From the Writings of Walter Lippman

A young man of 23 was gifted with remarkable perception and analytical skills in the early 1900's. Not only this, but also a concern for men and their future in a complex and constantly changing world. He was able to express this with well-chosen words and literary ability.

If he saw the world as such then, how much more do we have to take careful note of added complexity and speed of change and the effect it is having on us. It is a clarion call to stop and contemplate who we are, why we are here and where are we going.

In his chapter, A Big World and Little Men, he develops this theme. He describes city dwellers as those who mostly work with 'symbols and shadows of events',( we would add imaginary money)or an 'abstract part of a complicated manufacture,' rather than with natural elements and the effects of nature.

'This uprooted person is the despair of all those who love the flavour of words, for his language has gone stale and abstract in a miserly telegraphic speech.....Among country people words still taste of actual things:contact with sun and rain; earth and harvest turns the simple prose of the day's work into poetry for the starved imaginations of city-bred people....Slang is often vivid but it is too deeply sundered from the older sources of our happiness...trivial, strained and raucous.'

'For the slow movement of the seasons we have substituted the flicker of fashions. The older world changed, but repeated itself....summer and winter changed the world and left it unaltered. You could think of eternal ideas, for there was beneath the change some permanence....We actually move towards novelty...and what has never been is created each day.'

'We are unsettled to the very roots of our being...We are not used to a complicated civilization, we don't know how to behave when personal contact and eternal authority have disappeared. There are no precedents to guide us , no wisdom that wasn't made for a simpler age. We have changed our environment more quickly than we know how to change ourselves.'

We are at the mercy of advertising ...' and the premeditated gossip of the newspapers.'

We live in great cities without knowing our neighbours, the loyalties of place have broken down, and our associations over large territories, cemented by very little direct contact. But this impersonal quality is intolerable...And so you find an overwhelming demand on the press for human interest stories, for personal details opened to the vast public. Gossip is organized; and we do by telegraph ('twitter') what was done in the village store.'

'Institutions have developed inconsistencies...in former times you could make some effort to teach people what they needed to know.It was done badly, but could be attempted. Men knew the kind of problems their children would have to face. But today education means a radically different thing. We have to prepare children to meet the unexpected,their problems will not be the same as their fathers' To prepare them for this means training them in method instead of filling them in facts and rules. They will have to find their own facts and make their own rules, and if schools can't give them that power then schools no longer educate for the modern world.'

'The Church faces a dilemma, a matter of life and death to them. Their tradition is that the great things are permanent, and they meet a population which needs to understand the meaning and direction of change. No wonder their influence has declined, no wonder that men fight against the influence they have. Ministers are as bewildered as the rest of us, perhaps more so.

And so he lays our sickness bare.

The third part of Lippman's book sets out to describe the way forward as he saw it. The conclusion he comes to is to find hope and stability in the discoveries of science, the only rock in a changing world, the authority we will revere. This was much as Francis Bacon saw it as he set the path for man to follow. A hundred years on from Lippman, do we still agree? We may have more prosperity and ease of living but man is even more confused and society in chaos. Mathematical formulae combined with greed has led to financial meltdown with age-old corporations tumbling. Institutions built to serve society are disintergrating. Nothing is certain.

There has been no change in our sorry condition, no remedy has been found to root us deeper in the soil of humanity.

What hope do we have as secularism increases? The only hope is to recover the view Scripture reveals of God, the only 'I AM', the beginning and the end, the alpha and omega. 'I am God I change not', the 'same yesterday, today and forever'. Science has robbed God of His glory, attributing the discoveries to the wisdom of man. Paul tells us that God's retribution is to darken the hearts and minds of those who do not thank or glorify Him.'Declaring themselves to be wise, they become fools'

Solomon who was given all he desired, the truly wise man, declares that the only meaning in life is to 'Fear God and obey Him.' Ecclesiastes 12
'The Fear of God is the beginning of wisdom.' Proverbs 1

Paul, the preacher to secular man declares Christ to be that man 'in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge'. A greater than Solomon.

We do well to 'watch daily at His gates....for whoever finds me finds life, and obtains favour from the Lord.'