2. Sabbath and Life (Remastered)

The Sabbath and Life

R.J. Rushdoony

Our Scripture is Leviticus 25:1-17 and the subject, ‘The Sabbath and Life.’ Leviticus 25:1-17.

“And the Lord spake unto Moses in mount Sinai, saying, Speak unto the children of Israel, and say unto them, When ye come into the land which I give you, then shall the land keep a sabbath unto the Lord. Six years thou shalt sow thy field, and six years thou shalt prune thy vineyard, and gather in the fruit thereof; But in the seventh year shall be a sabbath of rest unto the land, a sabbath for the Lord: thou shalt neither sow thy field, nor prune thy vineyard. That which groweth of its own accord of thy harvest thou shalt not reap, neither gather the grapes of thy vine undressed: for it is a year of rest unto the land. And the sabbath of the land shall be meat for you; for thee, and for thy servant, and for thy maid, and for thy hired servant, and for thy stranger that sojourneth with thee, And for thy cattle, and for the beast that are in thy land, shall all the increase thereof be meat.

And thou shalt number seven sabbaths of years unto thee, seven times seven years; and the space of the seven sabbaths of years shall be unto thee forty and nine years. Then shalt thou cause the trumpet of the jubile to sound on the tenth day of the seventh month, in the day of atonement shall ye make the trumpet sound throughout all your land. And ye shall hallow the fiftieth year, and proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof: it shall be a jubile unto you; and ye shall return every man unto his possession, and ye shall return every man unto his family. A jubile shall that fiftieth year be unto you: ye shall not sow, neither reap that which groweth of itself in it, nor gather the grapes in it of thy vine undressed. For it is the jubile; it shall be holy unto you: ye shall eat the increase thereof out of the field. In the year of this jubile ye shall return every man unto his possession. And if thou sell ought unto thy neighbour, or buyest ought of thy neighbour’s hand, ye shall not oppress one another: According to the number of years after the jubile thou shalt buy of thy neighbour, and according unto the number of years of the fruits he shall sell unto thee: According to the multitude of years thou shalt increase the price thereof, and according to the fewness of years thou shalt diminish the price of it: for according to the number of the years of the fruits doth he sell unto thee. Ye shall not therefore oppress one another; but thou shalt fear thy God: for I am the Lord your God.”

The death penalties that are associated in the Old Testament with respect to the Sabbath, convey two very obvious assumptions. First, the Sabbath laws obviously involved a principle so important, so basic, that violation was regarded as a capital offense, and while the punishment of death by civil law is removed, it is still in some sense a capital offense. This means, second, that the law conveys to us the fact that violation is a kind of death in of itself. And similiarly, obedience is a kind of guarantee of life.

Now before we analyze the significance of the Sabbath law, it is important for us to realize that one of our problems is that familiarity often leads to ignorance. A thing becomes so routine to us that we lose the meaning of it. This was borne home to me some years ago when a friend who had been a doctor, a missionary doctor in China for fifty years, Dr. Dodson, a man of a most distinguished family, whose sister taught at one of the major medical schools of this country, and was himself a man of most remarkable character, was telling me of his practice on the mission field. And he said, “We had mail once a year.” And, he said, “My wife and daughter and two sons and I were the only non-Chinese for hundreds of miles around.” And, he said, “As a result, very often before the end of the year, and sometimes long, long before the end of the year if there were serious problems, I’d exhausted all the medicine I had.” So, he said, “I had to do with common everyday kitchen materials.” And so, I raised the question, “What did you do for a disinfectant?” He said “Oh! Something out of the kitchen.” I couldn’t guess what it was, I guessed salt, which, of course, he said was wrong, it would cause serious damage. He said, “I packed any wound or infection or any surgery that I had done with sugar.” And, he said, “Now, any woman who makes jelly knows that if that jelly or jam has a high sugar content, she doesn’t have to worry about sealing the jar, the sugar will preserve it. But if it is canned peaches, and the sugar content is not sufficiently high, she has to seal that carefully.” But, he said, “This has become so routine with us, we’ve lost the meaning of what we’re doing.”

And so it is. We observe many things like the Sabbath, we’ve lost the meaning of it. It’s become routine and the meaning is gone, and so, little by little the observance goes because we don’t understand the principle behind it. And so, when we approach it, we approach it ignorantly without realizing what it’s all about. You have to know the meaning to understand anything that you observe, or see, or practice. 

To cite another little illustration. When I was in school, I was taught that when a Roman general returned to Rome and he was given a triumphal march into the city, a slave always ran before him, beside his chariot, repeating, “Remember that you are a man.” Now, the teachers who cited this to me in Latin class and elsewhere said, “This is an example of the humility that was to be expected of the general at this point.” They were looking at the whole episode from a Christian perspective. Recently, as I was studying an analysis of Roman art by Heinz Kahler, I was interested in his comment. He pointed out that this statement by the slave, “Remember you are a man,” meant that he was a god.i That’s a startling fact, but you see, the Roman definition of a man was different then the Christian definition. And we read that or listen when a teacher tells it to us in Latin class, and we read it in terms of a Christian meaning of what constitutes a man, and it’s a statement of humility. But from the Roman perspective, “You are now a man, that is you are joining the ranks of those who are gods, up until now you were a subhuman, but now you are a man, you are with the gods.”

Now as we analyze the Sabbath, let us see it not in terms of what the world today sees it as or what ministers today may see it as, but in terms of Scripture. Jesus Christ declares:

“The sabbath was made for man, and not man for the sabbath: Therefore the Son of man is Lord also of the sabbath.” ii

The Sabbath was made for man, but it is not man who is Lord of the Sabbath but the Son of man, Jesus Christ. In other words, the redeemed man, the second Adam, the fountainhead of the new humanity is Lord of the Sabbath. Therefore, the Sabbath was made for the perfect man, Jesus Christ, and for the redeemed of Christ, for us, as a principle of life and regeneration in Him.

Now, with that let us turn to the law itself. First, as we have seen last week, the primary meaning of the Sabbath is rest, not worship. Only that worship which is a rest and refreshing to man is a part of the true Sabbath rest. But second, we cannot view the Sabbath exclusively in terms of man, although it is centrally concerned with man. We must approach the Sabbath from the standpoint of the whole earth as the Scripture does. 

Now, the commandment makes it clear that it effects man and beast alike and the vines and the trees of the field and the earth. The Scripture which we read dealt with the Sabbath years and with the Jubilee year. Every seventh year the land was to enjoy a rest. There was to be no pruning, no planting, no harvesting, the land was to go to weed. Anyone could go into the field, including a passerby, and pick of the fruit and eat of it, but they could not carry any away, in other words they could not harvest, it was free there for anyone to eat and for the birds of the field, and what fell was to lie there. They were not to do anything to kill the animals of the field at that time either; the gophers, the snakes, or the insects. 

Now, after seven sevens of years a sabbatical year every seventh year, the forty-ninth year then would be a sabbatical year, the fiftieth year was also to be a Sabbatical year, but it was called ‘the Jubilee.’ And that year, the Day of Atonement, the ram’s horn or trumpet was to be sounded. 

“And ye shall hallow the fiftieth year, and proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof…” iii

The words that are inscribed on the Liberty Bell, and when they were inscribed there they knew what it meant. Thus, the forty-ninth and fiftieth year of each century, or the ninety-ninth and hundredth year were a double-sabbatical year.

Now one thing you can see obviously, when you weren’t going to harvest your year, your sabbatical year, and you had two years in a row when you did not, one thing that was required of all the people was providence. They weren’t living up to the hilt on their income, that’s a plain, simple, ordinary fact, it did require a provident people. But the purpose of these laws is not humanitarian, nor is it simply to teach providence. The purpose of the Sabbath is the Sabbath, that is a rest and relief, a redemption and a regeneration. 

Now, the supreme Sabbath was the Jubilee year, it was begun, as we noted, on the day of Atonement by the sounding of the ram’s horn or trumpet, even as God annulled their sins, this is what the day of atonement was about, and forgave their debts, they were to forgive all debts and to give the soil a rest, and rest themselves together with all their household, and all their livestock. The goal of the Sabbath, according to Hebrews, the third chapter, is the Promised Land, the new creation in Jesus Christ, the restoration and restitution of all things. As a result, all debts ran out on the seventh year, they were cancelled. Debts were to be contracted on a six-year basis. In other words, you couldn’t have a ten year or a fifteen, or a thirty-year mortgage, you were supposed to have a six-year mortgage, or if you contracted it half-way between that time from one Sabbatical year to the next, it was to be three-and-a-half-year mortgage. The modern statute of limitation on debt, by the way, is an adaptation of this principle, and that year also slaves were freed, and the land reverted to its original owner, so that land was leased only from one sabbatical year to the next, or one Jubilee year to the next. Man anticipated in the Sabbath years and in the Jubilee, the final victory and the restored earth, the new creation.

Now this great work of restoration, of restitution, of undoing the Fall, included, by the Law of God, the soil also. The soil was to be restored, to be revitalized. Everything was to be allowed to go to weed, to revert to the soil, to be unpruned. Now, in recent years soil scientists, notably at the University of Missouri and one or two other institutions, have done remarkable work here, and they have learned that soil requires weeds. Weeds penetrate deep down into the subsoil and they bring up minerals, and they bring up water so that things thrive better when some weeds are allowed to grow. And when the land is allowed to revert to weeds, the soil is revitalized because the weeds bring up these things, and when the weeds next year are plowed under it adds to the topsoil. I heard recently of an interesting episode that happened here in southern California when a man whose orange grove was becoming progressively worse, and who had decided it was not fit to keep up, it was unproductive, let it go to weed and it sat there for a year with nothing done to it, and it revitalized the orchard!

There is of course an extensive body of literature here that tells us the value of this, of allowing the land to lie fallow. And Sir Albert Howard, one of the greatest of soil scientist, Dr. William A. Albrecht and Joseph Cocannouer and others have gone into this at great length and confirmed the validity of the Sabbath principle. And we do know how many areas have reverted to desert, or have been converted into desert, by the systematic exploitation of the soil by man. 

Babylon was once one of the most fertile areas in the world, a land flowing with waters, and now it is desert. The Sahara was once, although we find this difficult now to understand, orchard and farm country. True, the weather changed somewhat, but the real damage was done by an abuse of the earth. Long after the weather changed, many areas were still rich and fertile, and there are many areas of the Sahara that have a rainfall equal to parts of the Midwest; some of our richest grain country.

The Scripture tells us that Judah went into captivity because they failed to keep God’s Law with respect of the land:

“To fulfil the word of the LORD by the mouth of Jeremiah, until the land had enjoyed her sabbaths: for as long as she lay desolate she kept sabbath, to fulfil threescore and ten years.” iv

This means from the last days of Solomon, or after Solomon to the captivity, no Sabbatical year was kept. And so, they kept a seventy-year Sabbath unto the land by being taken into captivity. This in terms of the Word of the Lord in Leviticus 26:34:

“Then shall the land enjoy her Sabbath as long as it lieth desolate, and ye be in your enemies land, even then shall the land rest and enjoy her Sabbath” 

And again in Leviticus 26:43. If they violated this law:

“The land also shall be left of them, and shall enjoy her sabbaths, while she lieth desolate without them: and they shall accept of the punishment of their iniquity: because, even because they despised my judgments, and because their soul abhorred my statutes.”

But this seventy-year long Sabbath of the land was God’s mercy, it restored the earth there in the Promised Land to give Israel another chance. But after they rejected Christ, judgment came and the desolation of the land. Palestine is not the same country now, no longer a beautifully wooded country, only a handful of the Cedars of Lebanon remain, no longer a land of springs and streams, but only dry, eroded land.

Clearly, the renewal of the earth is a basic concept of the Sabbath, as is a renewal of all things. To ignore this is to court judgment and death. The death penalty is operative here, very clearly. Just as money cannot be taken out of the bank endlessly, neither can the earth be exploited endlessly, nor can a man work without food or rest. The Sabbath has a purpose, then, and it still has a capital punishment attached to it. Men who will have not Sabbath are doomed to die prematurely. 

But unhappily in our day and age, pills are a substitute for the rules of health, and that science somehow will figure out an answer to every contempt they express for good common sense living. A man I knew and liked, a very, very kindly and a likable person, killed himself literally, because when he developed ulcers and they became very serious, he continued drinking. And he literally bled to death, and he was amazed when he was dying, he was sure somehow a Doctor could provide a pill which could counteract everything he was doing, after all, what was medicine and science for?!

And today, of course, we are putting our confidence into some kind of gimmick, and we are destroying the earth, and we are destroying animals. Modern poultry methods produce nervous chickens, they only last a season, did you know? And then they are sold off, and its no wonder their eggs have a high cholesterol content; the chickens do, they’re nervous chickens. They’re kept awake twenty-four hours a day with continual lighting, so they will step up laying, and they’re burnt out after a season. And there is the same kind of stepped-up pace with dairy cows, so instead of lasting seventeen, eighteen, nineteen years as they did when I was a boy; three years and they’re through. 

Dr Hans Selye, one of the great medical researchers, has written an important volume on stress. A man has only the capacity to take so much stress, and he is dead. And most the stress, he said, comes from within, because a man has no rest within, no Sabbath principle in his life, no Christ. Man needs rest, he requires the Sabbath to live, but without faith he cannot truly rest, or give rest to others, or to the soil, or animals. The essence of the Sabbath is the restoration, the renewal of all things, and Christ is first and foremost our Sabbath, and then in Him man is required to rest and give the rest to the earth and to all things.

But having said this, we must note that the Sabbath is “a Sabbath unto the Lord,” it is a covenant sign according to Ezekiel 20:10-13. The source of life is God, is Christ, not the law or the Sabbath in of itself. It is not merely inactivity as Dr. Selye has said; the rest comes from within, or is no rest. It is “resting in the Lord.” 

O rest in the Lord, wait patiently for Him,

And He shall give thee thy heart’s desires. v

The Pharisees reduced the Sabbath rest to physical inactivity and therefore they indulged in endless debate as to whether they could eat an egg or not, because after all maybe the hen had violated the Sabbath laboring over that egg the previous Sabbath.

But we must also say, finally, that forgiveness is a basic aspect of the Sabbath, essential to it. Remember that the horn of the Jubilee, the trumpet of the Jubilee sounded on the evening the Day of Atonement, “proclaim liberty throughout all the land and unto all the inhabitants thereof?” Liberty from the burden of sin and guilt, atonement had been made. Liberty in the rest in the Lord, and the Lord’s prayer looks forward to the great Sabbath “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done,” and it has therefore the great Jubilee petition: “Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.” 

The word ‘trespasses,’ which is often used here, is a good translation in that it calls attention to the forgiveness of sins, but the word ‘debts’ perhaps is even better, although I like the use of both, because it calls attention to the Jubilee aspect. And we have this clearly stated in Deuteronomy 15:1-6, which in the Berkley version read: 

“At the end of every seven years there must be a canceling of debts, and this shall be the way of cancelling: Every creditor shall cancel the loan he made to his neighbor or to his brother, he shall make no demand for repayment, because the Lord’s release has been proclaimed. A foreigner you may press for payment [he doesn’t believe in the Sabbath, he’s not a believer in the principle of forgiveness - RJR], but whatever of yours was due from a brother, you shall cancel. However, there should be no poor among you, for the Lord your God will abundantly bless you in the land He will give you to possess as a heritage, if you listen to the Lord your God and rightly observe all these commandments which today I am enjoining upon you. When they Lord your God blesses you as He promised you, then ye shall lend from many nations, but not borrow; ye shall rule many nations, but they shall not rule over you.” vi

When God’s law is obeyed, God declares you will have a debt-free, poverty-free society, and that this is possible only in terms of Him.

A prominent writer on law has said, concerning these laws:

“Modern statutes of limitation and bankruptcy acts fulfill the purpose of the ancient law of sabbatical release—the former by forbidding the bringing of an action upon a debt after a certain number of years and the latter enabling a debtor to turn over his property in satisfaction of his debts.” vii

And this particular writer goes on at great length to tell us how much these laws of the Sabbath have embedded themselves deeply in our American law. But they are meaningless today, and they are abused because the heart is gone, Jesus Christ. The meaning of the Sabbath is not there. The Sabbath confers life, but to those alien to God, neither the Sabbath nor its release can have true meaning.

Let us pray.

* * *

Our Lord and our God, we thank thee that there is a rest unto the people of God, unto thy people. And we thank thee that in Jesus Christ we have entered into thy rest, and we pray, our Father, that in obedience to thy Word we may extend the sway of that rest unto the earth itself, unto every living creature and may bring the peace of Christ unto men and nations, unto the ends of the kingdoms of the world might become the kingdoms of our Lord and His Christ. Bless us to this purpose we beseech thee. In Jesus’ name. Amen.

* * *

Are there any questions now on our lesson?

Yes?

[Audience member] Could you comment on the sabbatical leave that some professors and teachers are given? viii

[Rushdoony] Yes, the sabbatical leave of professors and teachers is derived from the Sabbath principle. In the United States, the remnants of the sabbatical principle are very extensive, but the meaning is gone. It was once a very fundamental aspect here, and as I said the Liberty Bell embodies the whole principle of the Sabbath. It was the intention of the founders of this country to make this a land of the Sabbath. 

Yes?

[Audience member] What about the woman’s sabbath? ix

[Rushdoony] I’ll come to the woman’s Sabbath one of these Sundays very soon, so let’s let that ride. 

Yes?

[Audience member] Which financial debts are to be forgiven on the sabbath year? x

[Rushdoony] The debts that are to be forgiven are debts among fellow-believers. Debts to those who have no regard for the Sabbath principle are not remitted. But loans are to be made on this recognition, and at the expiration they are cancelled. Now, the assumption is that such people, under normal circumstances, repay it. But if there is a problem and they cannot repay it, it’s cancelled, and you are to make the loan with that fully in mind. This doesn’t mean that you are required to make it, but you make it in terms of this knowledge.

Yes?

[Audience member] Would pay the debt anyway, even though it was cancelled? xi

[Rushdoony] Not necessarily, no. I know of instances where Christians had made loans to other Christians, who had said after a period of time and a portion of it has been paid, and the person is still in a problem and cannot pay, “Forget about it, someday you’re going to be able to lend to somebody else, and then pass it on to them, help somebody else out.” I’ve known a number of cases where this has been done.

Yes?

[Audience member] Could you expound on the verse, “Owe no man…”? xii

[Rushdoony] Yes now, the Scripture that I read in Deuteronomy said that if we fully kept the law we would be poverty-free and debt-free. Now, the principle of Scripture is that basically we are to, “Owe no man anything save to love one another.” Now, debts, therefore, in Scripture are seen only as emergency measures, this is fully recognized by the law. They are to be emergency loans, not a way of life. And debt-living today is a way of life, and this is entirely anti-Biblical. And this is, of course, I must add, something fairly new, because until after World War I, the only things that were bought on time were houses and farm or ranch lands, and even then you bought something with a very sizeable downpayment, you paid a fourth to a half when you purchased it, and you paid off the balance in a few years, a very short span of time. Only after World War I did the whole principle of charge accounts, installment buying, ‘the never never plan’ as they call it in England, become increasingly commonplace. And after World War II it really took hold. And this is, of course, why you had the serious economic crises since World War II, this is an important aspect of it. 

Yes?

[Audience member] Comment about practices in farming areas in former times.

[Rushdoony] On a limited scale this was true. In some areas the merchant would carry the farmer to harvest. Now, there were a few limited areas, California was one of them, this is a special situation in California, it goes back to all the land problems the farmers had, they bought the land from Southern Pacific and there was a lot of shenanigans in the whole thing, they lost their shirts many of them because the titles were not proper, and farming got off to a very sorry start here economically in California and one or two other places locally, but this was not the general rule. But they had a difficult time here, it’s a sad story, and sometimes a dramatic one. Those of you who are familiar with the whole story of the Sontag brothers and the great train robbery in central California. The whole purpose of that by the Sontag brothers, some German farmers, was to bring national attention to the scandals connected with the farmers in this area.

Yes?

[Audience member] Further comment about bygone farming practices and their relation to debt and law.

[Rushdoony] Yes, the normal method… (this is contrary to the kind of things you get in books) but the normal method of farmers moving westward and settling was that they went with two years’ capital. In other words, they were not going to be able to live off the land for two years. So they went out there, which they went out with a sizable amount of savings. The idea you get from the movies and the storybooks that these people just picked up with nothing but their horse and a gun and went out West is nonsense. They went out with two years’ capital, so they were a hardworking thrifty group of people who had saved up. If they were foreigners, they came over to this country with their wife’s dowry in gold and they went out and lived off of it, or bought the land with a portion of it, and worked hard for two years before they figured they were going to have income from the land. So, it took capital, but the capital of the farmers in California was wiped out by a number of things, so they really had a difficult history of it.

Yes? Your question.

[Audience member] When Jesus said, “The poor you will have with you always,” what did He mean? xiii

[Rushdoony] Yes, now the question there now is the interpretation did He mean, “The poor all your lifetime you’re going to have with you but me, you will not always have with you,” you see, or did he mean to the end of time? Now, God says the poor can be abolished from a land that is faithful to Him if they keep His law. And we do know that during the period of their lawkeeping there was virtually nothing that you could call poverty in Israel, when they kept the law. Because the Hebrew word lacks, they never even developed the words for ‘creditor,’ for example. And when it came in, it came in from the Babylonians because it wasn’t a problem. So, it is possible for a land to be without the poor. Colonial America was a land without anyone poor. And early America was too, because they moved in terms of fundamental Biblical Law. It was a rare man in early America who didn’t own land and a home and was able to provide for himself. The few who didn’t were immigrants who had newly come over, and they very quickly earned it and bought it.

[Audience member] That doesn’t preclude the possibility of sudden disaster that would decapitalize as person or family? xiv

[Rushdoony] Yes, the point of course is anxiety. In other words, we are to do our duty in terms of the Word of God, to obey God’s Word, and then leave the rest to Him. So, you see, what He is saying, “Those of you who are walking faithfully in terms of my Word, of course something could happen tomorrow, a tornado or an earthquake, or a sudden accident, but obey my Word, and then don’t be anxious, commit yourself into the Lord’s hand.”

Our time is just about up, and there are a couple of things I’d like to read to you. First of all from Pastor Richard Wurmbrand’s letter of October 1, 1968. You know, of course, who Dr. Wurmbrand is, the minister from Romania who was tortured in a communist prison and is now working here and in Europe to further the underground work in church. I’ll just read it to you. 

“We have been heavily attacked in the press the main charge (and also by churchmen he could add) the main charge brought against us is that we mix religion with politics, my answer is simple; he who separates religion from politics knows neither religion nor politics.” 

Then he goes on to comment about the peace talks in Europe.

“Nobody knows Mr. Harriman, the head of the American delegation on the Paris conference, better then the Romanians. He led the talks in Russia about Romania too. Naively he believed the communists in 1947, and gave assurance to our King Michel I that America guarantees the non-intervention of Russia in the internal affairs of Romania. Afterwards of course, the Russians imposed upon us a Communist regime. Before communists can be believed, they must first be converted to Christ, this the underground church tries to do with our help. As for us we do wish to win the Communist for Christ, to do this we have to oppose Communism and its collaborators.”

Then as he speaks of the torture and savage persecution of the Christians by Communists and the death sentences, he goes on to say. 

“You don’t believe immigrants from Communist countries. Eugene Carson Blake, when I spoke to him about Communist cruelties, said he cannot rely on what refugees say. Listen to what a Communist newspaper says about the treatment of Christian prisoners. _____ a Czech Communist newspaper wrote on May 31, 1968, in the short respite of relative liberty under Dubcek.

‘The church as a whole has been in prison since 1950, her press resembles letter from a jail. In prison guards fired from the observation towers into prison cells. Dogs without muzzles were let into the prison hospitals. The inmates were beaten on the head with horsewhips, and sprayed with water from hoses and the investigator yelled: ‘Do you desire human rights? We do not recognize any humanitarianism.’ 

Many of the inmates suffered severe internal injuries, some for example Hermanolski, a very young man, became insane from the tortures. In one of the transports was also the 75 yr. old Bishop Wojtaftach they stripped him naked and he had to stand for several hours on the stone floor, and when he could not continue the squatting exercises they yelled at him: ‘Squat until you spit your soul you ____.’ 

Brother Blake, will you at least believe the Communists when they speak about the communist torture? How was it at that time you sponsored the tours around the America of the Czech professors of Madga that in Czechoslovakia there is full religious liberty.

The taking away of children from Christian parents in Russia continues. The last case to come to our attention is reported in a Moscow magazine for April 1968. The reporter describes his conversation with one of the children. ‘You look at books with pictures?’ The child answers, ‘Yes, to books in which there are pictures of how our God suffered, He suffered for men, for you, men.’ When the reporter offered her a book she refused saying, “It is written by a godless man.” “Your shoes have also been made by atheist, and yet you wear them.” “Then take them, I will walk barefoot like my God.” “You feel cold, and it is unpleasant to walk barefoot.” “It may be, but my God suffered and taught us to suffer.” 

She and her sister were taken away from their parents because of their deep religious conviction. There is news about other arrests in Cuba and in Bulgaria. What is most saddening to us is that you find youth in the West justifying these cruelties. I’ve just come from a meeting in which a Maoist, contradicting me, justified violence. I asked him ‘You approve of violence?’ He who had many comrades with him answered wholeheartedly: ‘I consider violence as good.’ I slugged him, tore down his Mao bag and said, “Here, you have what you consider good.” He remained speechless. After this he listened quietly. Revolutionists you can only impress by revolutionary methods.”

Now something in a slightly different vein in these days when we have as much as we do on campuses, and when we turn to the papers and we read about violence every day, this was a little happier note. 

“Some enterprising California entrepreneur could make a fortune by going to Palermo Sicily and interviewing Giacomo Leone and Provvidenza Caltagirone to find out what makes them tick. When Giacomo failed to win the hand of Provvidenza with tenderness and gallant phrases, he broke down her door and wound in jail after neighbors pried her loose from his embrace. So what’s unusual? Merely that Giacomo is 80 and his girlfriend a provocative 70.” 

And with that we are adjourned. 

i. "It is true that the slave who held the golden wreath over the triumphant general’s head as he drove along in a chariot drawn by four white horses had to repeat to him, “Remember that you are a man”, but that only meant that in the moment of his triumph the general was regarded as equivalent to the chief god of the state." Heinz Kahler. The Art of Rome and Her Empire. Revised Edition. New York: Greystone Press, 1965, pp. 63, 64.

ii. Mark 2:27–28.

iii. The Holy Bible: King James Version, Electronic Edition of the 1900 Authorized Version. (Bellingham, WA: Logos Research Systems, Inc., 2009), Le 25:10.

iv. The Holy Bible: King James Version, Electronic Edition of the 1900 Authorized Version. (Bellingham, WA: Logos Research Systems, Inc., 2009), 2 Kings 25:21.

v. This is from Mendelssohn‘s oratorio “Elijah“, and is based on Psalm 37, and was written in 1846.

vi. Deuteronomy 15:1-6 - Gerrit Verkuyl, trans. The Holy Bible, The Berkeley Version, In Modern English. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan Publishing House, 1959.

vii. H.B. Clark, ed. Biblical Law: Being A Text Of The Statutes, Ordinances, And Judgments Established In The Holy Bible— With Many Allusions To Secular Laws: Ancient, Medieval And Modern—Documented To The Scriptures, Judicial Decisions And Legal Literature. Second Edition. Portland, Oregon: Bindfords & Mort, 1944, 179.

viii. Question added/modified for the sake of clarity and brevity.

ix. Question added/modified for the sake of clarity and brevity.

x. Question added/modified for the sake of clarity and brevity.

xi. Question added/modified for the sake of clarity and brevity.

xii. Question added/modified for the sake of clarity and brevity.

xiii. Question added/modified for the sake of clarity and brevity.

xiv. Question added/modified for the sake of clarity and brevity.