our Great Troop stands, you'd see some marvellous things come out of it. If you can get caught up in their Spirit, as it were, I have no doubts that some gates which now are closed will be opened. Well, let's face it. You both are already caught within the leaves of our letters. Letters, of course, unlock doors which might otherwise be closed.

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I tried to explain to The Old Man of the Sea  that I am not writing letters (which may be governed by thimble sized thoughts) but a book which is being shepherded by you, Mr. Buckley. Your short pricks in answer to my long hooks, goads, and jabs serve well enough the project mentioned in Luke, that in spite of what The Old Man of the Sea  would want to believe there is a spirit between us, dear Sir, which I know is creating an interesting package of ideals which could flatten some of the whirlpools of rage the nations are now being swept into. I say this with caution, at even the risk of losing The Old Man of the Sea  as a friend, as I have always valued his contrary opinion, as I have yours--which we explain later. We cannot remain mute, for we know that the suppression of opinions leads to darkness, where there is no light, which is the subject of Duty and Profit . For the reasons noted herein we are happy to explore all diverse points of view--as you have so kindly done with me.

Certain opinions, we have noted previously, which manifest themselves in afflicting others, are not things which require a great deal of exploration, except to note them as examples of what to avoid. Certain Gnostic Texts, for instance, concluded that all knowledge must be explored and stretched the precept that a full exploration of debauchery was required, following after the manner of a continuing Bacchanalian Festival. So there are certain things a discerning man can see right away which lead to no good. Other things require a bit more prolix, such as those things evil men call good. If all men are evil, as in Sodom, then the more the prolix.

You and I share similar observations on this matter, and the fact that you have engaged a good conversation on the finer points of faith, confirm that the discussion is worth the effort. I am firmly convinced that as long as we continue the discussion under the auspices or vision of Christ, the work will be fruitful.

If you come forward a bit more, through Christ's similitude--following the idea of the Body of Christ--we should be able to better discern and agree on the true causes of our problems and how to avoid them.

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Diverting a river of change. As the channel of the scriptures leads towards a specific end, which we adore, and you said you looked forward to, I hoped that if The Old Man of the Sea could get around the names of the work (since he objects to God getting the credit) and into the Spirit of it, he would come along also. It's for the work's sake, and not for me, said Jesus long ago, regarding the same conditions. We know if he can put aside credits for a moment, The Old Man of the Sea  should be attracted particularly to the work, since it addresses a more equitable distribution of our wealth, as in the Spirit of the Day of Pentecost . We hope to persuade through our work any one who holds materialistic biases to concentrate more on the work which is needed to be done. After the work is done, who initiated it becomes self evident, for a tree is known by its fruits. "If a river to your liking comes your way and you could use it to irrigate your crops, what difference does it make who diverted it your way?" I asked him. A wise husbandman would get out his shovel to lay up dikes to guide the current, regardless of its source, to assure the good health of his fruit. This is what we have been addressing in you, Sir, as well.

Your comment, "Homer nods and I'm not Homer, but I cannot have said works were irrelevant to salvation.." we accept, and I hope that I will not be guilty of dragging you over that stumbling block again.

Back to the Watchman

I have called you a Watchman, a Righteous Man, because you reached down to answer me when I called. That you have engaged me in conversation in my somewhat heavy works I think is a good credit, particularly when there are others who think me unworthy of your dialogue.

I am a novice, I admit, and have much to learn. I should have used other metaphors beyond the Scaian Gates, rather than abusing Homer more (the Lord knows how the sages of the aeons have worked him to death). But I must confess my Homeric metaphors had an ulterior motive: to attract the attention of my children in France. My daughter is Parisian and may claim her heritage back to Priam, along with the Sang Grael ladies from Troyes, just south of her.

She is now eight years old, and I received the other day, for the first time, a letter from her in her own handwriting. She fortunately is not infected by her father's wordy ways and seems to prefer to cut to the chase just like you. This probably comes from her great uncle who is a famous early twentieth century Frenchman who updated Antigone and other Theban Plays. I may, perchance, blame my wordiness on my grandmother who was one of the heirs of the largest estates in Ireland, which was called the Chaucer estate. It may be that some of Chaucer's preferences for meandering among pilgrims, sifting through one sage to another, got into my blood. My prolix is in my genes, I think. It's a compulsion with me to stack ideas as high as I can.

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That you mentioned how dreadful the destruction of the Temple was gives us the comparison that in the Judgment of Israel over about a three month period, in Jerusalem at Passover 70 A.D., there were over 600,000 corpses thrown over the walls. Most of them died from starvation but many of them died at the hands of friends and relatives, because in the siege the Jews were fractured into many bloody factions. This compares to the ~500,000 we lost in the American Civil War, from 1861-1865. The final course of the Judgment of Israel ended with the Nazi death camps, where 6 million Jews were exterminated. After this, in 1948, the Jews were allowed to return to their Promised Land, from their near two thousand year captivity. The disaster which struck Jerusalem, we pointed out earlier, could strike here; and knowing that Americans were not particularly pleased over the losses in their own camp in World War II, or worse, the Civil War, it seems probable that a siege upon our stronghold anything like Jerusalem's would engage a level of terror far beyond their expectations. As noted, the tinder which is likely to produce that kind of terror is already corded on the streets. Newt Gingrich's plan to add more tinder and on top of this more orphanages and prisons will only serve to coerce the thing already burning within us into higher flames. The objectives of the series of signs mentioned in Luke address this and run counter to the present desires; for the end of the thing desired by the scriptures is to release the prisoners from their prison houses and to attend to the widow and the orphans. What the New Congress seems to be talking about, according to our standards, is an immoral thing to do. It is Christ's desire to stop such rude behavior; and this is done through the Judgment of the Gentile at the time Israel is restored to the Holy Land.

Of the signs St. Luke mentions, you will discover that the key that the Judgment of the Gentile is near has been turned. For the Judgment of the Gentile does not begin until the Jews are restored from their captivity; and this happened in 1948.

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Not a Closed Door

What you perceived as a door still closed-as things to look forward to --was true before the turn of the century. We showed in other works, such as Philistia Triumph thou because of me , where even the modern rabbis and scholars, such as reflected in Theodor Herzl's plan, had given up on the idea of the Jews being redeemed to their Promised Land:

Theodor Herzl [1860-1904], Tract on Zionism..Is Palestine or Argentina to be preferred? The Society will take whatever it is given and whatever the public opinion of the Jewish people favors. The Society will determine both these points.

Some, following Moses Hess and later Martin Buber, believed in the Promise, that the Jews could not be redeemed without being restored to the Holy Land:

Ussishkin, Eretz Israel, 1932..When the Jewish people will have been redeemed to the Land of Israel, the Land of Israel will redeem the Jewish people.

Because of their faith in that Promise the Children of Israel have been redeemed. Prove to me that this is not true: behold the scriptures: suddenly a door which had remained shut since 70 A.D. is now open! This, once again, relates to Jesus's parable of the Fig Tree [Luke 21.29] (a symbol of Israel) and such verses as:

Daniel 12.7..and when he shall have accomplished to scatter the power of the holy people, all these things shall be finished.

We know that the scattering is accomplished when the restoration of the captives from their captivity is manifest; and with this comes their redemption and a great outpouring of the Holy Spirit. The origin of this idea is:

Deut. 32.36 For the LORD shall judge his people, and repent himself for his servants, when he seeth that their power is gone, and there is none shut up, or left.
32.43 Rejoice, O ye nations, with his people: for he will avenge the blood of his servants, and will render vengeance to his adversaries, and will be merciful unto his land, and to his people.

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From this was manifested:

Zephaniah 3.8 Therefore wait ye upon me, saith the LORD, until the day that I rise up to the prey: for my determination is to gather the nations, that I may assemble the kingdoms, to pour upon them mine indignation, even all my fierce anger: for all the earth shall be devoured with the fire of my jealousy.
3.9 For then will I turn to the people a pure language, that they may all call upon the name of the LORD, to serve him with one consent.
Joel 3.1 For, behold, in those days, and in that time, when I shall bring again the captivity of Judah and Jerusalem,
3.2 I will also gather all nations, and will bring them down into the valley of Jehoshaphat, and will plead with them there for my people and for my heritage Israel, whom they have scattered among the nations, and parted my land.
Zechariah 12.8 In that day shall the LORD defend the inhabitants of Jerusalem, and He that is feeble among them at that day shall be as David; and the House of David shall be as God, as the angel of the LORD before them.
12.9 And it shall come to pass in that day, that I will seek to destroy all the nations that come against Jerusalem.
Ezekiel 37.21 And say unto them, Thus saith the Lord GOD; Behold, I will take the children of Israel from among the heathen, whither they be gone, and will gather them on every side, and bring them into their own land:
37.22 And I will make them one nation in the land upon the mountains of Israel; and one king shall be king to them all: and they shall be no more two nations, neither shall they be divided into two kingdoms any more at all:
37.23 Neither shall they defile themselves any more with their idols, nor with their detestable things, nor with any of their transgressions: but I will save them out of all their dwelling places.. and will cleanse them: so shall they be my people, and I will be their God.
37.24 And David my servant shall be king over them; and they shall have one shepherd: they shall also walk in my judgments, and observe my statutes, and do them.

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37.25 And they shall dwell in the land that I have given unto Jacob my servant, wherein your fathers have dwelt; and they shall dwell therein, even they, and their children, and their children's children forever: and my servant David shall be their prince forever.
37.26 Moreover I will make a covenant of peace with them; it shall be an everlasting covenant with them: and I will place them, and multiply them, and will set my sanctuary in the midst of them for evermore.
37.27 My tabernacle also shall be with them: yea, I will be their God, and they shall be my people.

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37.28 And the heathen shall know that I the LORD do sanctify Israel, when my sanctuary shall be in the midst of them for evermore.

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Then begins the story of Gog and Magog [Ezekiel 38] which in Revelation 20.8 begins after the character called the Word of God , who had a name written no man knew but he himself, [Rev. 19.12,13] appears. And his appearance concludes and is called the First Resurrection [Rev. 20.6].

It is apparent that when Israel is restored (which happened in 1948) those terms which involve the Judgment of the Nations begin. You can see from the selections above (many more examples can be given) that a door which had previously been closed, blocking our sight of when Christ would return, has clearly been opened. It is also quite clear that the scriptures intended the Second Coming of Christ to be with the restoration of Israel. We have shown in our previous works that the Jews in Jesus Christ's times believed this and the Jews still believe it today: that with the restoration of Israel the House of King David is restored, together with the restoration of the Temple, and, as seen above, from a few of the many scriptures dealing with the subject, the Tabernacle.

It has been our study to inquire how the character of David, called the Word of God, who has a name written known only to himself, is recognized.

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Because of the door opened by the restoration of Israel, it is apparent that we ought to be watching for the other signs that go with it; and where a sign calls for your support, support it. The prevailing American attitude towards Israel does, in fact, reflect a leaning in this direction; for pastors who denounce the Jews and their law, following Paul's epistles, now have modified their position to make sure that they are seen on the side of the restored Israel. Militarily and economically they tend to support Israel but in spirit they are far away from the terms of the restoration. This, again, is due to the false impressions snuck into American minds through the apostle Paul, focusing on the fact that neither restoration of the Tabernacle nor the Temple should be supported. This perception, among many, presumes upon the Duty of Christ, that part of his identity is discerned through the works of the restored Tabernacle and Temple, both of which having to do with coming equipped with the Cloud of God. In short, where we see in Luke the words, when the time of the Gentile shall be fulfilled, we know the Judgment of the Gentile is opened and the Judgment of Israel, through its restoration, is closed.

As noted before, Dr. Luke was a wonderful Hebrew scholar and recorded the scene of Christ coming with the Cloud of Heaven which we contrast with Daniel's and the other gospel record of Christ coming in the Clouds of Heaven. When the Cloud of Heaven is mentioned, there is no doubt in any Jew's mind that the Cloud which entertained Moses atop Mt. Sinai and then occupied the Mercy Seat of the Tabernacle is the Cloud of God [Shekinah] they have in mind.

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There is an association with the Mountains of Israel with God's Word, where the rabbis have also taught that the mountains of Israel may be interpreted to mean the prophets. So Christ resurrected is seen with the restoration of Israel seated, as David, atop the mountains of Israel: meaning in the double entendre a siege atop both Mt. Zion and the prophets. One cannot separate the two ideas, in fact, that the Christ, being the Word of God, was created to confirm the LORD's servants, the prophets. The vision of that confirmation, is, in fact, of Christ appearing with the Shekinah, and with it its prophets and its host [tens of thousands--a very large number] of saints and angels.

Together with the scriptures above noted are a set of scriptures which convey an image of Christ who is identified as having wondrous knowledge, being vested with the Wisdom of God. We have many scriptural examples explaining this Wisdom, but this should suffice:

Isaiah 29.14 Therefore, behold, I will proceed to do a marvellous work among this people, even a marvellous work and a wonder: for the wisdom of their wise men shall perish, and the understanding of their prudent men shall be hid.
29.15 Woe unto them that seek deep to hide their counsel from the LORD, and their works are in the dark, and they say, Who seeth us? And who knoweth us?
29.24 They also that erred in spirit shall come to understanding, and they that murmured shall learn doctrine.

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Now the Christ, Son of David, cannot say:

Psalm 40.7 Lo, I come: in the volume of the book it is written of me;

Or

Psalm 139.16 Thine eyes did see my substance, yet being unperfect; and in thy book all my members were written, which in continuance were fashioned, when as yet there was none of them.

Or

Psalm 56.8 Thou tellest my wanderings: put thou my tears into thy bottle: are they not in thy book?

– without opening the book to show you how he had been created and why. This is a sublime thought if you can handle it, for the key to the proof of God comes with the resurrection of His Christ to confirm not only the bill of materials and operating instructions assigned to him in the scriptures, but also those promises involving the restoration of Israel.

Every Tree is known by its Fruit [Luke 6.44]

Both the Christ and Israel were configured as Trees--which precepts we need not retrace here--and fundamental to the doctrine of the LORD is the idea of cultivating and harvesting fruitful fields. The Wisdom of God, or Word of God, is the fruit harvested in the Last Days. Fundamental to this process is the continuing requirement from Deuteronomy to call into remembrance what the Word of the LORD had done, wheresoever My People are scattered:

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Deut. 30.1 And it shall come to pass, when all these things are come upon thee, the blessing and the curse, which I have set before thee, and thou shalt call them to mind among all the nations, whither the LORD thy God hath driven thee,
30.2 And shalt return unto the LORD thy God, and shalt obey his voice according to all that I command thee this day, thou and thy children, with all thine heart, and with all thy soul;
30.3 That then the LORD thy God will turn thy captivity, and have compassion upon the and will return and gather thee from all the nations, whether the LORD thy God hath scattered thee...

30.7 And the LORD thy God will put all these curses upon thine enemies, and on them that hate thee, which persecuted thee..

The keys to the Kingdom of God are the Words which have been called into remembrance. When asked how he would be recognized, Jesus answered that he would be recognized on his return by his Word, and then described how his sheep would know his voice, etc.
One of the scenes after his resurrection addresses this point where:

Luke 24.27 And beginning at Moses and all the prophets, he expounded unto them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself.

This is not an easy task, as we can witness in my meagre exchanges with you.

Contrary to Pauline perceptions of the matter, Christ has a point of view which is common to the prophets, or, as seen in an earlier piece, The Word of God. Revelation addresses him in this attribute as the Spirit of Prophesy . As will be noted, in the beginning of many of the prophets, particularly the Psalms, there is a rehearsal of the story of the Jews and their LORD's wonderful works. According to Luke's account of the last sighting of the Spirit of Jesus, Jesus rehearsed these details again.

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It is impossible to describe the Christ and his times without reviewing precept upon precept the Holy Scriptures. As pertaining to the Last Day, such a review of Scriptures would call for their development and application to the Last Day, the Day of Judgment of the Gentile.

Because the restoration of Israel is the opening of that Judgment, we know that Christ must call into remembrance the scriptures which apply to that [now current] event, as pronounced beforehand. For calling into remembrance what you had been previously told is evidence that what the LORD God had previously pronounced had come true. As we have seen above, as applying to the Judgment of the Nations, we discover that His precognition, through His Word, ought to have been feared. Thus, we have:

Pirke Abot, ch. 29..and they settle accounts with him, as it is said, God hath His chastisers on the earth.

This comes from:

Psalm 58.11 So that a man shall say, Verily there is a reward for the righteous: verily He is a God that judgeth in the earth.

Now the Torah was called life, as it is said, "She is a tree of life to them that lay hold upon her" (Proverbs 3:18) [re: Pirke Abot Ch. 34] which leads to:

Pirke Abot, ch. 34 The righteous man was called life, as it is said, The fruit of the righteous is a tree of life (Proverbs 11:30).

Keeping this in mind: we have been picking the fruit of a righteous man to provide life to them who would have it.

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We like to describe the opening of the Gate of Righteousness in these terms, but in order to open that Gate so others can see inside we need to hail him who is at guard at the gate. As noted in our addresses concerning the Watchmen, as for example in The Miracle of Zer Anpin, we cited the practice of a city setting wise men at its gates. The Wise Men of Jerusalem sat at the Golden Gate, which is the entrance which Jesus and other Jews would pass through on the eastern side of the Temple Mount to get to the Temple. At the moment, as noted before, the Golden Gate is sealed and guarded by the tombs of Moslems. If you were to perceive this gate from the perspective that Israel is restored and prepared for the restoration of the Temple and the Tabernacle, and from the perspective that it is sealed, the problem of removing the stones and graves which block the Golden Gate becomes an issue of major importance. We address the removal of those stones and the corpses guarding that gate in Philistia Triumph thou because of me . Now seeing a way to open that Sealed Gate can be achieved only through rooting out the faith versus works argument. As noted in Philistia Triumph thou because of me and On the Breakage of the Holy Catholic Church , Saints Peter and James own the key to open that particular gate. For we pointed out that those who guard the Golden Gate (both the living atop the mount, who are Moslems, and their dead below) have a faith which is closer to Saint Peter's faith than yours. Thus, we addressed this matter from the point of view of the Chair of Saint Peter to pave the way of removing those stones that seal the Golden Gate so that the remaining tasks associated with the identification of Christ, or the manifestation of the Word of God, may be initiated.

As indicated, I took a form as if I were standing before the Gate of Righteousness, asking you to come up hither so to see what is inside that gate. We have been told of the Pearly Gate(s) [re: Rev. 21.21]. We mention this because we also said that opening the Golden Gate is the same as opening the Gates of Righteousness. It is no accident that with the comment:

Psalm 118.22 The stone which the builders refused is become the head stone of the corner.

comes:

118.19 Open to me the gates of righteousness: I will go into them, and I will praise the LORD:
118.20 This gate of the LORD, into which the righteous shall enter.

In this gate, as we have argued, you will find Saint Peter sitting in Judgment. This turns us full circle back to the issues Jesus Christ discussed with him and the other eleven original apostles; and this has led us to the focus of the present argument: that Christ cannot go back on his word, and to discern Him all one need do is to step through the threshold we have been discussing. It is no longer a matter of waiting and looking forward for Christ or for His Watchmen. What matters is to catch Him, as it were, at the Gate.

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We have argued that in order to discern Christ one must understand his foundations, that they are eternal and his point of view would be the same as in the Gospels. We are not speaking of one who merely parrots scripture but one who applies it in the same context which the prophets pronounced.

Waiting at the Airport

There are followers of Paul who wait at the stations of rapture, expecting to be snatched away when they see a vision of Christ in the clouds. There is a greater knowledge to be had were they to be watching for Christ with the Wisdom of God. In this attribute they need not stand at the airport at Tel-Aviv or watch a heliport from the Tower of David in Jerusalem, watching for a wise man to come out of the clouds. Rather we have the illustration of the bridesmaids:

Luke 12.36 And be yourselves like unto men that wait for the Lord when He will return from the wedding..
12.37 Blessed are those servants whom the Lord when He cometh shall find watching.

Our works concern those things for which one should be watching. This has led us into various topics, such as Duty and Profit , and this leads to discerning matters on morality and the coercive ways men tend to apply them. These things too, if you can bear with us, are matters which a such an one watching for Christ should be able to recognize.

Thinking perhaps that the Virtues we have been discussing somehow relate to common spiritual searches, The Old Man of the Sea  fed me some articles in the November 28, 1994 Newsweek magazine having to do with Newt's Reality Check  and The Search for the Sacred , both articles of which pertain to our views in Duty and Profit  et al.

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When Jesus Christ and his cousin, John the Baptist, visited us, the one attacked the government of Herod, pointing out his immorality, and the other attacked the immorality of the priests of Judah. Both of these men were at first perceived as prophets or as the Christs. The point of view is one which weighs a people against the Holy Scriptures: the Jews first against the Covenant they made at Mount Sinai; and then the Gentile against their covenant and also that curse introduced in Deuteronomy 30 above. In following this procedure we engaged the fact that the Gentile can be judged according to the righteousness of their scriptures and sages, many of whom we have already outlined and passed by you. Whether by the Old Testament, the Gospel of Jesus and Saints Peter and James, or by the sages and scriptures of the Greeks, Chinese, Hindus, etc., we must conclude that mankind is as a whole in default of all the teachings, the essence of which we reduced , as one reducing grapes into wine, back into the teachings of Jesus. What we have seen hereto Christ must also see and know. Thus, there is already a well defined seedbed upon which to execute Judgment; and among those who stand first in line for judgment are the people of America.

You and I have been discussing issues having to do with an American return to holiness whose foundations are based upon morality. Whilst Newt's Reality Check seems to address some institutions on morals, the other Newsweek article having to do with the return to the sacred has no bearing on the things you and I have been discussing. This should be apparent in Duty and Profit, but we hope that by clarifying some points of view on immorality there should be no confusion between what my Great Troop represents and the things Newsweek Magazine has ascertained fall into the category of the sacred.

Dancing around maypoles, chanting, and other uncognitive activities, have, first of all, nothing to do with the Wisdom we address. These do not cause the stones which seal the Golden Gate  to come down, for instance. Nor can they lead us to peace in Jerusalem and with Peace in Jerusalem peace in Bosnia and the rest of the world. For they detract from the real issue at hand which is Human Reason and its growth (or lack of it); how to reason with men to open the gates they have closed.

We have already seen in scriptures – as I know I emphasized it enough – that YHVH can speak to whomsoever He wills, and His purpose for speaking to us is to lead us to His Judgment or Wisdom. We have been searching out that Wisdom wheresoever we can find it so to apply it for good, that those effected by us may live and live more abundantly.

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To achieve this we need leaders to step forward to restore order where there is chaos, to establish principles which provide for our common weal and the nations who are around us.

A Good Idea

That in which we are engaged is in the Spirit of that Wisdom which came to us through the Gospels. For my part when I saw that Spirit and heard it, I thought He had a good idea! When I decided to hold onto it and pursue it further, as shown in Philistia Triumph thou because of me, it was because I was enraptured with the thought behind that purpose. This rapture is like two lovers, a man wanting to be as close to his beloved as possible, drinking every moment of her love, and never wanting to let go of her. Books like Ecclesiastese, Ecclesiasticus, the Song of Solomon, the Wisdom of Solomon, Proverbs, etc. play substantially with this theme. Simply put the LORD wants you to feel as much in love with Him and drink of His Wisdom [love] as you would a lover. Too few people who claim to love Him chase after His Wisdom, however.

We showed a contract between YHVH and Israel and the idea how the thought behind that contract would be transmitted to the nations, through the dispersion of the Jews, and then, in gathering the Jews back to the Holy Land, how a separate, Holy contract between YHVH and the nations would be engaged. I happen to agree with the objective of the contract and its terms, all of which have to do with bringing righteousness to the earth. I also agree with the terms of righteousness which are Virtues which I have shown to be in agreement with the world's greatest sages, as well as the prophets of the Holy Scriptures, their rabbis and Oral Torah . If I can agree on these things, then why not the world?

What prevents us all from agreement is a thing which John Stuart Mill calls Mental Slavery. In Isaiah 61 and other places we find that one of the objectives of the Holy Scriptures is to set men free of the shackles which bind them; and often these shackles are things which are identified with darkness and prison houses and the things which prevent men from seeing eye to eye with Him. Where the Scriptures contain a continuing appeal, that all that is asked of men is to do Justice and have Mercy, because of the blindness of men--being misled by false shepherds--the opposite occurs. Thus, to open the Gate of Righteousness we have to address those things which produce Mental Slavery and discern how they differ from the message which Jesus brought forward out of the prophets, as well as others noted in our Great Troop.

We may contrast the teachings of our Great Troop with things which have produced Mental Slavery, from the Spanish Inquisition to the Nazis and the teachings of Karl Marx and Engels. In the matter of the Spanish Inquisition, for instance, we have the imposition of torture to persuade a Jew to join the then prevailing Christian sect. In the case of Marx and Engels we have similar procedures which advocated the destruction of souls to enforce a doctrine. The Nazi methods need no further comment. But in this day similar doctrines and procedures, which persecute the Homeless, bringing terrible anguish to those who fail to lie and cheat in America, do require some exposure. Because we have seen little recognition of American institutions of injustice, we, therefore, continue to reap the sayings of our Great Troop, hoping that we might plant seeds of conscience somewhere in this harsh and inhospitable wasteland of denial.

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All of the scriptures which we have applied are pleas for man to do good and a Way by which good may be discerned. That peace may come to the earth. These scriptures have roots not through coercion but through reason and human understanding and leading by example; and all of these uphold honesty and Truth to be above all virtues; and the first fruit of Truth is to provide for the poor and the afflicted, as shown in Psalm 12. Fundamental to this engagement is the idea that the God of Truth cannot lie, that He will provide for the poor and the afflicted; and that the wicked, who do lie and resist this desire, shall be punished. Actually, they shall ultimately be brought into a Valley of Judgement and destroyed. Because the wicked lie and cheat and trust no man, thinking that all other men do the same, the judgment we have related from scripture shows that in their judgment their own arms shall be turned upon themselves, brother against brother. Actually this is an inevitable conclusion, if one thinks about it, because wicked people, such as our Old Congress  and the Berkeleyites  mentioned in Quest for Human Dignity  and Duty and Profit , can be easily turned to fall upon themselves, as in a shark feed. For:

Pirke ' Abot [The Fathers according to Rabbi Nathan ], ch. 32..for him who turns to the evil impulse, he is judged by the evil impulse; as for him who turns to the good impulse, he is judged by the good impulse; as it is said, Because He standeth at the right hand of the needy, to save him from them that judge his soul [Psalm 109.31].

How to turn wicked men from this inevitable consequence is our issue; and I found that the scriptures we quoted are a sure guide by the which the inevitable ruination of this nation through its own evil impulse can be avoided. For the truths which can save us have been tested by time, all of which agree:

Pirke ' Abot, ch. 29..love him that reproves thee and hate him that praised thee; for he who reproves thee brings thee to the life of the world to come, while he who praises thee removes thee from the world....
..as it is said, God hath his chastisers on the earth (Psalm 58.12).

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I mention this because it facilitates the argument we now must take up which has to do with Immoral Coercion, or, if you prefer the more polite form of expressing it, deceit- -its recognition and remedies. We contrast this with the Lord of Truth whom:

Pirke ' Abot, ch. 25..I cannot appease with words or bribe with money!

The Lord knows that I have never imposed my will upon another. I have, however, never been reluctant to express my opinion commingled with others. For:

Pirke ' Abot, ch 23..Who is it that is wise? He that learns from all men, as it is said, from all my teachers have I got understanding (Psalm 119.99).

Both The Old Man of the Sea and my lawyer friend come from the school of thought that seems to suppose that knowledge should be measured out in thimbles; and having anticipated that school of thought we opted to compose this work in small bites, called Wisdom bound in Small Books Series. Nevertheless , we still receive complaints that the works are too wordy.

The ancients did agree that the sign of a fool is in his prolix:

Pirke ' Abot, ch. 22..He who is verbose brings on sin, as it is said, in the multitude of words there wanteth not transgression (Proverbs 10.19); and it says, even as a fool when he holdeth his peace, is counted wise (Proverbs 17.28).

However, we also have the custom among most of the ancients, when they enter a subject, to deal with it as completely and fairly as they know, always drawing upon the teachings they had collected from the sages before them. No subject has had more words dedicated to it than morality ; and even with the abundance of words on it our people fail to receive its message.

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Because they have been corrupted into believing that there is no truth, that there can be no restraints on human conduct to the extent that it might interfere with the maxim, It is every man for himself , bringing men to the conclusion that it is just to deprive our seven million homeless the right to raise a shelter or beg. We first countered that practice by publishing a Tiny Book , What Price Justice, which we gave to the poor to hand out on the street, thinking that that infinitesimally small piece of work might turn the evil Berkeleyites from their ways of punishing the poor. But here we failed to contact them with a message tasteful to them, so we followed it up with an even tinier Tiny Book (only 8 pages!) called When the Afflicted Soul is satisfied, which we [also] gave to a pastor of the Unitarian Church and still made no impact with regard to our appeal. We found that the people and their pastors everywhere are so preoccupied with avarice that no amount of words can turn them aside, to provide for our afflicted souls. We realized beyond this, that they have no inborn morality which compels them to denounce those who are afflicting us.

The sages and the prophets of our Holy Scriptures are in agreement on providing for the poor. We thus were compelled to search them out trusting that someone will recognize at least one of them and come to us to hear our plea. Following this course led us to you, dear Sir, to which end we realized that God had given us an audience, though we had despaired in failing to find one; that by careful search the Truth could be manifest. In fact, to search out the Truth we learned that we must root out the error. This led us to John Stuart Mill.

To ferret out the truth, or as Mill envisioned it: to extirpate truth and error, what would appear to be obvious and plain, that one would think they could never stand in need of a dispute [re: p. 64 Duty and Profit ] turns out to require from time to time major discourse! This, in fact, is the nature of Truth, as Mill so aptly pointed out [all quotes from Mill's work, On Liberty , 1859:

Mill, ch 2..Men are not more zealous for truth than they often are for error, and a sufficient application of legal or even of social penalties will generally succeed in stopping the propagation of either. The real advantage which truth has, consists in this, that when an opinion is true, it may be extinguished once, twice, or many times, but in the course of ages there will generally be found persons to rediscover it, until some one of its reappearances falls on a time when from favorable circumstances it escapes persecution until it has made such head as to withstand all subsequent attempts to suppress it...the amount of penal inflictions which modern feeling would probably tolerate, even against the most obnoxious opinions, is not sufficient to extirpate them.

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We mentioned in Duty and Profit  that I lost The Old Man of the Sea ..because he tends to follow his own agenda, apart from the sages. The height from which I addressed you and him was a place built from the teachings of the sages, including the prophets of Israel; and they, I said, are a Great Troop who just gathered behind Cicero. Among our troop are the Heirs and they said, (at the time we delivered Duty and Profit , I did not pass this on to you because it would have blurred your focus):

Cicero hath delivered us..

Seeing as how you might have misunderstood this (because you believe Jesus has already delivered us) we opted to defer that message until now, when the appropriate topic is due.

We are confident that you will agree that Christ would be inclined to obtain the alliance of all the sages (since they naturally agree with him anyway!); and, whereas the Commandments of Christ have obviously been discarded by this nation the good advise of Cicero might be of use in bringing them back. At least there are many scholars who accept this argument. For:

Mill, 2. 790 What Cicero practiced as the means of forensic success, requires to be imitated by all who study any subject in order to arrive at the truth. He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that.

Our having dragged you and The Old Man of the Sea down through the Quest to view the monster Nimrod, I knew would be a chilling experience for the both of you, because you are of the generation which created that Nimrod and are responsible for his consequences.

When you ascended towards us after that visitation, I was elated, but nevertheless distraught that The Old Man of the Sea was not able to follow. And this is because of his basic misunderstanding as to the nature of our ascendancy--or the ascendancy of truth as our Great Troop prefer.

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We believe that honesty is the right conduct before any other, and this can be found in all men. Voltaire confirms this in his Discourses , where he comments on the Golden Rule , (the negative version--do not to another what you would not have done to you ), which he reduced to Zoroaster's maxim:

When encountering a need to act, not knowing whether its consequences will be either good or evil, don't do it.

This is the point Cicero made in our work Duty and Profit , where we extended it to the point of view [re: Duty and Profit  p. 60]:

..Full disclosure is in order when it involves a thing in which the people are concerned to know.. 

It has always been the position of the wise men to make sure that the people are informed in cases which involve the salvation of life. Often this involves passing messages down from the Gates of Justice [sic. Gates of Righteousness] to those who have an ability to know and understand [re: p. 12 of Duty and Profit and the argument mentioned in Works and Days among the Hyperboreans ]:

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Those bound to the Holy Scriptures and the teachings we contain cannot overstep their word, no more than one can overstep his word to his friend. In following this course of action our Great Troop recognize:

Cicero, On Friendship ..But if he who, on account of any of those superiorities which I have mentioned, appears the most conspicuous figure in the circle of his friends, ought by no means to discover in his behavior towards them the least apparent sense of the eminence of which he stands, so neither should they, on the other hand, betray sentiments of envy or dissatisfaction in seeing him thus exalted above them...

It is not sufficient, therefore, merely to behave with an easy condescension towards those friends who are of less considerable note than oneself; it is incumbent upon him to bring them forward, and, as much as possible, to raise their consequence.

We mentioned in Duty and Profit  the profile in which I have taken, how I would reflect the consensus of the sages and the prophets so mentioned. This, I believed, would leave no cause for jealousy, as pertaining to my being, as I point out the heavenly sayings of them who are before and surround me. "Show me where any part of my Great Troop are wrong", I answered The Old Man of the Sea , and I will cast it out of me. But he seems to still feel (presumably with resentment) that you and I are channels of God when in fact it is the Spirit behind the Great Troop which is the channel, and I happen to agree with the direction in which it is flowing and jumped in with both feet, as it were, to discern where it might lead. I portrayed this also as an allegory of climbing a mountain or Jacob's Ladder , the steps of which are our sages and our prophets.

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Being on the heights of a Great Troop, I said to you, "Come up hither", with the intention to show you a message from our Great Troop, to persuade you to do something you might not otherwise have done (in the discerning way, in which you know how to do best). It is, of course, a consensus of our Great Troop that no one should be left alone in the pursuit of knowledge, because of the dangerous precipices the journey often leads. The sages and the prophets above mentioned, in fact, are enraptured with this process and thus we hope that Cicero's comment of our Great Troop's duty to bring you and others forward and raise all of you to greater heights should be received with joy. All agree that it is not the will of God to leave men in purgatory.

Messages are sent from Heaven when a nation is in trouble, and a sage's plainly packaged words are fit for the occasion: for chastisement. Among friends, however, such chastisements are often misconstrued (as was the case with Socrates and many prophets of Israel), and rather than being received for instruction they are received as one would a reviler. "Who are you to judge us?" they ask, rather than focusing on the Spirit of the appeal.

In Duty and Profit we addressed the importance of discernment. Opposite to the Discerning Man is the Petty Man [See Confucius] who is driven by material interests, the greatest of which is that all-consuming feature of human nature, which is called Pride, which often, where there is a will to allow it, overtakes and drives one's basic emotions so to divert one from the Way of the spiritual realm to the way leading to spite and avarice. The soul always knows that a message by itself is not harmful, but because of the source of a message, being perceived as either good or evil (or unknown), it may be received as being harmful.

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Whether a message is to a friend or a nation, nevertheless, it must always be received in the spirit of learning. Even so, were it to appear to come from a reviler the following response applies:

Cicero, On Friendship ..if the language should not be too insulting to be borne, it will be prudent in consideration of their former friendship to receive it without a return, for by this forbearance the reviler, and not the reviled, will appear the person that most deserves to be condemned.

Jesus put this in simple terms, following the dictum of the Torah, to turn the other cheek, etc. And you, Sir, have been very good at that, having endured the many chastisements sent your way by my hand. In our Satire, Quest for Human Dignity  and then in Duty and Profit  we surely can be taken as the reviler, and it is we who risk playing the part of the fool as it were. But having created in our argument a great alliance we know that those who discern the finer grains of our argument should praise our Great Troop. For:

Cicero, On Friendship ..the first endeavor should be to acquire to yourself those moral excellences which constitute a virtuous character, and then to find an associate whose good qualities reflect back the true image of your own...
    It is an error, therefore, that leads to the most pernicious consequences to imagine that the laws of friendship supersede those of moral obligations, and justify a participation with licentiousness and debauchery. Nature has sown the seed of that social affection in the heart of man for purposes far different; not to produce confederates in vice, but auxiliaries in virtue..They who are thus leagued in reciprocal support and encouragement of each other's moral ambition may be considered as setting out together in the best company and surest road towards those desirable objects in which nature has placed the supreme felicity of man..He, therefore, who means to acquire these great and ultimate beatitudes of human life must receive them from the hands of Virtue: as neither friendship or aught else deservedly valuable can possibly be obtained without her influence and intervention. For they who persuade themselves that they may possess a true friend, at least, where moral merit has no share in producing the connection, will find themselves miserably deceived whenever some severe misfortune shall give them occasion to make the decisive experiment.

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It is a maxim, then, which cannot too frequently or too strongly be inculcated, that in forming the attachment we are speaking of "we should never suffer affection to take root in our hearts before judgment has time to interpose;" for in no circumstance of our lives can a hasty and inconsiderate choice be attended with more fatal consequences. But the folly is that we generally forbear to deliberate till consideration can nothing avail; and hence it is that after the association has been habitually formed, and many good offices perhaps have been mutually interchanged, some latent flaw becomes visible, and the union which was precipitately cemented is no less suddenly dissolved..Accordingly, nothing is more true than what Archytas of Tarentum, if I mistake not, is reported to have said, "That were a man to be carried up into heaven, and the beauties of universal nature displayed to his view, he would receive but little pleasure from the wonderful scene if there were none to whom he might relate the glories he had beheld..."
    Nature points out her tendencies by a variety of unambiguous notices, and proclaims her meaning in the most emphatic language, yet, I know not how it is, we seem strangely blind to her clearest signals, and deaf to her loudest voice!
..I mean the duty of admonishing, and even reproving, his friend, an office which, whenever it is affectionately exercised, should be kindly received. It must be confessed, however, that the remark of my dramatic friend is too frequently verified, who observes in his Andria that "obsequiousness conciliates friends, but truth creates enemies."...Let our obsequiousness (to repeat the significant expression of Terence) extend as far as gentleness of manners and the rules of good breeding require; but far let it be from seducing us to flatter either vice or misconduct, or meanness unworthy, not only of every man who claims to himself the title of friend, but of every liberal and ingenuous mind. Shall we live with a friend upon the same cautious terms we must submit to live with a tyrant? Desperate indeed must that man's moral disorders be who shuts his ears to the voice of truth when delivered by a sincere and affectionate monitor. It was a saying of Cato (and he had many that well deserve to be remembered) that "some men were more obliged to their inveterate enemies than to their complaisant friends, as they frequently heard the truth from the one, but never from the other;" in short, the great absurdity is that men are apt, in the instances under consideration, to direct both their dislike and their approbation to the wrong object.

 

They hate the admonition, and love the vice; whereas they ought, on the contrary, to hate the vice, and love the admonition.

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As nothing, therefore, is more suitable to the genius and spirit of true friendship than to give and receive advice-to give it, I mean, with freedom, and without rudeness, and to receive it not only without reluctance, but with patience..
..without sincerity, friendship is a mere name, that has neither meaning nor efficacy. It is the essential property of this alliance to form so intimate a coalition between the parties that they seem to be actuated, as it were, by one common spirit.
..Nothing in nature, indeed, is so plain and versatile as the genius of a flatterer, who always acts and pretends to think in conformity, not only to the will and inclination, but even to the looks and countenances of another..
..Gross and open obsequiousness can deceive none but fools..
...that even the populace know how to discriminate the soothing insidious orator, whose only aim is to acquire popularity, from the firm, inflexible, and undesigning patriot...
Now, if in popular assemblies, a scene, of all others, in which fiction and fallacious representations have the greatest scope, and are usually employed with the most success, Truth, when fairly stated and properly enforced, could thus prevail, with how much more reason may she expect to be favorably heard in an intercourse of friendship, the very essence whereof depends upon sincerity!...
..genuine friendship cannot possibly exist where one of the parties is unwilling to hear truth and the other is equally indisposed to speak it.

When we examine the terms of friendship quoted above we see that the same terms apply to relationships among societies and nations.

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The sage knows that his first duty is to the community of sages which conceived him, such as our Great Troop. Cicero put it well when he said:

Cicero, On Old Age ..I ardently wish to visit also those celebrated worthies, of whose honorable conduct I have heard and read much, or whose virtues I have myself commemorated in some of my writings. To this glorious assembly I am speedily advancing and I would not be turned back in my journey, even upon the assured condition that my youth, like that of Pelias, should again be restored.

Among Cicero's troop of sages and statesmen was Scipio, of whom he said:

Cicero, On Friendship ..his virtues can never die...

Within Cicero's Virtues were those of Scipio, Cato, and a host of others which composed his troop. We mention this for the sake of our argument with The Old Man of the Sea , and others who have given up on eternal truths, to demonstrate that even at this late date, after two thousand years, the Virtues of Scipio and the others, being passed on through Cicero and other sages through the ages, still live on and can here be witnessed not only having lived in John Stuart Mill but also in me.

We composed a parable of this in On the Breakage of the Holy Catholic Church , where we addressed Pope John-Paul in part II of that work as the Virgin Virtue and asked that he answer us.

Now it was Cicero's desire to take his place among our Great Troop, as one can clearly see from the quote from On Old Age above; and it seemed appropriate that we opened Duty and Profit in honor of his wish; that even a greater troop than he anticipated is now gathered around him!; and surely as he hoped he has lived on and has even stretched the limits of time too.

How this came to be so is in the introductory remark in Duty and Profit , which alludes to the contrast between Cratippus and Cicero. Whilst Cratippus was the most famous philosopher of Cicero's day, he left nothing invested for the future. Whatever virtues he may have had got lost behind the veil of time.

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You are known by the Company you choose

The Old Man of the Sea  was most disturbed over the idea [as he perceived] that you, Sir, and I, think we are channels of God. He then sent the Newsweek articles, whose bearing upon our argument needs to be clarified. For The Old Man of the Sea  has confused our troop and our cause to be associated somehow with Newsweek's perception of the Search for the Sacred.

We hold to this because we wish to break the ice which is holding him back from us. For to my knowledge, Sir, I see no relevance between our Quest  and that related in the Newsweek magazine. For my part I am engaged to expose the Truth, which concerns us all, in every bit the spirit of Christ and, as you have seen, that shared by Cicero and many others. In this Quest  you, Sir, noted how you had been touched by the realm of the Sacred, and I replied how it is that I have been touched and what I learned in that contact. Since then we have been engaged in discerning the fruit of that knowledge and how to apply it.

It is the spirit of the thing which makes the Quest for Knowledge wonderful. For it takes the true seeker into realms never before explored and sometimes, on the other hand, up and down well trodden paths. Never, in my estimation, has a man on such a Quest feared taking the Siege of Peril, as it were, for all inquiry, for it to lead to discerning a way from evil and to good, is always besought by dangers. The first danger, of course, is when one is seated among friends, that it is often perilous for him to report the findings of his Quest .

The Quest for knowledge, by nature, leads to higher levels of information; as one precept always builds upon another. The discerning man always follows the path upwards to truth, as if he were caught up by Heaven itself, not being diverted along byways which lead downhill, whose features are discerned as being more and more desiccated, with fewer offerings of fruit.

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We addressed this in our work against Freud, called Validations of Truth, where we showed how Freud condemned a book (the Bible) he never took the opportunity to read and then sought to replace its morality with his (whilst at the same time he was being chased down by the Nazis for being a Jew). We argued that the results of his morality are wandering aimlessly in our Inner City streets fighting away persecutions and coercions which are no less vile than the persecutions and coercions of the Nazis. Thus, whilst Freud wrote against a morality he had never discerned, Freud was pandering midst the wealthy class to study their dysfunction, neglecting the dysfunction which was chasing the Jews into ghettos and ovens. Those who uphold Freud's teaching, as if he were a god, still have problems discerning the association that the dysfunction which has produced our poverty has much to do with the 500 or so maladies they fail to cure: for they apply the confused moralities of the rich, who continue to fund their business, with their own counsels, which only adds to the confusion of the poor, waifs with babes, and drug addicts. They have sterilized our society such that no one understands morality any more.

Again, citing the verse of Cicero which gives thanks to the eternal virtues he learned from Scipio [and also others], we know that what Cicero had been feeding on, and in turn has fed us, is eternal. The variable in this manna is how it is applied, whether men apply it for evil or for good, or, as in the case of the Freuds among us, ignored altogether. From the wretched nature of our society we can see that the disciples of Freud were false messengers.

Morality teachings are not easily digested out of the past, because of the context of the times in which they were first discerned. Sometimes, as Cicero so aptly discerned, there is need for one to interpret the message to the aeons that need them. For even Cicero saw angels (and hence the idea of the Hyperboreans  of Greek Mythology- [re: Works and Days among the Hyperboreans ] when he said:

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Cicero, On Old Age ..For her [the soul's] native seat is in heaven; and it is with reluctance that she is forced down from those celestial mansions into these lower regions, where all is foreign and repugnant to her divine nature. But the gods, I am persuaded, have thus widely disseminated immortal spirits, and clothed them with human bodies, that there might be a race of intelligent creatures, not only to have dominion over this our earth, but to contemplate the host of heaven, and imitate in their moral conduct the same beautiful order and uniformity so conspicuous in those splendid orbs. This opinion, I am induced to embrace, not only as agreeable to the best deductions of reason, but in just deference also to the authority of the noblest and most distinguished philosophers. Accordingly, Pythagoras and his followers (who were formerly distinguished by the name of the Italic Sect) firmly maintained that the human soul is a detached part, or emanation, from the great universal soul of the world. I am further confirmed in my belief of the soul's immortality, by the discourse which Socrates, whom the oracle of Apollo pronounced to be the wisest of men, held upon this subject just before his death. In a word, when I consider the faculties with which the human mind is endowed; its amazing clarity; its wonderful power in recollecting past events, and sagacity in discerning the future; together with its numberless discoveries in the several arts and sciences--I feel a conscious conviction that this active comprehensive principle cannot possibly be of a mortal nature.

The more one becomes engaged with our Great Troop, the more apparent it becomes that there is truly something taking place among them which is of an immortal nature. For their Spirit is so much higher than those who daily root out the pleasures of this life, hanging onto every moment and every sensation, though oblivious to the greater pleasures and heights of Wisdom. We speak of the Wisdom of the ages.

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In The Tapestry of One we illustrated how the Brahmins, and later Buddha, held onto this relationship with man, seeing how the Ineffable Wisdom sends mankind teachers who can appear wheresoever that Will sends them. Confucius, Socrates, and the prophets of Israel shared this common reality. As noted earlier Mohammed too corroborated this process when he pointed out that God can send any nation an apostle. What separates the Bible from other teachings is that it has defined the specific occasions the LORD willed his prophets and the angel of his presence, how, when, and where they will be seen, what they are to do; and, most of all, what you are to do. We have spoken, for instance, of the angel called the Light of the Gentile  [Isaiah 42; see also Exodus 23.20 and John 5.45, i.e., there is one who accuses you, even Moses. ] as compared to the messenger, Immanuel , of Isaiah 7.14-7.24 [see also Exodus 19.18; John 12.47, 5.46, i.e., Moses wrote of me ].

The Newsweek article opined in this work addresses the self-interest orientation, how people are searching for the spiritual, as opposed to the material realm. The prophets and sages we have listed all agree that to reconcile one's place in the material world, one must separate oneself from material interests. One of the cautions on how to recognize a messenger of the Spirit is mentioned in the Didaché discussed previously, to wit:

if they ask for money do not go to them..

The other part of the criteria is reflected in Moses Mendelsohn's work, On Judaism as revised legislation: :

Mendelsohn: According to Judaism miracles and extraordinary signs cannot furnish proof for or against the eternal truths of reason. Hence we are instructed by Scripture itself not to listen to a prophet if he teaches or advises things which are contrary to established truths, even if he confirms his mission by miracles.

This idea is reflected in Revelation:

Revelation 19.20 And the beast was taken, and with him the false prophet that wrought miracles before him, with which he deceived them that had received the mark of the beast, and them that worshipped his image...

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Some useful distinction, how the messenger of God differs from the brutes, as it were, we gleaned from a small pamphlet a friend named Harchet Singh insisted I read, as follows:

Joginder Singh, What Matters Most ..Let us not forget that in this world there is nothing without a purpose, though we may not be aware of the same at the moment. Matter constitutes our physical being, as also sustains life and provides comforts and conveniences. Since matter constitutes our physical being and also serves our needs, even if these are the barest minimum, there is nothing wrong in its use as such. However, the trouble actually begins when man gets totally attached to matter and thinks that all that matters is matter. Accordingly, he blindly runs after material advantages and interests, temptation for which is, undoubtedly, tremendous. Thus, a human being with such a mentality, is reduced to a mechanical being and matter, created to serve as handmaid, becomes his master.
..man has unlimited desires, but a limited span of life and limited means, the result that fulfillment of all his desires is not at all possible. Even satisfaction derived from the fulfillment of certain desires is not lasting because, in the first instance, these desires are shifting and, secondly, the source of their satisfaction, that is matter, is intrinsically transitory..
    The spiritual master brings about a synthesis between these two, not only extreme but also diametrically opposite approaches-all that matters is matter, as advocated by the materialists, and matter matters not, as propagated by the religionists-and asserts that it is incorrect and irrational to consider that matter and spirit are antagonistic to each other. In fact, all matter is the manifestation of the spirit, and these are the two sides of the same coin. As such due importance ought to be given to each.
    The noble traits such as love, humility, compassion, courage, fellow-feeling, reverence for life, are much more precious than the material riches. A person, possessing these traits, but no material wealth, is surely richer than a millionaire, bereft of such virtues. On the other hand, a multimillionaire, possessing no such human, moral and spiritual virtues, is simply a pauper. One should, therefore, guard against being blinded by the material glare: But this does not imply total rejection of things material as such...

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An astute general is always prepared to lose a battle to win the war. Again, a scientist is not disheartened if an experiment fails, rather he analyzes the causes of the failure, and with single-minded devotion, dedication and limitless patience, he goes on experimenting till he achieves a tangible result. In the same way, an awakened being is not discouraged by material setbacks; he takes the same not as a full stop but a mere comma to pause, to introspect, to weed out the causes thereof, and also to strive again with redoubled zeal to achieve his objective. Accordingly, he keeps himself engaged to explore, to discover, as also to unravel the mysteries of the Spirit for the benefit of mankind...
    Knowing that in this world there is nothing without a purpose and that in the human form, mental and physical faculties come into full play, the awakened being considers it a sacred duty, rather than a burden, to seize life as a rare opportunity to contribute his might in making the society happier, healthier and harmonious. Thus, like others, he too joins the struggle for existence, but does not get lost in it...

He is open-minded and rational. This helps rid himself of superstitions, make-beliefs, social and religious taboos and dogmas. He not only appreciates other's viewpoints but accepts what is right, no matter from whom it comes.

We must, of course, keep in mind that there are dogmas, opinions, taboos, laws and religious beliefs which hold societies together, which promote life. The model we are exploring is how to discern those which destroy as against those which bring life. The Torah, we have shown before, introduced for the Children of Israel its law as life.:

Deuteronomy 30.15 See, I have set before thee this day life and good, and death and evil;
30.16 In that I command thee this day to love the LORD thy God, to walk in his ways, and to keep his commandments and his statutes and his judgments, that thou mayest live and multiply: and the LORD thy God shall bless thee in the land whither thou goest to possess it.
30.19 I call heaven and earth to record this day against you, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live:
30.20 That thou mayest love the LORD thy God, and that thou mayest obey his voice, and that thou mayest cleave unto him: for he is thy life, and the length of thy days: that thou mayest dwell in the land which the LORD sware unto thy fathers, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, to give them.

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Thus we saw in the emerging Zionists:

S. R. Hirsch, The dangers of updating Judaism ..Whatever fails this test, he totally disregards. But the firmer he stands upon the rock of his Judaism, the more thoroughly he is imbued with the consciousness of his Judaism, the more inclined will he be to accept and thankfully appropriate whatever is really true and genuinely good, provided it conforms with the truths of Judaism. No matter in whose mind it originated, no matter who uttered it, he will always be ready le-qabbel ha-emet mimmi sheamarah [to accept the truth no matter who speaks it].

As noted in On the Breakage of the Holy Catholic Church , and again in Philistia Triumph thou because of me , the law which came of the Torah had a part which applied to the Jews, which required their separation and could not be abrogated under penalty of a curse; and another point of view with respect to the application of that law to the nations of the earth: that through the Jews a blessing would come to all the nations [sic. Peace on earth]. They would lead the way. Ultimately this comes down to:

Martin Buber, On Zion ..Then, as Israel will marry its land again, so the Holy One, blessed be He, will marry His Shekinah again, which is the Assembly of Israel. It is this whereof it is written [Zech. 14.9] "In that day YHVH shall be One, and His Name One..".
    The world can be redeemed only by the redemption of Israel and Israel can be redeemed only by reunion with its land.

When we compare the few examples above we can readily discern that Singh's commentary reflects Judaic values and particularly those voiced by Jesus Christ, who Himself reduced the Holy Scriptures into more easily digestible particles. One may ascertain the full desire and essence of the Torah and its prophets from the teachings of Jesus Christ. We have shown how easy it is for the sages in our Great Troop to walk with him; and in this essence we can see a Way to lay the foundation for a House of Prayer for all people.

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Hirsch points out the key to the Way by noting (as Jesus also said; re: Matthew 10.40-42) to accept the truth no matter who speaks it. The point we make here is that one needs to learn those foundations which promote truth. The way of exploring this is through reasoning with a man's heart. One knows, for example, that anything material, which is fashioned by the hands of man--though it may reason to a degree--does not have a heart. In Isaiah [see more specifically Ecclesiasticus] God points to idols and asks you why you bow down to them, when they cannot speak nor get themselves back up if they fall over. The point here is that He guides us with His Wisdom and not the works of our hands; and this come through His Spirit; and the prophets have taught us that the abode of His Spirit [sic. Light] is in man. The issue at hand, then, is to learn how to recognize His Spirit, and we reduced that down to Psalm 12, arguing that if the LORD took an interest in delivering 600,000 Jews out of Egypt and then a remnant of some 4 million Jews back to the Promised Land in 1948, He surely would be sensitive to delivering our 7 million [and growing] homeless souls in America. Whosoever is for delivering them step this way.

When we began our Quest , in Against Leviathan we had The Old Man of the Sea  at our side. He obviously had an interest with us in the greater part of our journey until he got the impression that we – you and I – Sir, think we are channels of God. Though at one time The Old Man of the Sea was a pastor in Mexico, something happened in his life which caused him to disassociate himself from the Holy Scriptures and that thing which says it created them which we call God.

In the communion of this series, Sir, The Old Man of the Sea has played a great and valuable part, in that he has carried forward often times an opposite opinion to mine. As we have seen from Cicero above, and also expressed in the opening passages of Xenophon's Oeconomics , an enemy's wealth [or opponent's] is as much counted among the wealth of an estate, as that of a friend. The argument proceeds from the idea that it is the enemy who is always testing the strength of an estate, and because of the continuing testing the estate grows stronger. In this case what applies to political associations and estates also applies to the estate of Wisdom. We test our opponents or enemies so to gain more knowledge and thus apply greater Wisdom.

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How well I know this! Most of my life I suffered without an opponent. By the grace of God you, Sir, and The Old Man of the Sea entered my life at the same moment, both carrying opposing points of view to mine! It is through the opposing points of view that knowledge is reaped and sifted.

Now The Old Man of the Sea also complained that I don't allow opposing opinions, that I consider my opinion sacrosanct. I replied that with regard to the matter at hand, we are not speaking of my opinion but my judgment; and that my judgment is really not mine but that of a Great Troop [sometimes, in the context, referred to as ELOHIM TZVAOT]. Nevertheless I have an open invitation to anyone who will offer any details in which I may have misjudged. I know that any effort to root out any errors on my part would be frustrated by my prolix, but you, Sir, are a quick study and it seems not to have effected you (thank God) thus far.

Our two-year conversation on ethics has turned full circle in the mind of The Old Man of the Sea to the extent that not only have I been in communion with a God who does not exist but also a righteous man who does not exist, and frustrated over the prolix and over what appears to be nothing, he beat off to another channel. This is how I came to lose him; but I perceive that he will rejoin us when he sees the essence of what we have been doing.

Convinced there is no God, there is no Truth. I don't know who persuaded The Old Man of the Sea to change to the course where there is no God nor Truth. Now Voltaire gives us a piece of instruction which addresses such perceptions. In his Discourses he says;

I would like to see God speak for himself..

This is a materialistic perception, isn't it? That someone would like to see God [himself] speak. To ease the materialists towards the Virtues and the being of God, we picked up on Gandhi's thesis that God is Truth (which is the principal argument of the Bible) and, in the form of our Great Troop presented what we call The Spirit of Truth . What we have quoted from the sages, including the prophets of Israel, have been virtues which have always remained true as long as reason has been able to comprehend them. We then threw those Truths against you, Sir, to compel you to support a further engagement of the Spirit of Truth , seeing as how you too had joined with the ancients. We applied this pressure not to coerce you to do something which is evil but to persuade you to do something which is good, which can help to save those who are suffering from the afflictions of the liars who run our government and those false doctrines crusading over Jerusalem. There is much work to be done here and we believe that those who have their sights on Heaven, to get out of here as it were, could do us a good service by helping to bring Heaven down here (which the Spirit of Truth put in His Prayer).

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The arguments which we cited out of the Spirit of Truth among our Great Troop were to persuade not only you but our great nation to turn its purposes to those things which are demonstratively good (though not being honored), as opposed to those evil things which are clearly being done from our highest citizens to the lowest (sic. Xenophon: a people tend to resemble their leaders ). So we write to mitigate the corruption--by the which we are grateful for your hearing. Now Cicero says that those who share these common instincts to work against corruption within the purview of that criteria cited by the sages, are allies, of one body. Now I say to The Old Man of the Sea , and any others who do not believe that such a body exists, that I have proven (as many others before me) that they exist. Why many people have trouble seeing them is due to the fact that they tend to be a bit wordy and hard to understand at times (Mill's essay, On Liberty  took nearly 120 pages!). Thus, there is the provision always among them [see also the Oral Torah  and The Tapestry of One ] to send a message which applies their Virtues to our times. That message, I have pointed out to The Old Man of the Sea, is between his, yours, and our contributions to the argument. And in this respect whether The Old Man of the Sea wishes to admit it or not he has been a channel of God himself: that the Spirit of Truth can be seen through both his agreement and his opposition.

For my part, after finishing a piece posted to you, usually I feel that I have fairly exhausted the subject (and our readers) and wonder whether there can be anything more said on the subject. But then either you or The Old Man of the Sea offer a comment, and from it I discover that we have just scratched the surface and off I go again to discover the Truth of the matter.

Not Body Snatchers

Where The Old Man of the Sea has us confused, we assert, is that he thinks the Great Troop with which I am associated has a design upon his being, to snatch his body away from him, as it were. And whilst this may be a method used by Torquemada, when he persecuted non-Catholics, or Caesar Marcus Aurelias when he persecuted the Christians (an unfair comparison I admit because the [latter] one was somewhat enlightened, whose teachings also resembled Christ's, whilst the other, feigning the teachings of Christ, was just plain mean); this is not the method of our Great Troop. For as we mentioned in Duty and Profit, there is one thing man must do on his own which no one can do for him, and that is to come to the Truth. We cannot make up your mind for you what is true and what is not, though many think this may be so. Every individual must weigh the arguments and make up his own mind as a freethinking being, which brings us back to some points John Stuart Mill in, On Liberty, made having to do with discerning a lie from the truth.

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This is how the Bible begins: how a people fell into captivity and were set free and how to retain their Liberty and teach it to others. Thus:

Leviticus 25.10 And ye shall hallow the fiftieth year, and proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof: it shall be a jubilee unto you; and ye shall return every man unto his possession, and ye shall return every man unto his family.

And:

Heine, Germany to Luther, 1834..Since the Exodus, Freedom has always spoken with a Hebrew accent.

The requirement of the Torah for the Jews to call into remembrance what God had done for them, wheresoever they had been scattered among the nations, assured the success of this process. Liberty, of course, is founded upon Truth. When Mill wrote and published On Liberty in 1859, just before the moment the United States entered its Civil War, the Western World was undergoing a reformation to the ideals demonstrated by the United States of America, in their new orders of government which are as follows:

Declaration of Independence: ..that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute a new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.

But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.

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The abuses of our government we listed in Quest for Human Dignity and Duty and Profit are quantitatively more and considerably more severe than those abuses against which the American colonies rebelled (which are listed in the Declaration of Independence).

We argued these points with you in an earlier work, where we quoted Jefferson's, Adams' and Thomas Paine's points of view as relating to our present despair. For our Old Congress (not to be confused with the Congress which acted on the Declaration of Independence and created this nation under the motto, In God we Trust ) has not only abused its people in the most insolent way, by avarice, it has also consumed the rights of our Heirs. And it is for these reasons we remarked in Duty and Profit  that that government must be abolished such that it never appear in the future.

In a Tiny Book  called What Price Justice  which the homeless handed out in the streets of Berkeley we simplified the case, focusing on the disenfranchisement of some seven millions of homeless people. Of the thousands of this and associated Tiny Books  handed out in Berkeley, which dealt with the abuses of our Old Congress , I received no reply. The poor received more quarters in their styrofoam cups than otherwise, but the books had no apparent effect upon the public conscience. Rather than seeing the Berkeleyites outraged over the abuses we listed and the International Laws impugned, they passed more laws designed to strip the homeless and other unfortunates of their rights to live. Now these laws, which are typical of new orders driven by the avarice of our Old Congress , strike right at the heart of our issue. For our Old Congress stripped millions of households of their homes and families and then, following their path of avarice, misguided leaders of local communities across the nation condemned them who lost their possessions and then denied them the one remaining dignity they had: which is the right to live. As noted in What Price Justice and many works, such as the Quest and Duty and Profit , the Berkeleyites are not unusual in our society but symptomatic of the very corruption of our government. For they have seen fit to outlaw begging and even the right to raise a tent over one's head; and this complaint, Sir, as said before, is one of major significance and repulsive to every sage who has ever commented on justice.

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Now the Berkeleyites' failure to answer our complaint, What Price Justice , is not due to any prolix. They are simply so much engaged in materialism they have no interest in Human Dignity. A homeless lady, who saw a lot of truth in our tiny book, handed her copies of What Price Justice back with tears in her eyes, saying, "No one is interested in the Truth".

Others, of the Homeless, were more successful with the book after they explained that the book was about them. So we wept our way into the avenues of prolix; and then we received complaints that our Small Books are too wordy.

John Stuart Mill and many before him endured the same kind of complaints, where he answered in On Liberty in words to the effect that the principles in which he is engaged demand the prolix--not owing to the sage's failure to simplify a case--but because of a public's failure to comprehend it and respond to it.

In any event, as said in our case, we presented our argument in short form in What Price Justice and expanded from there, following the procedure of the ancients which Mill discovers as follows [all quotes from Mill are from On Liberty ]:

Mill, Ch 1.160..There must be discussion, to show how experience is to be interpreted. Wrong opinions and practices gradually yield to fact and argument: but facts and arguments produce any effect on the mind, must be brought before it. Very few facts are able to tell their own story, without comments to bring out their meaning. The whole strength and value, then, of human judgment, depending on the one property, that it can be set right when it is wrong, reliance can be placed on it only when the means of setting it right are kept constantly at hand. In the case of any person whose judgment is really deserving of confidence, how has it become so? Because he has kept his mind open to criticism of his opinions and conduct. Because it has been his practice to listen to all that could be said against him; to profit by as much of it as was just, and expound to himself, and upon occasion to others, the fallacy of what was fallacious. Because he has felt, that the only way in which a human being can make some approach to knowing the whole of a subject by hearing what can be said about it by persons of every variety of opinion, and studying all modes in which it

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can be looked at by every character of mind. No wise man ever acquired his wisdom in any mode but this; nor is it in the nature of human intellect to become wise in any other manner. The steady habit of correcting and completing his own opinion by collating it with those of others, so far from causing doubt and hesitation in carrying it into practice, is the only stable foundation for a just reliance on it: for, being cognizant of all that can, at least obviously, be said against him, and having taken up his position against all gainsayers-knowing that he has sought for objections and difficulties, instead of avoiding them, and has shut out no light which can be thrown upon the subject from any quarter-he has a right to think his judgment better than that of any person, or any multitude, who have not gone through a similar process...
..we have neglected nothing that could give the truth a chance of reaching us: if the lists are kept open, we may hope that if there be a better truth, it will be found when the human mind is capable of receiving it; and in the meantime we may rely on having attained such approach to truth, as is possible in our own day.

Clarifying Truth

The Declaration of Independence had reduced down all of the truths before it into a simple precept, as quoted above; and as noted in What Price Justice that precept has had added to it The Helsinki Agreement (1975), American Convention on Human Rights (1969); United Nations International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966); European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (1953); United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), in addition to the UN Charter and other covenants which our governments have accepted, all of which defend a person's right to be treated with dignity, as a human being, and apart from all the other freedoms they have a right to have the freedom from fear and want.

In the Quest we argued that our homeless people are not being treated in this country like Human Beings and, in fact, dogs and brutes get better treatment than they. Now all of the laws the San Franciscans and Berkeleyites have passed which have persecuted the unfortunate and homeless, which are at the heart of our argument, our founding fathers and all of the sages of the aeons gathered around them have long ago condemned. It is clear that based upon their truths that they would require a people to abolish a government which had perpetrated such indignities as we have listed.

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Sir, the proof of the pudding, that our government should be condemned for its unrighteouness, is in our prolix. Even so the simple argument in What Price Justice was more than enough to cause a discerning people, being complementary to our founding fathers' integrity, to march in the streets and overthrow the tyrants who had passed such laws that perpetrated the 7 millions of homeless refugees.

Sir, it is the lack of Human Understanding among the liberals in Berkeley in particular (who more than other people should be ashamed of their inhuman behavior, because they profess to be more open to justice), which compels me to advertise them as the symbol of our shame. Sir, we believe we have reached a point in the argument that must convince you that the causes behind the persecutions of our nation, its ideals and people, must be abolished.

We noted this complaint in a short letter, "to Asiz" which we put in Appendix A of The Mehl Commentary , Part 1; and here we repeated the complaint against the indignities perpetrated against the homeless and said that every Christian Pastor has a duty to march in the streets against the aforesaid indignities and the tyrants which have induced them.

Again, Sir, all of this villainy comes from the Halls of Avarice  a people so blinded in the Halls of Avarice they ignore the simplest foundations of truth so long established and honored by mankind.

This, in our Judgment, because of the scope of the crimes perpetrated by our leaders, must be addressed by public display of the crimes, to shame them who perpetrated them, and to force a remedy.

Since a people tend to resemble their leaders, as said before, it follows that to rid the corruption from the midst of the Berkeleyites we must rid the corruption from the highest levels of our government.

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This comes from On Liberty . Here Mill says:

Mill, 1.124 ..The limitation, therefore, of the power of government over individuals loses none of its importance when the holders of power are regularly accountable to the community, that is, to the strongest party therein.

Breaking the Cycle of Corruption

When our own California Legislature took its seats a few days ago, there was a large hue and cry over the fact that the new house is as corrupt as the old (which cast doubt on the validity of Term Limits). In the Quest  and Duty and Profit we showed how the Old Congress has not been accountable to our people. The reason for this is owing to the fact that the people who tolerate their crimes are themselves corrupted by the same avarice which corrupted the Old Congress . Breaking the Cycle of Corruption then becomes the issue at hand; and we know from history that this is not the first time such cycles have been instituted; but in this case, the Cycle of Corruption has manifested itself in its worst possible form. For it, unlike previous ages, has the ability to destroy the entire earth and the inheritance of my people. So the cause against this Cycle of Corruption is greater. Keep this in mind whilst you read the following:

Mill, 1.133.."the tyranny of the majority" is now generally included among the evils against which society requires to be on its guard. Like other tyrannies, the tyranny of the majority was at first, and is still vulgarly, held in dread, chiefly as operating through the acts of the public authorities. But reflecting persons perceived that when society is itself the tyrant-society collectively, over the separate individuals who compose it-its means of tyrannizing are not restricted to the acts which it may do by the hands of its political functionaries. Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practices a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself. Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough: there needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling; against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them..
..Some rules of conduct, therefore, must be imposed, by law in the first place, and by opinion on many things which are not fit subjects for the operation of law.

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Against Sinners

When our founding fathers framed their principles into a law of the land which should keep us from evil, as it were, they were not oblivious to the circumstances which could undermine the future of this nation. At that time, continuing into the age of Mill, the concern was to protect against the suppression of individuality, that variety of opinion must be cultivated and cherished (as against the suppressive nature of the then prevailing church opinions). The Church of England, being led at first by King Henry VIII rooted out and destroyed all other religious opinions, then Cromwell levelled his share of estates, as did Torquemada in 1492 in Spain, as well as others. So foremost in the minds of the emerging democracies was the need to protect all [moral] freedoms of expression, with religion being among the first of them to be protected. By Mills' time the democracies had then derived within their body of laws certain values which established what is a sin or a crime against a society and what is not. Among the sins which were forbidden by law were those associated with prostitution, adultery, and other kinds of immoral displays. Now these laws and opinions against sin were brought forward into the twentieth century because of their value in maintaining the integrity of a society, even though the prevailing opinion behind our constitution included:

Mill 1.357..In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.

This opinion is the foundation of the Right to Choose movement, isn't it? Where modern women share the opinion that they have a right to choose whether a child they conceive ought to live. Opposing this point of view are those who say that the child in the womb must be protected by law just as any other individual.

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We mention this vestige--the right of an individual to be sovereign over his own body- -brought forward from the past because, whilst the people argue over the rights of a child in the womb, they [selfishly] ignore the fundamental rights of those who survive the womb and are now being persecuted in our streets. It is fair to say from the angle of our argument that our people have lost complete sight of the very idea of Human Dignity , and what might appear to be an argument over the sovereignty of a woman's body is merely a manifestation of selfishness where a people have become blinded so much that they ignore the cries of the babes on the street who were once suckled at their breasts!

The truth is, though we argue over the sovereignty of the individual over his body, the people are being extorted and suppressed on a scale far above that which revolted our forefathers in the first place. As argued in our other works, this is what has happened to our people:

Mill 1.515..as the tendency of all the changes taking place in the world is to strengthen society, and diminish the power of the individual, this encroachment is not one of the evils which tend spontaneously to disappear, but, on the contrary, to grow more and more formidable. The disposition of mankind, whether as rulers or as fellow citizens, to impose their own opinions and inclinations as a rule of conduct on others, is so energetically supported by some of the best and by some of the worst feelings incident to human nature, that it is hardly ever kept under restraint by anything but want of power; and as the power is not declining, but growing, unless a strong barrier of moral conviction can be raised against the mischief, we must expect, in the present circumstances of the world, to see it increase.

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Expected to be Immoral

We have argued that the prevailing opinion in this country is that it is expected that one should be immoral. This in part can be traced back to Xenophon's Oeconomics , where he pointed out, that one must count his enemy as part of the wealth of his nation and in his Histories he notes of Cyrus the Great, how he used deception to overcome the Greeks. Xenophon here noted that deception is a natural tool of diplomacy and an order of statehood. Machiavelli, in his Discourses , picked up on this thesis, which is also reflected in The Prince , where he advises governors to employ deception so to protect their interests. Our public has taken this advice to heart and now employs it in everyday affairs.

Now these sources advertise the justification of evil, when it is in one's interest so to do it. This can be taken up by a Congress or a people, whether through law (as those inhumane laws of the Berkeleyites and, by illustration of a former era of the same kind of indignities, the Nazi era) or by public opinion.

We know that the Nazis were wrong in their treatment of the Jews, though common German opinion tolerated that conduct. We know that when the Jews were first denied the right to work, then had their homes confiscated from them, and then denied the right to beg and secure shelter, that this also was wrong; and the Germans have been ostracized for it. The Berkeleyites are, like the Nazis, guilty of the same level of crimes, by denying the homeless among them a right to live. As said, they represent what other American communities are doing, which we brought to your and others attention long ago, hoping for some level of remedy.

It is through error that we learn truth. If The Old Man of the Sea and you had agreed with the principles of What Price Justice and had the facilities to do something about it, for instance, there would never have been a further need for argument and, thus, a further exploration of the truth upon which What Price Justice is founded.

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Although the desperation of our 7 million untouchables does not deserve as much conversation on the matter as we have had, it did offer an opportunity to explore the opposing views on the subject which have caused them such hostile and unmerciful treatment. Thus, perhaps the collision of our opinions will be to the advantage of an improved justice for our Heirs. For we hold to this idea:

Mill, 2.40..If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.

Recognizing that a people can be blinded by false opinions, Mill points out that Truth has its own time in which to be revealed. Sometimes Righteousness itself must wait for its time to reappear, after having been suppressed by the likes of the wicked whom we have already defined.

In the case of the shame of the Berkeleyites we can see an example (proved throughout the epochs of time) how a people can suppress truth by ignoring it. Listen to this:

Mill, 2.50..Those who desire to suppress it, of course deny its truth; but they are not infallible. They have no authority to decide the question for all mankind, and exclude every other person from the means of judging. To refuse a hearing to an opinion, because they are sure that it is false, is to assume that their certainty is the same thing as absolute certainty.

Since:

Mill 1.408..A person may cause evil to others not only by his actions but by his inaction, and in either case he is justly accountable to them for the injury. The latter case, it is true, requires a much more cautious exercise of compulsion than the former. To make any one answerable for doing evil to others, is the rule; to make him answerable for not preventing evil, is, comparatively speaking, the exception. Yet there are many cases clear enough and grave enough to justify that exception. In all things which regard the external relations of the individual, he is de jure amenable to those whose interests are concerned, and if need be, to society as their protector.

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By means of the force of our Great Troop we mean to explore the idea whether the Old Congress and such avaricious people like the Berkeleyites can escape judgment and be forced to answer to not only crimes against our Law of the Land but also those crimes previously designated as being against humanity. We have seen before, as in Nürnberg, that where Human Dignity was scorned a tribunal eventually brought those who perpetrated the indignity to justice and, with regard to those who permitted the indignity, perpetual scorn. Now added to the list of those perpetually scorned, beyond the Neros and the Nazis and their cohorts, is our Old Congress and the Berkeleyites; for the history of the matter shows that one ought to have corrected the other's bad behavior.

You may be thinking that these villains will get their just deserts in hell. They aren't afraid of hell, Sir. They make it.

This comes from Mill:

Mill, 1.341 That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.

Inasmuch as this applies to individuals and groups, we see that it is the duty of our leaders and our laws to protect our citizens from being harmed by others. But then, if our Congress is in error and does not protect the members of our Homeless Communities from suppressions and extortions of such as be from the hardened hearts of the Berkeleyites, then what option is there left? If the people themselves are as corrupt as their governors what are an oppressed community to do? For here we have the examples of certain classes of our nation persecuting others; and the scale of the injustice is not a smattering amount, for the numbers being persecuted in our land exceed probably threefold the original population of the American Colonies (in 1780 2.8 million) which declared independence from the tyrant, King George III, who, it turns out, was far more benevolent than our current Congress.

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We noted in Against Leviathan and in The Second Coming of the American Revolution how strangely enough Thomas Paine's pamphlet, Common Sense , received midst the 2 million inhabitants 100,000 readers. Whilst he was writing, public opinion was against separation from the British Crown; and it was his desire to persuade the leaders of his time to break the accord they had made with that devil and the panderers in his court. Our original argument was straightly lifted from Paine's Common Sense , where we subtly used his voice to express our dismay at the injustice of these times, and we used far fewer words to express the same discontent. Imagine this peculiarity, how he reached 100,000 buyers of his pamphlet and we, with the same argument in tow, a deficit! It is suffice to say that had the Berkeleyites and their kind lived in Thomas Paine's day he would have caught up no man and we would, no doubt, still be under the yoke of the British Crown. Thank God the Berkeleyites did not live in his day!

This comes from Mill as follows:

Mill, 2.315..These are exactly the occasions on which the men of one generation commit those dreadful mistakes, which excite the astonishment and horror of posterity. It is among such that we find the instances memorable in history, when the arm of the law has been employed to root out the best men and the noblest doctrines; with deplorable success as to the men, though some of the doctrines have survived to be (as if in mockery) invoked, in defense of similar conduct towards those who dissent from them, or from their received interpretation
Mankind can hardly be too often reminded, that there was once a man named Socrates, between whom and the legal authorities and public opinion of his time, there took place a memorable collision.
2.385..the impressiveness of an error is measured by the wisdom and virtue of him who falls into it.

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Little could Mill and other formative minds on modern democracy have imagined that a government could devolve (in the suppression of public opinion) to the extent that it would scuttle all sense of Virtue and be so utterly depraved--typified in the Berkeleyites--that they could not even be caused to respond to the most vituperative opinions on their lack of integrity. We commented on this before, how much worthier the men of Socrates' and other sages' times were, who at least, though wrong, and believing they were right, killed the messenger who chastised them. The Berkeleyites and our Old Congress are too depraved to be this self-conscious. It makes one wish the laws of the Locrians were reinstituted:

Mill 2.475..in the legislation of the Locrians, the proposer of a new law, with a halter round his neck, to be instantly tightened if the public assembly did not, on hearing his reasons, then and there adopt his proposition.

Whilst this may sound funny, and I, for my part, laugh when I see this practice, I wonder sometimes whether we might at least be better off if our Congress and the lawmakers of the Berkeleyites and the like were required to express their opinions with a noose around their neck. But then, except for a few homeless people and myself, I doubt we could find anyone who would be willing to hold the noose; nor would such a practice, come to think of it, be much effective, because the bribes in the pockets of our leaders would continue to hobble them to the pilings of Avarice more than any noose around their neck could dissuade them to some other preference.
We conclude this part by a quote of Dr. Johnson forwarded by Mill, that:

Mill 2.447..the persecutors of Christianity were in the right: that persecution is an ordeal through which truth ought to pass..

So we must say to the 7 million homeless that they must, in spite of the unfavorable odds against them, keep their chins up so that others in the future may obtain out of their suffering, as with the Suffering Christians, some kind of truth which will benefit us of the future. Now to those who believe that Human Suffering is a good way to promote truth, we offer a contrary opinion, that Human Decency is a far more preferred way. Sir, we presume you plan to be among the Heirs of this unworthy estate (because your premise of December 1 also involves the Lord's Prayer [sic. A Kingdom in earth as it is in Heaven ]); therefore, we believe that you would agree with us that we might as well solve this tragedy now rather than to have to face it later.

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Being disadvantaged at the moment leaves us with the realization that the kindred spirits of the Berkeleyites and our Old Congress will remain in the company they have chosen, to wit: that as Domitian and his fettered friends tightened the screws upon the Christians, and as Torquemada and Hitler tightened the screws upon their victims, so too must our Old Congress and such as be the Berkeleyites delight in turning ever more harder the screws upon their hapless victims. And this leaves us with this epiphany:

Mill 2.505..Men are not more zealous for truth than they often are for error...

This brings us back to the core of the problem, that whereas in former times there were men who would uphold tried and proven truths, today there is no man to do so. It is not a question today that men are less zealous for truth; the fact of the matter, from the pastors to our Congressmen, is that their zealousness is for error and against the discovery of truth, illustrated in On the Breakage of the Holy Catholic Church , Quest for Human Dignity and Duty and Profit.

Still a Chance for the Confessional

We were glad to hear that Pope John Paul declared a few days ago that the Catholic Church will apologize for its errors in the past. We wonder how far he will go? We firmly believe that by confession of error an error is coerced from surviving into the future. We would hope that included in the Catholic Confession there will be an admission how the apostle Paul erroneously perceived the Torah (as applying to the Jews) and how his error gangrenously spread into the minds of Hitler and his gangs and what the consequence of that error really was. But we doubt he would go that far, for then it would imply that the pastors have been liars, grouping them with atheists who, until this time, were the only ones who habitually were liars. We may be a bit unfair to the atheists here, but it is suffice to say in their case that as they preached that there is no God they opened themselves to being liars. For they have no evidence of God or Truth and have gone out on a limb to convince others that what they have not evidently seen does not exist. These lack Mental Freedom. Just as religious leaders and their doctrines can suppress mental freedom, so too have atheistic leaders and their doctrines done the same.

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Contrary but following the same Bloody Path

The spirit behind atheistic doctrine is repulsed by opinions which might constrain his behavior. So as he follows his libertine ways, stepping over suffering bodies in the streets of Berkeley, for example, he in reality follows the same bloody path the religious themselves have been taking, who also have been stepping over the shivering creatures suffering in the street.

Now the liberals of Berkeley can justify persecution of the homeless in the streets because they have no need for Virtue. Those churchmen who follow behind them, stepping on the homeless, are more hypocritical, perhaps, but nevertheless equally subversive to the ideals of Human Dignity. For just as the Churchmen of Nazi Germany stepped over the disenfranchised in 1941, in 1995 the Berkeleyites of all persuasions shall continue the tradition, that somehow they are better than the ones whom they persecute and fully justified in enacting laws punishing those outlawed by them: the homeless. In the specific example of the Berkeleyites which applies to us all, though they profess to live upon a campus known for mental freedom they have become rather bigoted and pernicious in every sense of the terms which pertain to the mind suffocating criminals of the past.

It is Good to listen to Heretics

This does not mean it is good to follow all heretics, or differing opinions, but rather to at least hear the opinion. As noted, as with certain Churchmen, there are no more closed minds in this day than those of the Berkeleyites, for they, among their peers, as with Churchmen, fear heresy to their own doctrines!

Time limits one's investigation of truth; and one is constrained by the time God has allowed him in this regard. But:

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Mill 2.681..No one can be a great thinker who does not recognize, that as a thinker, it is his first duty to follow his intellect to whatever conclusions it may lead. Truth gains more even by the errors of one who, with due study and preparation, thinks for himself, than by the true opinions of those who only hold them because they do not suffer themselves to think...There have been, and may again be, great individual thinkers, in a general atmosphere of mental slavery.

Again, referring to the subtitle of Duty and Profit : A manifest against governments run by avarice , we note that Avarice itself has enslaved the mental capacity of our Old Congress and much of the people, such as the Berkeleyites, in this nation. They are simply blinded to any opinions which might lead them from Avarice. The idea of ridding the streets of homeless people comes home here, where we can see that the Berkeleyite attitude is to persecute the homeless so they will avoid their streets. We need a law (since people can't do it voluntarily) of comforting the poor and restoring the homeless to the status of a Dignified Human Being and with it a dignified job.

Following such a course would be too hazardous to our governors, as it might jeopardize the source of their profits; for there are many making money off of the poor.
Thus, we have darkness:

Mill 2.705..where the discussion of the greatest questions which can occupy humanity is considered to be closed, we cannot hope to find that generally high scale of mental activity which has made some periods of history so remarkable.

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Harvesting Knowledge

What a contrast this period is to that when I was a young man participating in the Apollo Program! As you well know the Apollo Program was named after the god of Wisdom, and for good reason: for it cultivated more knowledge in its short span of time than ever before harvested in history. Then someone began to complain during the Ford years about wasting our tax dollars in space, following which was a movement taking the opposite course, of restricting our technological progress. Those same libertine minds which were closed to space exploration because it was a waste of tax dollars, have no qualms, however, at wasting magnitudes more than what the Apollo Program cost on interest payments. What may have cost $100 Billion per year to explore space, we now spend in 100 days on interest to service our National Debt. Now the Apollo Program, being true to its name, was a search for truth, wheresoever it may be through our investigation of Space; and being true to its spirit brought us a great deal of Wisdom in a short period of time. The $100 Billion per year (or whatever Apollo may have cost over its short life-span), leaving us with greater knowledge, and through applying it, greater Wisdom, has no match to our current era: where we now spend $100 Billion every hundred days and derive absolutely no benefit from it--neither jobs nor Wisdom! Now 60% of our National Debt is owned by 1% of our people; and about another 20% or more of the debt was listed as owned by our five major trading partners' Central Banks. We are forking over $1 Billion per day to people in the main who use the money to build for themselves nice mansions whilst they hold contempt for those whom they have willfully and knowledgeably left out in the cold: from those who subsist on beggarly wages to those who cower from the snow and rain beneath coverts and underpasses in our streets. Many of these people who have been exploited by the Old Congress which not only scuttled our jobs but also the fruit of our knowledge, know it is not the gods which brought us ruin but our own greedy system. In the churchmen, libertines, and other Epicureans which created this system driven by avarice, we have strong evidence there is no knowledge. Thus, for those who have forsaken knowledge for money we say:

Mill, 2.827 All that part of the truth which turns the scale, and decides the judgment of a completely informed mind, they are strangers too..
2.900..that not only the grounds of the opinion are forgotten in the absence of discussion, but too often the meaning of the opinion itself...Instead of a vivid conception and a living belief, there remain only a few phrases retained by rote; or, if any part, the shell and husk only of the meaning is retained, the finer essence being lost.

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Whether we apply this vision to errant pastors who have lost their way, having no idea that the original Christian congregation shared all things in common, providing foremost for the poor; or whether we apply this to a corrupt Congress who lost its way, being caught in the narrowing grip of avarice and corruption, in which there can be no knowledge, the result is the same. What we have reviewed has not lost its flavor because of age. In the case at hand our people have not only been stripped of livelihood, home and family, they have also been stripped of their minds. And they, as a people, have forgotten the essence of their being. We say this because the essence of this nation's being was Justice; today, as illustrated in Quest for Human Dignity and Duty and Profit , there is no justice:

Sir, I know you mean well, but your position that you look forward to the completion of that event in Luke 21 does not balance with what we know of the matter. Restoring Israel is fruitless if there is no one to be jubilant in it. If the nations can't appreciate the substance of the decree, which in 1998 will have added meaning to the forgiveness of debts, how, Sir, can you look forward to the Glory of God?

Freeing the poor seems to be a small matter, but because of the origin of Christ's point of view--having been a son of slaves out of Egypt-- it is the most important thing on his mind (it was the first thing he read [Isaiah 61] to the people). There are more prisoners in America than ever there were in Rome or Judaea; and there are more needy, and more orphans. Oughtn't He to drop off here first?

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Or would you ask him to step around lifeless people just to enter the sealed Golden Gate?

We can address these issues one at a time, if you will. Hoping to hear your position on honoring Beulah (Isaiah 62.2,4), and any other matter visiting our accession, such as repairing the breach in America's Dignity for the Kingdom come, I remain,

Sincerely yours,

M

Mr. Buckley's answer to Duty and Profit:

December 1, 1994

Homer nods and I'm not Homer, but I cannot have said works were irrelevant to salvation. They're always symptoms of it and we both know what St. James said about faith without them.
And the destruction of the temple was no doubt dreadful, but as far as I know the other signs St. Luke mentions were missing: we still have those to look forward to.

Yours cordially,

Wm. F. Buckley Jr.

Our response:

December 7, 1994


Dear Mr. Buckley,

You missed the restoration of Israel, with its implications, which are preparatory to the Cloud of Glory mentioned in Luke 21, which we trust you will find wraps around our argument enclosed: of opening some doors you assumed are closed. Wondering whether you will recognize Beulah , for instance, I remain, as always,

Sincerely yours,

M

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