As a lad in elementary and high school, I took different kinds of jobs, as permitted for the times during the 1930s, the Great Depression years. One of those jobs was as a paper boy peddling newspapers to customers, selling extras on the street, and managing the little money that came from hours devoted to subscribers. Newspapers were three cents each, and I received a penny from each cash sale. Subscribers paid twenty cents weekly, for seven days delivery. I received six of the twenty. I learned to like and read newspapers, graduating gradually from the funnies to the front page as well as editorials and sports pages. I remember well the day Billy Sunday died, and the small squib on the front page about the evangelist. There was Billy Sunday, knee on the floor, hand held high, about to slap into the other hand making some point. Another photo on a later date also holds my memory. Neville Chamberlain, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, held his hand high as he emerged from an airplane, with papers in his hand a treaty with Hitler. Chamberlain had made concessions about Nazi influence in neighboring countries in exchange for peace in our time. He was lionized for his diplomacy. Winston Churchill was at low ebb, and shunned for his words of British disgrace. Soon, Hitler’s true plans emerged. Chamberlain was then replaced by Churchill. World War II followed. Its carnage, horror, holocaust, became history’s most horrible war.
Just before the war got under way, R. G. Collingwood, the Oxford scholar, released his: An Autobiography. He and Churchill knew each other and agreed. He accented World War I as the most ferocious of all wars, which turned out to be only awful in the light of the Second World War. He did not live to see it in its worst carnage and waste. He counted WWI as a great victory for science and technology. He pointed out how he had tried this and that in an attempt to guide his life and research. He found loss of values and the distortions of technology meant failure. Both factors were needed for victory. The results became catastrophic. He turned to history. Fascism was being supported by intellectuals who had abandoned Christian ideals. Collingwood became a Christian, and was supportive of concepts of values that exposed the ideas and directions of the European sphere of interest. The leaders and intellectuals were in a wilderness. Fred Inglis in his book, History Man, tells the Collingwood life story with the insight of the decades since Collingwood’s death in 1943, at the age of 53 years. Society would likely have been well served had Collingwood survived to evaluate nations and history following World War II. Students would do well to give attention to such insightful writers as Collingwood, in the understanding of the power and the meaning of Christian values to the history of mankind in any age. In her review of the Inglis book, Lenore T. Ealy, summarized the move by Collingwood from naturalism – supported by a Christian faith that could not lightly confine the mind to mere materialism and the parlor games of logical thought seemed to diminish any relationship between morality and metaphysics. He, Collingwood, sought for understanding in history that would find a morality. He believed it would start with human nature. That is a common starting point of Christians when reviewing morality, values, and human responsibility to self and society. Collingwood, perhaps like Kierkegaard, worked through various important options and lighted upon Christianity as holding answers to the needs of society, to be carried by individuals fighting in the arenas of ideas and conduct for the values and morality given of God. That should drive us to Scripture.
No matter how excellent our presumed ideals for scholarship and truth, we often act as rebels. We often decide in advance how matters will emerge. Ought is not what is. Since nature is all that registers on the human senses, we decide, in one way or other that it is all we have to work with. In such a situation, the earth playpen, as large and wonderful as it is, is too small for eternity. World meaning is for mortality only, and leaves the person at the closure of death. In the 21st Century there is emerging a more insightful writing, easily seen in the biographies of a number of eminent persons. They reveal how wrong some of the public ideas are about this or that, and what best serves the ideals of individuals and nations. There is no doubt that there is a general desire for something fresh in understanding of history. *Mark W. Lee, Sr. — 2016, 2020