Реферат: Jospeh Freeman

elite. And nobody would join a radical movement if he were told that it would end in

nothing more than the regulation of the price index or the transfiguration of a few

obscure politicians into dictators and generals.

No, men fight and die for casue only when they think it will free them from evil and

give them some good, above all when that casue is the emancipation of mankind, or at least

of millions, a casue in some way connected with the redemption and liberation of man.

The corruption comes later — but not before some good is done. Then the early church

dies, the Jacobins and the Abolitionists disappear and, in our time, the communists may go

out of business. But the original dream, the vision of man’s universal liberation is

always there and will always find new ways to express itself.

What is that vision?

In the Book of Revelations we are told: "’And I saw a new heaven and A new

earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away, and there was no more

sea . . . And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes and there shall be no more

death; neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain, for the former

things are passed away . . . And he said unto me: It is done. I am Alpha and Omega,

the beginning and the end. I will ,give unto him that is athirst of the fountain of the

water of life freely. And there shall be no night there.’"

It has also been said: All men are equal, not in capacity but in value.

This vision has haunted men for thousands of years. It reappears in the apocalyptic

utterances of the Reformation, the Puritan Revolution, the French Revolution, the

twentieth century socialist revolution — and in the American writing of the Thirties,

always in different terms appropriate to the age but always with the same hope: to wipe

away all tears, to abolish man-made death, to do away with pain by the passing away of the

former things, the old state of affairs, and the arrival of a new beginning, a new heaven

and a new earth.

This has been called the basic dream with the changing name.

And in every case the vision, once carried into practice, achieves great things and

becomes corrupt. And after a while the vision finds a new outlet; for as long as there is