Continuing from the book ‘The Smallest Part which I feel’ written by Neal A. Maxwell, published almost 50 years ago, this post should have been sent weeks ago (see the previous post or this series * A View of Truth III or the beginning post called ‘The Smallest Part of which I feel’ (links continue in order from that beginning post):
. . . . “Without the anchor of eternal truths, men may wrongly reason that the turbulence we have known in the physical sciences is characteristic of all knowledge. . . . Scientists, or at least many of them, are still open and capable of surprise and wonder. Perhaps this is a vital clue for men in dealing with the “key of knowledge” to which Jesus referred. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel has observed: “There is only one way to wisdom: awe, Let you conceit diminish your ability to revere, and the universe becomes a market place for you. The loss of awe is the great stumbling block to insight.”*
Sir Isaac Newton had this sense of awe: “I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have only been like a little boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me. (Brewster’s Memoirs of Newton, II,Ch.27.)
Thus the real “famine in the land” is the absence “of hearing the words of the Lord.”
For the Christian, mental progress means hungering after truth and righteousness and growing as Chesterton wrote, “into more and more definitive convictions. . . .” It is the skeptic that slips “slowly backwards into. . . vagueness.” Intellectual nomads and behavioral gypsies knock on many doors but turn away because the rule is, says C. S. Lewis: “You must be asking which door is the true one; not which pleases you best by its paint and paneling. In plain language the question should never be; Do I like that kind of service?’ but ‘Are these doctrines true: Is holiness here? Does my conscience move me towards this? Is my reluctance to knock at this door due to my pride, or my mere taste, or my personal dislike of this door keeper?’ “
So much turns, therefore, on one’s view of truth and how deep his hunger is for what is contained in “the key of knowledge.”
So far as its view of truth is concerned, the gospel is galactic whereas secularism is so insular! Little wonder the prophets have been so concerned with theological truancy—for it reduces human happiness.
Some individuals are simply too busy to be concerned with key truths; others mistake their particular secular passion for the purpose of life; still other individuals specialize in tiny tactical truths and shrink from the strategic truths of the Gospel of Jesus Christ because the latter are not only difficult to accept, but “too large to be managed”; many souls are kept from the truth because they know not where to find it.”
The special, longitudinal truths of the gospel help us to feel more and to see more clearly our circumstance—a vital thing in this secular dispensation of despair. Each of us may begin like the young servant Elisha who feared for the future until “the Lord opened the eyes of the young man” so that he could see what Elisha saw: celestial cavalry! “And when the servant of the man of God was risen early, and gone forth, behold, an host compassed the city both with horses and chariots. And his servant said unto him, Alas, my master! how shall we do?
“And he answered, Fear not: for they that be with us are more than they that be with them.
“And Elisha prayed, and said, Lord, I pray thee, open his aeyes, that he may see. And the Lord opened the eyes of the young man; and he saw: and, behold, the mountain was full of horses and bchariots of fire round about Elisha.” (2 Kings 6:17-17)
As the disciples of Christ seek to “stand in holy places” unmoved, theirs is a place with a view—a view of truth that, in time of turbulence, can help us to “fear not, for they that be with us are more than they that be with them.” For our own “holy place” can be a “heaven upon the earth” when truth is honored as Francis Bacon prescribed: “Certainly it is a heaven upon the earth, to have a man’s mind to move in charity, rest in providence, and turn upon the poles of truth” (Francis Bacon, Essays, 1, “Of Truth.”)
~Neal A. Maxwell, The Smallest Part—which I feel (Salt Lake City, Deseret Book, 1973), 14-16
(Posts with a preamble asterisk * are for a more general audience, and not specific to teachings of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.)
