The Pattern of Salvation

At first I believed what I was taught: that the world steadily was becoming a better and better place, that progress was the law of life. Education and religion were the engines of improvement. When people became better educated and more religious, wrongs and injustices would disappear.

For several years, I had no trouble with these comfortable beliefs. I discovered little to make them difficult and nothing to make them impossible to hold. I could see that people were becoming better educated, and it seemed they were becoming more moral too. Certainly, material conditions were improving. In the early years of this century, it seemed to me that nations, as well as individuals, were getting a higher sense of social responsibility.

The start of the First World War did not shake my beliefs, for there had always been wars, and this one seemed to me merely the same thing on a wider scale. Then the German government ordered submarines to sink merchant and passenger ships without warning. When the Lusitania went down, with the loss of more than eleven hundred men, women, and children, I’d had the disadvantage—or the advantage—of contact with the catastrophe. Years before, I was one who stood outside the Iroquois Theater in Chicago while the firemen were carrying out the dead. And I was one of the newspapermen who reported the accident at the Eastland, when it turned over in the Chicago River with a loss of eight hundred lives. These were almost unbearable experiences, and both disasters, of course, were wholly accidental. The sinking of the Lusitania, to the contrary, had been deliberately ordered and contrived.

After we entered the war and Germany was beaten, it seemed that we were on the way up again. Then the twin tyrannies of terror—fascism and nazism—took over, first the nation which had been for more than a thousand years the seat of the Catholic church; and next, they captured the state which had brought about the Protestant reformation. And we were in a second world war, more barbarous and brutal than the first. The Nazis bombed Rotterdam, London, Coventry. Like everybody else, I called it atrocious.

But soon I found myself on the side that was bombing Hamburg, Berlin, Nuremberg, Hiroshima. I had particular difficulty with Hiroshima because years earlier I had visited the city. Hiroshima was not, for me, a dot on the map and a simple statistic: population, 300,000. I’d had acquaintance with a family in Hiroshima, and they had been extremely courteous and kind to me. They lived in one of those flimsy wood and paper houses—the sort which had disappeared under the bomb. There had been a little boy so glad to run an errand for me on a rainy evening, and a little girl too shy to do more than bow and smile at a visitor from so far away. Had they been in their matchbox homes when the bomb went off?

I remembered how eager the older people had been to show their admiration of America and of our civilization. They had wanted me to tell them all I could about our ways. If they had survived, what were they thinking of us now? What am I, myself, to think?

I find about me not only the collapse of confidence between nations, but also an undeniable letdown in personal conduct and morals. Plainly, things are not better. Plainly, we’re in a period of trial like that with which Abraham Lincoln was dealing when he declared, “The pattern of salvation must be worked out by all, for all.” No personal significance or insignificance can spare one or another of us as we go through our lives here. The trial through which we are passing will light each single one of us, down, in honor or in dishonor, to the last generation.

This comes to me as a call to my duty today, reminding me there was never through any single great stroke that civilization was built up, but through the countless inconspicuous acts of millions like myself, each doing his best and holding to his faith in his God in the final triumph of the right. So once more, the pattern of salvation will be worked out for all, by all. This I believe.