DEFINITION OF MAN

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 10, Issue 68, 3 January 1947, Page 4

DEFINITION OF MAN

MAN is superior to the ants in many ways, and lower than them in many others. He can fly in the air, swim under the sea, and fling his voice around the world, turn night into day with filaments, take pictures of men’s insides, send heat and light or horse power across 400 miles of desert in a copper wire. Yet give this wonder man a simple problem such as how to keep from killing several million of other men just like him each 20 years or so, and he is baffled and destroyed. This man, who understands the vast complexity og logarithms and who has the formula for harmony and chemistry—just give this man the problem of some surplus livestock on the one hand and some hungry men on the other, and he will fume and fret and make up laws and regulations and then finally destroy the livestock and leaye the hungry men still hungry. This man who knows more than the gods do of the spectrum of the stars, splits atoms traps whales, count molecules, knows not enough to grasp the simplest truths and bend them to his will. He hails the Golden Rule as golden and puts it on a shelf to be forgotten, and makes new rules of lead—but I shall not despair. For man has in him all the seeds of his own betterment, and one day they shall sprout. When that day comes the vine shall reach to heaven, and the gods climb down.—From the radio play “The Descent of the Gods.”