Pitts Report » Books

The Crusades: Crescent and the Cross. Full version: pt 1 of

CMAC — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 08:48:29 +0000

The Crusades: Crescent and the Cross. Full version: pt 1 of

Conversations With History – Amy Chua

CMAC — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 18:07:07 +0000

Conversations With History – Amy Chua

How the Drug Lords Took Over Mexico – SHOCKING!

CMAC — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 11:50:27 +0000

They command an army of thousands: men, women, even children north and south of the US-Mexico border. They build tunnels, and dispatch submarines and customized armored vehicles. They load planes, trucks, and railroad containers with drugs and other illicit cargo. In bulk, they buy arms and political influence across the continent. They are feared and revered at the same time; loathed and obeyed by those paid to follow their orders.

Monday, August 22, 2011 | Borderland Beat Reporter Buggs

By José Luis Sierra
New America Media

Journalist Anabel Hernandez.

They are the Drug Lords of Mexico and, according to journalist Anabel Hernandez, they have succeeded at infiltrating the highest circles of financial and political power in the countries where they now operate and even might have a say in deciding who the next President of Mexico might be.

But who are they exactly?
“Most people in Mexico and in this country believe that the Drug Lords is a men’s club being lead by “El Chapo” Guzman, “El Mayo” Zambada –leaders of the well known Cartel de Sinaloa— as well as the handful of replacements who have taken the place of those who used to control Los Zetas in the Gulf [of Mexico], and Los Templarios that now have taken over the cartel of La Familia in Michoacán and El Cartel de Tijuana. But in fact, these renowned gangsters are figure heads, eventually fall guys,’’ says Hernandez, during her second trip to Los Angeles promoting her book The Drug Lords —the result of a five-year investigation into the Mexican drug cartels, their close ties to Mexican officialdom, and the expansion of their influence in Central and South America.

“How else can you explain how individuals running the cartels with almost no education can outpace the US and Mexican intelligence agencies, the Mexican Army and Mexican law enforcement at all levels? There is only one explanation,” says Hernandez with a dramatic pause— “corruption.”

From Top to BottomFor the 39-year-old Hernandez—now working on a follow-up book focused on US policies toward Latin America in its war on drugs — corruption in Mexico is so pervasive that it jumped the US border many decades ago, back in the 1980s, during the Reagan administration, when senior officials facilitated the sale of arms to Iran and through back-door funding of the Nicaraguan Contras, thereby bypassing the oversight of Congress.

Much of the funding for the Contras, according to Hernandez, came from illegal trafficking of cocaine through Central America en route to the United States, with full knowledge of top CIA officials. Most of these events were well documented by several congressional commissions, as well as independent reports. Yet, only a handful of the US government officials involved got prosecuted. They ended up being pardoned or with commuted sentences.

At that time, Mexico’s ruling party, the PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party) had total control of the political power in Mexico and the drug cartels were left to mind their own business with no interference, as long as they paid a cut of their profits to key government officials, who in turn would spread some of that money around to make sure the drug operations would run smoothly.

Things began to get shaky in 1985, with the execution of Enrique “Kiki” Camarena, a US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) agent who had investigated a 1,000-hectare marijuana plantation in the state of Chihuahua. The killing of Camarena unleashed outrage from the US government and pressured Mexican officials to punish those responsible for the murder. Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo and Rafael Caro Quintero —at that time two very well know drug lords— were apprehended and are still in prison. Four others, including a relative of former Mexican President Luis Echevarria, were also found guilty in a federal court in Los Angeles.

“The official records are there,” declares Hernandez in an interview with New America Media. “Then and now, US and Mexican officials had been involved in deals with the drug lords and they are playing a double moral standard in this so called “war’’ against drug trafficking that already cost Mexico more than 40 thousand victims.’’

She cites a more recent case when the son of “El Mayo Zambada,’’ Jesus Vicente Zambada-Niebla (aka “Mayito”) claimed immunity from prosecution early last week in a federal court in Chicago, alleging that in 1998 he had an agreement with top DEA and US officials, in exchange for his services as an informant on the activities of the Sinaloa cartel, led by his father and Joaquin “Shorty” Guzman.

According to reports from Reuters, US government officials in Mexico declined to comment on Zambada’s allegations, and US prosecutors have denied that Zambada had been granted immunity. They have until September 9 to file a response with the court. But if Zambada-Niebla’s claim is upheld, it can potentially turn into another embarrassment for the US government, on a par with the scandalous Operation “Fast and Furious,’’ in which U.S. officials deliberately allowed the export of high-power firearms into Mexico, then lost track of the arms.

“The only winner in this drug war is the Sinaloa Cartel and they can thank [Mexican] President Felipe Calderon for that,’’ says Hernandez.

MAYFLOWER COMPACT, THE FIRST AMERICAN GOVERNMENT DOCUMENT, WAS WRITTEN TO ADVANCE THE CHRISTIAN FAITH

CMAC — Sun, 07 Aug 2011 13:23:06 +0000

In the name of God, Amen.

We, whose names are underwritten, the loyal subjects of our dread Sovereign Lord King James, by the Grace of God, of Great Britain, France, and Ireland, King, defender of the Faith, etc.

Having undertaken, for the Glory of God, and advancements of the Christian faith and honor of our King and Country, a voyage to plant the first colony in the Northern parts of Virginia, do by these presents, solemnly and mutually, in the presence of God, and one another, covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil body politic; for our better ordering, and preservation and furtherance of the ends aforesaid; and by virtue hereof to enact, constitute, and frame, such just and equal laws, ordinances, acts, constitutions, and offices, from time to time, as shall be thought most meet and convenient for the general good of the colony; unto which we promise all due submission and obedience.

In witness whereof we have hereunto subscribed our names at Cape Cod the 11th of November, in the year of the reign of our Sovereign Lord King James, of England, France, and Ireland, the eighteenth, and of Scotland the fifty-fourth, 1620.^[12]

Mayflower Compact (1620)

The following is a very careful letter-for-letter and line-by-line transcription made by me of the Mayflower Compact, as it is found in the original page of William Bradford’s History Of Plymouth Plantation. Spelling and punctuation have not been modernized. The original from which this transcription was made can be seen in the graphic at the bottom of this page.

In y^e name of God Amen· We whose names are vnderwriten,
the loyall subjects of our dread soueraigne Lord King James
by y^e grace of God, of great Britaine, franc, & Ireland king,
defender of y^e faith, &cHaueing vndertaken, for y^e glorie of God, and aduancemente
of y^e christian ^{^faith} and honour of our king & countrie, a voyage to
plant y^e first colonie in y^e Northerne parts of Virginia· doe
by these presents solemnly & mutualy in y^e presence of God, and
one of another, couenant, & combine our selues togeather into a
ciuill body politick; for y^e our better ordering, & preseruation & fur=
therance of y^e ends aforesaid; and by vertue hearof, to enacte,
constitute, and frame shuch just & equall lawes, ordinances,
Acts, constitutions, & offices, from time to time, as shall be thought
most meete & conuenient for y^e generall good of y^e colonie: vnto
which we promise all due submission and obedience. In witnes
wherof we haue herevnder subscribed our names at Cap=
Codd y^e ·11· of Nouember, in y^e year of y^e raigne of our soueraigne
Lord king James of England, france, & Ireland y^e eighteenth
and of Scotland y^e fiftie fourth. An^o: Dom ·1620·|

SIGNERS:

John Carver	Edward Tilley	Degory Priest
William Bradford	John Tilley	Thomas Williams
Edward Winslow	Francis Cooke	Gilbert Winslow
William Brewster	Thomas Rogers	Edmund Margesson
Isaac Allerton	Thomas Tinker	Peter Brown
Myles Standish	John Rigsdale	Richard Britteridge
John Alden	Edward Fuller	George Soule
Samuel Fuller	John Turner	Richard Clarke
Christopher Martin	Francis Eaton	Richard Gardinar
William Mullins	James Chilton	John Allerton
William White	John Crackstone	Thomas English
Richard Warren	John Billington	Edward Doty
John Howland	Moses Fletcher	Edward Leister
Stephen Hopkins	John Goodman

History behind the Mayflower Compact

The Mayflower Compact was signed on 11 November 1620 on board the Mayflower, which was at anchor in Provincetown Harbor. The document was drawn up in response to “mutinous speeches” that had come about because the Pilgrims had intended to settle in Northern Virginia, but the decision was made after arrival to instead settle in New England. Since there was no government in place, some felt they had no legal obligation to remain within the colony and supply their labor. The Mayflower Compact attempted to temporarily establish that government until a more official one could be drawn up in England that would give them the right to self-govern themselves in New England.

In a way, this was the first American Constitution, though the Compact in practical terms had little influence on subsequent American documents. John Quincy Adams, a descendant of Mayflower passenger John Alden, does call the Mayflower Compact the foundation of the U.S. Constitution in a speech given in 1802, but this was in principle more than in substance. In reality, the Mayflower Compact was superseded in authority by the 1621 Peirce Patent, which not only gave the Pilgrims the right to self-government at Plymouth, but had the significant advantage of being authorized by the King of England.

The Mayflower Compact was first published in 1622. William Bradford wrote a copy of the Mayflower Compact down in his History Of Plymouth Plantation which he wrote from 1630-1654, and that is the version given above. Neither version gave the names of the signers. Nathaniel Morton in his New England’s Memorial, published in 1669, was the first to record and publish the names of the signers, and Thomas Prince in his Chronological History of New England in the form of Annals (1736) recorded the signers names as well, as did Thomas Hutchinson in 1767. It is unknown whether the later two authors had access to the original document, or whether they were simply copying Nathaniel Morton’s list of signers.

The original Mayflower Compact has never been found, and is assumed destroyed. Thomas Prince may have had access to the original in 1736, and possibly Thomas Hutchinson did in 1767. If it indeed survived, it was likely a victim of Revolutionary War looting, along with other such Pilgrim valuables as Bradford’s now lost Register of Births and Deaths, his partially recovered Letterbook, and his entirely recovered History Of Plymouth Plantation.

The term “Mayflower Compact” was not assigned to this document until 1793, when for the first time it is called the Compact in Alden Bradford’s A Topographical Description of Duxborough, in the County of Plymouth. Previously it had been called “an association and agreement” (William Bradford), “combination” (Plymouth Colony Records), “solemn contract” (Thomas Prince, 1738), and “the covenant” (Rev. Charles Turner, 1774).

This is the “Mayflower Compact” as written by Mayflower passenger William Bradford
into his manuscript History of Plymouth Plantation about 1630.

How David Beats Goliath

CMAC — Sun, 24 Jul 2011 15:06:26 +0000

When underdogs break the rules.

by Malcolm Gladwell

A non-stop full-court press gives weak basketball teams a chance against far stronger teams. Why have so few adopted it?

When Vivek Ranadivé decided to coach his daughter Anjali’s basketball team, he settled on two principles. The first was that he would never raise his voice. This was National Junior Basketball—the Little League of basketball. The team was made up mostly of twelve-year-olds, and twelve-year-olds, he knew from experience, did not respond well to shouting. He would conduct business on the basketball court, he decided, the same way he conducted business at his software firm. He would speak calmly and softly, and convince the girls of the wisdom of his approach with appeals to reason and common sense.

The second principle was more important. Ranadivé was puzzled by the way Americans played basketball. He is from Mumbai. He grew up with cricket and soccer. He would never forget the first time he saw a basketball game. He thought it was mindless. Team A would score and then immediately retreat to its own end of the court. Team B would inbound the ball and dribble it into Team A’s end, where Team A was patiently waiting. Then the process would reverse itself. A basketball court was ninety-four feet long. But most of the time a team defended only about twenty-four feet of that, conceding the other seventy feet. Occasionally, teams would play a full-court press—that is, they would contest their opponent’s attempt to advance the ball up the court. But they would do it for only a few minutes at a time. It was as if there were a kind of conspiracy in the basketball world about the way the game ought to be played, and Ranadivé thought that that conspiracy had the effect of widening the gap between good teams and weak teams. Good teams, after all, had players who were tall and could dribble and shoot well; they could crisply execute their carefully prepared plays in their opponent’s end. Why, then, did weak teams play in a way that made it easy for good teams to do the very things that made them so good?

Ranadivé looked at his girls. Morgan and Julia were serious basketball players. But Nicky, Angela, Dani, Holly, Annika, and his own daughter, Anjali, had never played the game before. They weren’t all that tall. They couldn’t shoot. They weren’t particularly adept at dribbling. They were not the sort who played pickup games at the playground every evening. Most of them were, as Ranadivé says, “little blond girls” from Menlo Park and Redwood City, the heart of Silicon Valley. These were the daughters of computer programmers and people with graduate degrees. They worked on science projects, and read books, and went on ski vacations with their parents, and dreamed about growing up to be marine biologists. Ranadivé knew that if they played the conventional way—if they let their opponents dribble the ball up the court without opposition—they would almost certainly lose to the girls for whom basketball was a passion. Ranadivé came to America as a seventeen-year-old, with fifty dollars in his pocket. He was not one to accept losing easily. His second principle, then, was that his team would play a real full-court press, every game, all the time. The team ended up at the national championships. “It was really random,” Anjali Ranadivé said. “I mean, my father had never played basketball before.”

David’s victory over Goliath, in the Biblical account, is held to be an anomaly. It was not. Davids win all the time. The political scientist Ivan Arreguín-Toft recently looked at every war fought in the past two hundred years between strong and weak combatants. The Goliaths, he found, won in 71.5 per cent of the cases. That is a remarkable fact. Arreguín-Toft was analyzing conflicts in which one side was at least ten times as powerful—in terms of armed might and population—as its opponent, and even in those lopsided contests the underdog won almost a third of the time.

In the Biblical story of David and Goliath, David initially put on a coat of mail and a brass helmet and girded himself with a sword: he prepared to wage a conventional battle of swords against Goliath. But then he stopped. “I cannot walk in these, for I am unused to it,” he said (in Robert Alter’s translation), and picked up those five smooth stones. What happened, Arreguín-Toft wondered, when the underdogs likewise acknowledged their weakness and chose an unconventional strategy? He went back and re-analyzed his data. In those cases, David’s winning percentage went from 28.5 to 63.6. When underdogs choose not to play by Goliath’s rules, they win, Arreguín-Toft concluded, “even when everything we think we know about power says they shouldn’t.”

Consider the way T. E. Lawrence (or, as he is better known, Lawrence of Arabia) led the revolt against the Ottoman Army occupying Arabia near the end of the First World War. The British were helping the Arabs in their uprising, and the initial focus was Medina, the city at the end of a long railroad that the Turks had built, running south from Damascus and down through the Hejaz desert. The Turks had amassed a large force in Medina, and the British leadership wanted Lawrence to gather the Arabs and destroy the Turkish garrison there, before the Turks could threaten the entire region.

But when Lawrence looked at his ragtag band of Bedouin fighters he realized that a direct attack on Medina would never succeed. And why did taking the city matter, anyway? The Turks sat in Medina “on the defensive, immobile.” There were so many of them, consuming so much food and fuel and water, that they could hardly make a major move across the desert. Instead of attacking the Turks at their point of strength, Lawrence reasoned, he ought to attack them where they were weak—along the vast, largely unguarded length of railway line that was their connection to Damascus. Instead of focussing his attention on Medina, he should wage war over the broadest territory possible.

The Bedouins under Lawrence’s command were not, in conventional terms, skilled troops. They were nomads. Sir Reginald Wingate, one of the British commanders in the region, called them “an untrained rabble, most of whom have never fired a rifle.” But they were tough and they were mobile. The typical Bedouin soldier carried no more than a rifle, a hundred rounds of ammunition, forty-five pounds of flour, and a pint of drinking water, which meant that he could travel as much as a hundred and ten miles a day across the desert, even in summer. “Our cards were speed and time, not hitting power,” Lawrence wrote. “Our largest available resources were the tribesmen, men quite unused to formal warfare, whose assets were movement, endurance, individual intelligence, knowledge of the country, courage.” The eighteenth-century general Maurice de Saxe famously said that the art of war was about legs, not arms, and Lawrence’s troops were all legs. In one typical stretch, in the spring of 1917, his men dynamited sixty rails and cut a telegraph line at Buair on March 24th, sabotaged a train and twenty-five rails at Abu al-Naam on March 25th, dynamited fifteen rails and cut a telegraph line at Istabl Antar on March 27th, raided a Turkish garrison and derailed a train on March 29th, returned to Buair and sabotaged the railway line again on March 31st, dynamited eleven rails at Hediah on April 3rd, raided the train line in the area of Wadi Dhaiji on April 4th and 5th, and attacked twice on April 6th.

Lawrence’s masterstroke was an assault on the port town of Aqaba. The Turks expected an attack from British ships patrolling the waters of the Gulf of Aqaba to the west. Lawrence decided to attack from the east instead, coming at the city from the unprotected desert, and to do that he led his men on an audacious, six-hundred-mile loop—up from the Hejaz, north into the Syrian desert, and then back down toward Aqaba. This was in summer, through some of the most inhospitable land in the Middle East, and Lawrence tacked on a side trip to the outskirts of Damascus, in order to mislead the Turks about his intentions. “This year the valley seemed creeping with horned vipers and puff-adders, cobras and black snakes,” Lawrence writes in “The Seven Pillars of Wisdom” of one stage in the journey:

We could not lightly draw water after dark, for there were snakes swimming in the pools or clustering in knots around their brinks. Twice puff-adders came twisting into the alert ring of our debating coffee-circle. Three of our men died of bites; four recovered after great fear and pain, and a swelling of the poisoned limb. Howeitat treatment was to bind up the part with snake-skin plaster and read chapters of the Koran to the sufferer until he died.

When they finally arrived at Aqaba, Lawrence’s band of several hundred warriors killed or captured twelve hundred Turks, and lost only two men. The Turks simply did not think that their opponent would be mad enough to come at them from the desert. This was Lawrence’s great insight. David can beat Goliath by substituting effort for ability—and substituting effort for ability turns out to be a winning formula for underdogs in all walks of life, including little blond-haired girls on the basketball court.

Vivek Ranadivé is an elegant man, slender and fine-boned, with impeccable manners and a languorous walk. His father was a pilot who was jailed by Indira Gandhi, he says, because he wouldn’t stop challenging the safety of India’s planes. Ranadivé went to M.I.T., because he saw a documentary on the school and decided that it was perfect for him. This was in the nineteen-seventies, when going abroad for undergraduate study required the Indian government to authorize the release of foreign currency, and Ranadivé camped outside the office of the governor of the Reserve Bank of India until he got his way. The Ranadivés are relentless.

In 1985, Ranadivé founded a software company in Silicon Valley devoted to what in the computer world is known as “real time” processing. If a businessman waits until the end of the month to collect and count his receipts, he’s “batch processing.” There is a gap between the events in the company—sales—and his understanding of those events. Wall Street used to be the same way. The information on which a trader based his decisions was scattered across a number of databases. The trader would collect information from here and there, collate and analyze it, and then make a trade. What Ranadivé’s company, TIBCO, did was to consolidate those databases into one stream, so that the trader could collect all the data he wanted instantaneously. Batch processing was replaced by real-time processing. Today, TIBCO’s software powers most of the trading floors on Wall Street.

Ranadivé views this move from batch to real time as a sort of holy mission. The shift, to his mind, is one of kind, not just of degree. “We’ve been working with some airlines,” he said. “You know, when you get on a plane and your bag doesn’t, they actually know right away that it’s not there. But no one tells you, and a big part of that is that they don’t have all their information in one place. There are passenger systems that know where the passenger is. There are aircraft and maintenance systems that track where the plane is and what kind of shape it’s in. Then, there are baggage systems and ticketing systems—and they’re all separate. So you land, you wait at the baggage terminal, and it doesn’t show up.” Everything bad that happens in that scenario, Ranadivé maintains, happens because of the lag between the event (the luggage doesn’t make it onto the plane) and the response (the airline tells you that your luggage didn’t make the plane). The lag is why you’re angry. The lag is why you had to wait, fruitlessly, at baggage claim. The lag is why you vow never to fly that airline again. Put all the databases together, and there’s no lag. “What we can do is send you a text message the moment we know your bag didn’t make it,” Ranadivé said, “telling you we’ll ship it to your house.”

A few years ago, Ranadivé wrote a paper arguing that even the Federal Reserve ought to make its decisions in real time—not once every month or two. “Everything in the world is now real time,” he said. “So when a certain type of shoe isn’t selling at your corner shop, it’s not six months before the guy in China finds out. It’s almost instantaneous, thanks to my software. The world runs in real time, but government runs in batch. Every few months, it adjusts. Its mission is to keep the temperature comfortable in the economy, and, if you were to do things the government’s way in your house, then every few months you’d turn the heater either on or off, overheating or underheating your house.” Ranadivé argued that we ought to put the economic data that the Fed uses into a big stream, and write a computer program that sifts through those data, the moment they are collected, and make immediate, incremental adjustments to interest rates and the money supply. “It can all be automated,” he said. “Look, we’ve had only one soft landing since the Second World War. Basically, we’ve got it wrong every single time.”

You can imagine what someone like Alan Greenspan or Ben Bernanke might say about that idea. Such people are powerfully invested in the notion of the Fed as a Solomonic body: that pause of five or eight weeks between economic adjustments seems central to the process of deliberation. To Ranadivé, though, “deliberation” just prettifies the difficulties created by lag. The Fed has to deliberate because it’s several weeks behind, the same way the airline has to bow and scrape and apologize because it waited forty-five minutes to tell you something that it could have told you the instant you stepped off the plane.

Is it any wonder that Ranadivé looked at the way basketball was played and found it mindless? A professional basketball game was forty-eight minutes long, divided up into alternating possessions of roughly twenty seconds: back and forth, back and forth. But a good half of each twenty-second increment was typically taken up with preliminaries and formalities. The point guard dribbled the ball up the court. He stood above the top of the key, about twenty-four feet from the opposing team’s basket. He called out a play that the team had choreographed a hundred times in practice. It was only then that the defending team sprang into action, actively contesting each pass and shot. Actual basketball took up only half of that twenty-second interval, so that a game’s real length was not forty-eight minutes but something closer to twenty-four minutes—and that twenty-four minutes of activity took place within a narrowly circumscribed area. It was as formal and as convention-bound as an eighteenth-century quadrille. The supporters of that dance said that the defensive players had to run back to their own end, in order to compose themselves for the arrival of the other team. But the reason they had to compose themselves, surely, was that by retreating they allowed the offense to execute a play that it had practiced to perfection. Basketball was batch!

Insurgents, though, operate in real time. Lawrence hit the Turks, in that stretch in the spring of 1917, nearly every day, because he knew that the more he accelerated the pace of combat the more the war became a battle of endurance—and endurance battles favor the insurgent. “And it happened as the Philistine arose and was drawing near David that David hastened and ran out from the lines toward the Philistine,” the Bible says. “And he reached his hand into the pouch and took from there a stone and slung it and struck the Philistine in his forehead.” The second sentence—the slingshot part—is what made David famous. But the first sentence matters just as much. David broke the rhythm of the encounter. He speeded it up. “The sudden astonishment when David sprints forward must have frozen Goliath, making him a better target,” the poet and critic Robert Pinsky writes in “The Life of David.” Pinsky calls David a “point guard ready to flick the basketball here or there.” David pressed. That’s what Davids do when they want to beat Goliaths.

Ranadivé’s basketball team played in the National Junior Basketball seventh-and-eighth-grade division, representing Redwood City. The girls practiced at Paye’s Place, a gym in nearby San Carlos. Because Ranadivé had never played basketball, he recruited a series of experts to help him. The first was Roger Craig, the former all-pro running back for the San Francisco 49ers, who is also TIBCO’s director of business development. As a football player, Craig was legendary for the off-season hill workouts he put himself through. Most of his N.F.L. teammates are now hobbling around golf courses. He has run seven marathons. After Craig signed on, he recruited his daughter Rometra, who played Division I basketball at Duke and U.S.C. Rometra was the kind of person you assigned to guard your opponent’s best player in order to shut her down. The girls loved Rometra. “She has always been like my big sister,” Anjali Ranadivé said. “It was so awesome to have her along.”

Redwood City’s strategy was built around the two deadlines that all basketball teams must meet in order to advance the ball. The first is the inbounds pass. When one team scores, a player from the other team takes the ball out of bounds and has five seconds to pass it to a teammate on the court. If that deadline is missed, the ball goes to the other team. Usually, that’s not an issue, because teams don’t contest the inbounds pass. They run back to their own end. Redwood City did not. Each girl on the team closely shadowed her counterpart. When some teams play the press, the defender plays behind the offensive player she’s guarding, to impede her once she catches the ball. The Redwood City girls, by contrast, played in front of their opponents, to prevent them from catching the inbounds pass in the first place. And they didn’t guard the player throwing the ball in. Why bother? Ranadivé used that extra player as a floater, who could serve as a second defender against the other team’s best player. “Think about football,” Ranadivé said. “The quarterback can run with the ball. He has the whole field to throw to, and it’s still damned difficult to complete a pass.” Basketball was harder. A smaller court. A five-second deadline. A heavier, bigger ball. As often as not, the teams Redwood City was playing against simply couldn’t make the inbounds pass within the five-second limit. Or the inbounding player, panicked by the thought that her five seconds were about to be up, would throw the ball away. Or her pass would be intercepted by one of the Redwood City players. Ranadivé’s girls were maniacal.

The second deadline requires a team to advance the ball across mid-court, into its opponent’s end, within ten seconds, and if Redwood City’s opponents met the first deadline the girls would turn their attention to the second. They would descend on the girl who caught the inbounds pass and “trap” her. Anjali was the designated trapper. She’d sprint over and double-team the dribbler, stretching her long arms high and wide. Maybe she’d steal the ball. Maybe the other player would throw it away in a panic—or get bottled up and stalled, so that the ref would end up blowing the whistle. “When we first started out, no one knew how to play defense or anything,” Anjali said. “So my dad said the whole game long, ‘Your job is to guard someone and make sure they never get the ball on inbounds plays.’ It’s the best feeling in the world to steal the ball from someone. We would press and steal, and do that over and over again. It made people so nervous. There were teams that were a lot better than us, that had been playing a long time, and we would beat them.”

The Redwood City players would jump ahead 4–0, 6–0, 8–0, 12–0. One time, they led 25–0. Because they typically got the ball underneath their opponent’s basket, they rarely had to take low-percentage, long-range shots that required skill and practice. They shot layups. In one of the few games that Redwood City lost that year, only four of the team’s players showed up. They pressed anyway. Why not? They lost by three points.

“What that defense did for us is that we could hide our weaknesses,” Rometra Craig said. She helped out once Redwood City advanced to the regional championships. “We could hide the fact that we didn’t have good outside shooters. We could hide the fact that we didn’t have the tallest lineup, because as long as we played hard on defense we were getting steals and getting easy layups. I was honest with the girls. I told them, ‘We’re not the best basketball team out there.’ But they understood their roles.” A twelve-year-old girl would go to war for Rometra. “They were awesome,” she said.

Lawrence attacked the Turks where they were weak—the railroad—and not where they were strong, Medina. Redwood City attacked the inbounds pass, the point in a game where a great team is as vulnerable as a weak one. Lawrence extended the battlefield over as large an area as possible. So did the girls of Redwood City. They defended all ninety-four feet. The full-court press is legs, not arms. It supplants ability with effort. It is basketball for those “quite unused to formal warfare, whose assets were movement, endurance, individual intelligence . . . courage.”

“It’s an exhausting strategy,” Roger Craig said. He and Ranadivé were in a TIBCO conference room, reminiscing about their dream season. Ranadivé was at the whiteboard, diagramming the intricacies of the Redwood City press. Craig was sitting at the table.

“My girls had to be more fit than the others,” Ranadivé said.

“He used to make them run,” Craig said, nodding approvingly.

“We followed soccer strategy in practice,” Ranadivé said. “I would make them run and run and run. I couldn’t teach them skills in that short period of time, and so all we did was make sure they were fit and had some basic understanding of the game. That’s why attitude plays such a big role in this, because you’re going to get tired.” He turned to Craig. “What was our cheer again?”

The two men thought for a moment, then shouted out happily, in unison, “One, two, three, ATTITUDE!”

That was it! The whole Redwood City philosophy was based on a willingness to try harder than anyone else.

“One time, some new girls joined the team,” Ranadivé said, “and so in the first practice I had I was telling them, ‘Look, this is what we’re going to do,’ and I showed them. I said, ‘It’s all about attitude.’ And there was this one new girl on the team, and I was worried that she wouldn’t get the whole attitude thing. Then we did the cheer and she said, ‘No, no, it’s not One, two three, ATTITUDE. It’s One, two, three, attitude HAH ’ ”—at which point Ranadivé and Craig burst out laughing.

In January of 1971, the Fordham University Rams played a basketball game against the University of Massachusetts Redmen. The game was in Amherst, at the legendary arena known as the Cage, where the Redmen hadn’t lost since December of 1969. Their record was 11–1. The Redmen’s star was none other than Julius Erving—Dr. J. The UMass team was very, very good. Fordham, by contrast, was a team of scrappy kids from the Bronx and Brooklyn. Their center had torn up his knee the first week of the season, which meant that their tallest player was six feet five. Their starting forward—and forwards are typically almost as tall as centers—was Charlie Yelverton, who was six feet two. But from the opening buzzer the Rams launched a full-court press, and never let up. “We jumped out to a thirteen-to-six lead, and it was a war the rest of the way,” Digger Phelps, the Fordham coach at the time, recalls. “These were tough city kids. We played you ninety-four feet. We knew that sooner or later we were going to make you crack.” Phelps sent in one indefatigable Irish or Italian kid from the Bronx after another to guard Erving, and, one by one, the indefatigable Irish and Italian kids fouled out. None of them were as good as Erving. It didn’t matter. Fordham won, 87–79.

In the world of basketball, there is one story after another like this about legendary games where David used the full-court press to beat Goliath. Yet the puzzle of the press is that it has never become popular. People look at upsets like Fordham over UMass and call them flukes. Basketball sages point out that the press can be beaten by a well-coached team with adept ball handlers and astute passers—and that is true. Ranadivé readily admitted that all an opposing team had to do to beat Redwood City was press back: the girls were not good enough to handle their own medicine. Playing insurgent basketball did not guarantee victory. It was simply the best chance an underdog had of beating Goliath. If Fordham had played UMass the conventional way, it would have lost by thirty points. And yet somehow that lesson has escaped the basketball establishment.

What did Digger Phelps do, the season after his stunning upset of UMass? He never used the full-court press the same way again. The UMass coach, Jack Leaman, was humbled in his own gym by a bunch of street kids. Did he learn from his defeat and use the press himself the next time he had a team of underdogs? He did not.

The only person who seemed to have absorbed the lessons of that game was a skinny little guard on the UMass freshman team named Rick Pitino. He didn’t play that day. He watched, and his eyes grew wide. Even now, thirty-eight years later, he can name, from memory, nearly every player on the Fordham team: Yelverton, Sullivan, Mainor, Charles, Zambetti. “They came in with the most unbelievable pressing team I’d ever seen,” Pitino said. “Five guys between six feet five and six feet. It was unbelievable how they covered ground. I studied it. There is no way they should have beaten us. Nobody beat us at the Cage.”

Pitino became the head coach at Boston University in 1978, when he was twenty-five years old, and used the press to take the school to its first N.C.A.A. tournament appearance in twenty-four years. At his next head-coaching stop, Providence College, Pitino took over a team that had gone 11–20 the year before. The players were short and almost entirely devoid of talent—a carbon copy of the Fordham Rams. They pressed, and ended up one game away from playing for the national championship. At the University of Kentucky, in the mid-nineteen-nineties, Pitino took his team to the Final Four three times—and won a national championship—with full-court pressure, and then rode the full-court press back to the Final Four in 2005, as the coach at the University of Louisville. This year, his Louisville team entered the N.C.A.A. tournament ranked No. 1 in the land. College coaches of Pitino’s calibre typically have had numerous players who have gone on to be bona-fide all-stars at the professional level. In his many years of coaching, Pitino has had one, Antoine Walker. It doesn’t matter. Every year, he racks up more and more victories.

“The greatest example of the press I’ve ever coached was my Kentucky team in ’96, when we played L.S.U.,” Pitino said. He was at the athletic building at the University of Louisville, in a small room filled with television screens, where he watches tapes of opponents’ games. “Do we have that tape?” Pitino called out to an assistant. He pulled a chair up close to one of the monitors. The game began with Kentucky stealing the ball from L.S.U., deep in L.S.U.’s end. Immediately, the ball was passed to Antoine Walker, who cut to the basket for a layup. L.S.U. got the ball back. Kentucky stole it again. Another easy basket by Walker. “Walker had almost thirty points at halftime,” Pitino said. “He dunked it almost every time. When we steal, he just runs to the basket.” The Kentucky players were lightning quick and long-armed, and swarmed around the L.S.U. players, arms flailing. It was mayhem. Five minutes in, it was clear that L.S.U. was panicking.

Pitino trains his players to look for what he calls the “rush state” in their opponents—that moment when the player with the ball is shaken out of his tempo—and L.S.U. could not find a way to get out of the rush state. “See if you find one play that L.S.U. managed to run,” Pitino said. You couldn’t. The L.S.U. players struggled to get the ball inbounds, and, if they did that, they struggled to get the ball over mid-court, and on those occasions when they managed both those things they were too overwhelmed and exhausted to execute their offense the way they had been trained to. “We had eighty-six points at halftime,” Pitino went on—eighty-six points being, of course, what college basketball teams typically score in an entire game. “And I think we’d forced twenty-three turnovers at halftime,” twenty-three turnovers being what college basketball teams might force in two games. “I love watching this,” Pitino said. He had a faraway look in his eyes. “Every day, you dream about getting a team like this again.” So why are there no more than a handful of college teams who use the full-court press the way Pitino does?

Arreguín-Toft found the same puzzling pattern. When an underdog fought like David, he usually won. But most of the time underdogs didn’t fight like David. Of the two hundred and two lopsided conflicts in Arreguín-Toft’s database, the underdog chose to go toe to toe with Goliath the conventional way a hundred and fifty-two times—and lost a hundred and nineteen times. In 1809, the Peruvians fought the Spanish straight up and lost; in 1816, the Georgians fought the Russians straight up and lost; in 1817, the Pindaris fought the British straight up and lost; in the Kandyan rebellion of 1817, the Sri Lankans fought the British straight up and lost; in 1823, the Burmese chose to fight the British straight up and lost. The list of failures was endless. In the nineteen-forties, the Communist insurgency in Vietnam bedevilled the French until, in 1951, the Viet Minh strategist Vo Nguyen Giap switched to conventional warfare—and promptly suffered a series of defeats. George Washington did the same in the American Revolution, abandoning the guerrilla tactics that had served the colonists so well in the conflict’s early stages. “As quickly as he could,” William Polk writes in “Violent Politics,” a history of unconventional warfare, Washington “devoted his energies to creating a British-type army, the Continental Line. As a result, he was defeated time after time and almost lost the war.”

It makes no sense, unless you think back to that Kentucky-L.S.U. game and to Lawrence’s long march across the desert to Aqaba. It is easier to dress soldiers in bright uniforms and have them march to the sound of a fife-and-drum corps than it is to have them ride six hundred miles through the desert on the back of a camel. It is easier to retreat and compose yourself after every score than swarm about, arms flailing. We tell ourselves that skill is the precious resource and effort is the commodity. It’s the other way around. Effort can trump ability—legs, in Saxe’s formulation, can overpower arms—because relentless effort is in fact something rarer than the ability to engage in some finely tuned act of motor coördination.

“I have so many coaches come in every year to learn the press,” Pitino said. Louisville was the Mecca for all those Davids trying to learn how to beat Goliaths. “Then they e-mail me. They tell me they can’t do it. They don’t know if they have the bench. They don’t know if the players can last.” Pitino shook his head. “We practice every day for two hours straight,” he went on. “The players are moving almost ninety-eight per cent of the practice. We spend very little time talking. When we make our corrections”—that is, when Pitino and his coaches stop play to give instruction—“they are seven-second corrections, so that our heart rate never rests. We are always working.” Seven seconds! The coaches who came to Louisville sat in the stands and watched that ceaseless activity and despaired. The prospect of playing by David’s rules was too daunting. They would rather lose.

In 1981, a computer scientist from Stanford University named Doug Lenat entered the Traveller Trillion Credit Squadron tournament, in San Mateo, California. It was a war game. The contestants had been given several volumes of rules, well beforehand, and had been asked to design their own fleet of warships with a mythical budget of a trillion dollars. The fleets then squared off against one another in the course of a weekend. “Imagine this enormous auditorium area with tables, and at each table people are paired off,” Lenat said. “The winners go on and advance. The losers get eliminated, and the field gets smaller and smaller, and the audience gets larger and larger.”

Lenat had developed an artificial-intelligence program that he called Eurisko, and he decided to feed his program the rules of the tournament. Lenat did not give Eurisko any advice or steer the program in any particular strategic direction. He was not a war-gamer. He simply let Eurisko figure things out for itself. For about a month, for ten hours every night on a hundred computers at Xerox PARC, in Palo Alto, Eurisko ground away at the problem, until it came out with an answer. Most teams fielded some version of a traditional naval fleet—an array of ships of various sizes, each well defended against enemy attack. Eurisko thought differently. “The program came up with a strategy of spending the trillion on an astronomical number of small ships like P.T. boats, with powerful weapons but absolutely no defense and no mobility,” Lenat said. “They just sat there. Basically, if they were hit once they would sink. And what happened is that the enemy would take its shots, and every one of those shots would sink our ships. But it didn’t matter, because we had so many.” Lenat won the tournament in a runaway.

The next year, Lenat entered once more, only this time the rules had changed. Fleets could no longer just sit there. Now one of the criteria of success in battle was fleet “agility.” Eurisko went back to work. “What Eurisko did was say that if any of our ships got damaged it would sink itself—and that would raise fleet agility back up again,” Lenat said. Eurisko won again.

Eurisko was an underdog. The other gamers were people steeped in military strategy and history. They were the sort who could tell you how Wellington had outfoxed Napoleon at Waterloo, or what exactly happened at Antietam. They had been raised on Dungeons and Dragons. They were insiders. Eurisko, on the other hand, knew nothing but the rule book. It had no common sense. As Lenat points out, a human being understands the meaning of the sentences “Johnny robbed a bank. He is now serving twenty years in prison,” but Eurisko could not, because as a computer it was perfectly literal; it could not fill in the missing step—“Johnny was caught, tried, and convicted.” Eurisko was an outsider. But it was precisely that outsiderness that led to Eurisko’s victory: not knowing the conventions of the game turned out to be an advantage.

“Eurisko was exposing the fact that any finite set of rules is going to be a very incomplete approximation of reality,” Lenat explained. “What the other entrants were doing was filling in the holes in the rules with real-world, realistic answers. But Eurisko didn’t have that kind of preconception, partly because it didn’t know enough about the world.” So it found solutions that were, as Lenat freely admits, “socially horrifying”: send a thousand defenseless and immobile ships into battle; sink your own ships the moment they get damaged.

This is the second half of the insurgent’s creed. Insurgents work harder than Goliath. But their other advantage is that they will do what is “socially horrifying”—they will challenge the conventions about how battles are supposed to be fought. All the things that distinguish the ideal basketball player are acts of skill and coördination. When the game becomes about effort over ability, it becomes unrecognizable—a shocking mixture of broken plays and flailing limbs and usually competent players panicking and throwing the ball out of bounds. You have to be outside the establishment—a foreigner new to the game or a skinny kid from New York at the end of the bench—to have the audacity to play it that way. George Washington couldn’t do it. His dream, before the war, was to be a British Army officer, finely turned out in a red coat and brass buttons. He found the guerrillas who had served the American Revolution so well to be “an exceeding dirty and nasty people.” He couldn’t fight the establishment, because he was the establishment.

T. E. Lawrence, by contrast, was the farthest thing from a proper British Army officer. He did not graduate with honors from Sandhurst. He was an archeologist by trade, a dreamy poet. He wore sandals and full Bedouin dress when he went to see his military superiors. He spoke Arabic like a native, and handled a camel as if he had been riding one all his life. And David, let’s not forget, was a shepherd. He came at Goliath with a slingshot and staff because those were the tools of his trade. He didn’t know that duels with Philistines were supposed to proceed formally, with the crossing of swords. “When the lion or the bear would come and carry off a sheep from the herd, I would go out after him and strike him down and rescue it from his clutches,” David explained to Saul. He brought a shepherd’s rules to the battlefield.

The price that the outsider pays for being so heedless of custom is, of course, the disapproval of the insider. Why did the Ivy League schools of the nineteen-twenties limit the admission of Jewish immigrants? Because they were the establishment and the Jews were the insurgents, scrambling and pressing and playing by immigrant rules that must have seemed to the Wasp élite of the time to be socially horrifying. “Their accomplishment is well over a hundred per cent of their ability on account of their tremendous energy and ambition,” the dean of Columbia College said of the insurgents from Brooklyn, the Bronx, and the Lower East Side. He wasn’t being complimentary. Goliath does not simply dwarf David. He brings the full force of social convention against him; he has contempt for David.

“In the beginning, everyone laughed at our fleet,” Lenat said. “It was really embarrassing. People felt sorry for us. But somewhere around the third round they stopped laughing, and some time around the fourth round they started complaining to the judges. When we won again, some people got very angry, and the tournament directors basically said that it was not really in the spirit of the tournament to have these weird computer-designed fleets winning. They said that if we entered again they would stop having the tournament. I decided the best thing to do was to graciously bow out.”

It isn’t surprising that the tournament directors found Eurisko’s strategies beyond the pale. It’s wrong to sink your own ships, they believed. And they were right. But let’s remember who made that rule: Goliath. And let’s remember why Goliath made that rule: when the world has to play on Goliath’s terms, Goliath wins.

The trouble for Redwood City started early in the regular season. The opposing coaches began to get angry. There was a sense that Redwood City wasn’t playing fair—that it wasn’t right to use the full-court press against twelve-year-old girls, who were just beginning to grasp the rudiments of the game. The point of basketball, the dissenting chorus said, was to learn basketball skills. Of course, you could as easily argue that in playing the press a twelve-year-old girl learned something much more valuable—that effort can trump ability and that conventions are made to be challenged. But the coaches on the other side of Redwood City’s lopsided scores were disinclined to be so philosophical.

“There was one guy who wanted to have a fight with me in the parking lot,” Ranadivé said. “He was this big guy. He obviously played football and basketball himself, and he saw that skinny, foreign guy beating him at his own game. He wanted to beat me up.”

Roger Craig says that he was sometimes startled by what he saw. “The other coaches would be screaming at their girls, humiliating them, shouting at them. They would say to the refs—‘That’s a foul! That’s a foul!’ But we weren’t fouling. We were just playing aggressive defense.”

“My girls were all blond-haired white girls,” Ranadivé said. “My daughter is the closest we have to a black girl, because she’s half-Indian. One time, we were playing this all-black team from East San Jose. They had been playing for years. These were born-with-a-basketball girls. We were just crushing them. We were up something like twenty to zero. We wouldn’t even let them inbound the ball, and the coach got so mad that he took a chair and threw it. He started screaming at his girls, and of course the more you scream at girls that age the more nervous they get.” Ranadivé shook his head: never, ever raise your voice. “Finally, the ref physically threw him out of the building. I was afraid. I think he couldn’t stand it because here were all these blond-haired girls who were clearly inferior players, and we were killing them.”

At the nationals, the Redwood City girls won their first two games. In the third round, their opponents were from somewhere deep in Orange County. Redwood City had to play them on their own court, and the opponents supplied their own referee as well. The game was at eight o’clock in the morning. The Redwood City players left their hotel at six, to beat the traffic. It was downhill from there. The referee did not believe in “One, two, three, attitude HAH.” He didn’t think that playing to deny the inbounds pass was basketball. He began calling one foul after another.

“They were touch fouls,” Craig said. Ticky-tacky stuff. The memory was painful.

“My girls didn’t understand,” Ranadivé said. “The ref called something like four times as many fouls on us as on the other team.”

“People were booing,” Craig said. “It was bad.”

“A two-to-one ratio is understandable, but a ratio of four to one?” Ranadivé shook his head.

“One girl fouled out.”

“We didn’t get blown out. There was still a chance to win. But . . .”

Ranadivé called the press off. He had to. The Redwood City players retreated to their own end, and passively watched as their opponents advanced down the court. They did not run. They paused and deliberated between each possession. They played basketball the way basketball is supposed to be played, and they lost—but not before making Goliath wonder whether he was a giant, after all. ♦

SCI/TECH/PSY: The Science of Evil and Variations in Empathy

CMAC — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 03:19:00 +0000

Can Google Wallet reinvent the way we pay for things?

Yahoo! News – 10 mins ago

Last week’s unveiling of Google’s mobile payment app, Google Wallet, heralds a radical revamping of commerce and currency. Google Wallet, rolled out first in New York and San Francisco, uses near field communication (NFC) technology that allows two-way communication between a … Full Story »

Study: Pfizer lung cancer pill may double survival

AP – Sun Jun 5, 4:03 pm ET

TRENTON, N.J. – A much-anticipated drug for advanced lung cancer from Pfizer Inc. appears to double survival over standard drugs against tumors with a certain genetic mutation, according to research presented Sunday. Full Story »

The Apple Universe

Apple’s big iCloud announcement: 3 takeaways

June 6, 2011, at 6:25 PMApple CEO Steve Jobs rolls out a new cloud-based service that lets users store and sync their music, photos, and other documents. Is it a game-changer?

Controversial drilling technique prompts CA bill

AP – 2 hrs 42 mins ago

LOS ALAMOS, Calif. – In a place where oil exploration long co-existed with agriculture, a three-story contraption humming day and night in the heart of Santa Barbara wine country struck residents as a mere curiosity until someone uttered the petroleum industry’s dirty word: fracking. Full Story »

Today’s Top Science News

Monday, June 6, 2011

Print Bookmark Email

New Supernova Shows Signs of Atypical Composition

An exploding star, in nearby galaxy M51, shows signs of an unusual composition. The material thrown into space in the explosion contains a wide variety of elements — a mix that is atypical of supernova events at such an early stage of the explosion, … > full story

more on:

Stars; Astrophysics; Galaxies; Astronomy; Black Holes; Extrasolar Planets

Climate Scientists Forecast Permanently Hotter Summers

The tropics and much of the Northern Hemisphere are likely to experience an irreversible rise in summer temperatures within the next 20 to 60 years if atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations continue to increase, according to a new climate study. … > full story

more on:

Climate; Weather; Global Warming; Severe Weather; Environmental Issues; Geography

Material Turns Hard or Soft at the Touch of a Button

A world premiere: A material which changes its strength, virtually at the touch of a button. This transformation can be achieved in a matter of seconds through changes in the electron structure of a material; thus hard and brittle matter, for example, can … > full story

more on:

Materials Science; Nanotechnology; Civil Engineering; Physics; Nature of Water; Inorganic Chemistry

Symposia Sunday: Messy Morality

Deception, threats, violence – why do some individuals frequently engage in immoral behaviors like these while others never do? This Sunday morning presentation featured neuroimaging, genetic research, and behavioral research to investigate how social perception, cognition, and affect shape moral judgments and behavior. More>

Joy of Theorizing

There’s the Joy of Cooking, the Joy of Sex, and now … the Joy of Theorizing. Daniel Wegner has created more than his share of influential theories in psychology, and in his William James Fellow Award Address at this year’s APS Convention, the Harvard psychological scientist reflected on what theories… More>

The Social Animal

The presidential symposium at the APS 23rd Annual Convention challenged four scientists to give modern scientific support to Aristotle’s ancient saying: “Man is by nature a social animal.” More>

Reflecting on Behavior: Giacomo Rizzolatti Gives a Tour of the Mirror Mechanism

In his keynote address at the APS 23rd Annual Convention, Giacomo Rizzolatti of the University of Parma, in Italy, gave a brief history of the mirror mechanism. More>

Leading Researchers Discuss Current Directions in Schizophrenia Research

On Thursday morning, five distinguished researchers came together to discuss the latest research on schizophrenia. If there’s one thing that all five can agree on it’s that schizophrenia research has come a long way. More>

Be It Numbers or Words – The Structure of Our Language Remains the Same

June 6, 2011

From News

It is one of the wonders of language: We cannot possibly anticipate or memorize every potential word, phrase, or sentence. Yet we have no trouble constructing and understanding myriads of… More>

Improving the Lives of Employees Through Goal Setting

June 6, 2011

From Daily Observations

In his James McKeen Cattell Fellow Award Address, Gary P. Latham discusses how goal setting theory, developed with Edwin Locke, has been the framework for developing predictors as well as… More>

Using Your Brain to Get Smarter

June 6, 2011

From Daily Observations

We may inherit a good deal of our intelligence, but that doesn’t mean a person can’t get any smarter. That is the upshot of the ongoing cognitive research presented by… More>

How We Reason

June 6, 2011

From Daily Observations

A long-standing tradition is that we are rational because our thinking is founded on the ‘laws of thought.’ This APS Award Address by Philip N. Johnson-Laird of Princeton University argues… More>

Do We Dare to Change America’s Diet?

June 6, 2011

From Daily Observations

Kelly D. Brownell of Yale University charged convention-goers to ask themselves whether we have the courage necessary to change America’s diet at the Bring the Family Address at the APS… More>

Emotion-Related Self-Regulation

June 6, 2011

From Daily Observations

In her APS Award Address on Saturday, May 28 Nancy Eisenberg of Arizona State University made the case for the importance of emotion-related self-regulation for understanding socio-emotional development. More>

New Solar System Formation Models Indicate That Jupiter’s Foray Robbed Mars of Mass

Planetary scientists have long wondered why Mars is only about half the size and one-tenth the mass of Earth. As next-door neighbors in the inner solar system, probably formed about the … > full story

more on:

Solar System; Asteroids, Comets and Meteors; Jupiter; Solar Flare; Sun; Space Exploration

Carbon Release to Atmosphere 10 Times Faster Than in the Past, Geologists Find

The rate of release of carbon into the atmosphere today is nearly 10 times as fast as during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), 55.9 million years ago, the best analog we have for current global warming, according … > full story

more on:

Global Warming; Climate; Early Climate; Air Quality; Environmental Issues; Forest

Major Step in Improving Forecasts of Weather Extremes Such as Floods and Droughts

Moisture and heat fluctuations from the land surface to the atmosphere form a critical nexus between surface hydrology and atmospheric processes, especially those relevant to rainfall. While … > full story

more on:

Weather; Floods; Nature of Water; Drought Research; Severe Weather; Water

Early Light Refines Brain’s Circuitry for Vision: Studies Show Importance of Visual Stimulation in Wiring Up Species’ Brains to See

Creatures are not born hardwired to see. Instead, they depend on electrical activity in the retina to refine the complex circuits that process visual information. Two new studies in different … > full story

more on:

Mice; Neuroscience; Intelligence; Perception; Brain Injury; Developmental Biology

Neuroscientists Map a New Target to Wipe Pain Away

Researchers have discovered a peptide that short circuits a pathway for chronic pain. Unlike current treatments this peptide does not exhibit deleterious side effects such as reduced motor coordination, memory loss, or depression, according to a new … > full story

more on:

Osteoporosis; Pain Control; Bone and Spine; Fibromyalgia; Women’s Health; Neuropathy

Physicists Store Antimatter Atoms for 1,000 Seconds — And Still Counting

Physicists with the international ALPHA Collaboration at CERN in Geneva have succeeded in storing a total of 309 antihydrogen atoms, some for as long as 1,000 seconds (almost 17 minutes) or even longer — more than enough time to … > full story

more on:

Physics; Quantum Physics; Chemistry; Nanotechnology; Graphene; Optics

Could a Birth Control Pill for Men Be on the Horizon? Retinoic Acid Receptor Antagonist Interferes With Sperm Production

Researchers are honing in on the development of what may be the first non-steroidal, oral contraceptive for men. Tests of low doses of a compound that interferes with retinoic acid … > full story

more on:

Fertility; Birth Control; Pharmacology; Prostate Cancer; Men’s Health; Vitamin A

Roll over headlines to view top news summaries:

Latest News: Quick Links

Want to see all of ScienceDaily’s current headlines and summaries?

All summaries and headlines.
View more top news stories.
Search by date and keyword.
Read our RSS newsfeeds.
Sign up for email newsletters.

Ads by Google

Prostate Cancer — Top prostate cancer experts. Memorial Sloan-Kettering in NY/NJ. www.mskcc.org

Alternative Cancer Clinic — Advanced Treatments for Cancer Call for more info (800)923-7878 www.SunridgeMedical.com

Resveratrol Price Watch — Over 80 Resveratrol Prices Compared – Questions Answered & Public Forum www.ResveratrolPriceWatch.com

Food To Lower Cholesterol — Find Foods To Lower Cholesterol & Lower Your Cholesterol Level Today. StayingFit.com

Top Medical News

Conquering the fear of standing up to bullies

By Loretta Graziano Breuning, Ph.D. on June 6, 2011 in Greaseless

Bullies thrive because mammals tend to stick with the herd. Your mammal brain knows the herd could turn on you when you oppose a bully. A mammal without a herd soon lands in the jaws of a predator. That’s why people fear losing the safety of social alliances – and appease bullies instead of opposing them. Read More

Leucine Deprivation Proves Deadly to Malignant Melanoma Cells

Researchers have found that depriving human melanoma cells of the amino acid leucine can be lethal to the cells, suggesting a possible strategy for therapeutic intervention. The researchers observed the effect in melanoma cells with a mutation in … > full story

Lasers Used to Form 3-D Crystals Made of Nanoparticles

Chinese firms sign solar power deals in Greece

AFP – Mon Jun 6, 12:28 pm ET

AFP/File

ATHENS (AFP) – Two Chinese energy firms signed deals totalling 2.8 billion euros aimed at boosting Greece’s use of solar power, a Chinese trade association announced Monday. Full Story »

The Ten Most Endearing Things You Can Say to Your Sweetheart

By Barton Goldsmith, Ph.D. on June 6, 2011 in Emotional Fitness

Communication is the most important thing in any relationship. Unfortunately, many times we are unable to put into words what we feel in our hearts. Here are ten things you can say to your sweetheart that will help you convey the depth of your love. Read More

Behold The Leaked TouchPad–HP’s Response To The iPad

Wanted: Red Pop, A Giant Shutter Button For Your iPhone Camera

Tron Guy Rejoice: Disney, Microsoft Unveil HTML5 Graphic Novel “Tron: Legacy”

Japan’s TEPCO shares down 28% to record-low

AFP – Mon Jun 6, 7:55 am ET

AFP/File

TOKYO (AFP) – Shares in Japan’s TEPCO lost more than a quarter of their value Monday following a media report that the operator of the country’s tsunami-hit nuclear plant would log a $7 billion loss in fiscal 2011. Full Story »

“Big Bang Machine”

The Big Bang machine’s ‘incredible’ antimatter trap

June 6, 2011, at 4:00 PM
Scientists have managed to temporarily capture mysterious, elusive antimatter, putting them one step closer to solving one of the great mysteries of our universe

<< earlier edition | later edition >>

8 pm EDT

Prostate Cancer; Men’s Health; Prostate Health; Urology; Cancer; Breast Cancer;

Targeted Cancer Therapy Kills Prostate Tumor Cells, Study Finds

June 6, 2011 — A new targeted therapy for prostate cancer halts tumor growth in animals with advanced prostate cancer that is resistant to hormone therapy, a new study … > full story
Diabetes; Nervous System; Diet and Weight Loss; Obesity; Dieting and Weight Control; Nutrition Research;

Insulin Action in the Brain Can Lead to Obesity: How Insulin in Hypothalamus Controls Body’s Energy Balance

June 6, 2011 — Fat-rich food makes you fat. Behind this simple equation lie complex signalling pathways, through which the neurotransmitters in the brain control the body’s energy balance. Scientists in Germany have clarified an important step in this … > full story
Lung Cancer; Cancer; Breast Cancer; Colon Cancer; Leukemia; Diseases and Conditions;

Supplement Found to Improve Quality of Life for Female Cancer Survivors

June 6, 2011 — A natural nutritional supplement, marketed for the last decade as a sexual aid, has been shown to significantly improve overall quality of life for female cancer survivors, according to new … > full story
Endangered Plants; Nature; Ecology; Ecology Research; Exotic Species; Botany;

Hyperdiverse Flora in Cape Region, Africa, Mainly Caused by Huge Range of Soil Types

June 6, 2011 — Hardly any other place worldwide boosts such a hyperdiverse flora as is to be found on the southwestern tip of Africa. The flora is moreover quite unique with almost 70 % of the native species being endemic. Biologists have now established that the … > full story
Gender Difference; Headaches; Headache Research; PTSD; Stress; Psychiatry;

More Men With Migraine Suffer from PTSD Than Women, Study Finds

June 6, 2011 — A recently published paper highlights that while the risk of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is more common in those with migraine than those without migraine irrespective of sex, the risk is greater in male migraineurs than female … > full story

5 pm EDT

Diabetes; Gene Therapy; Mice; Immune System; Personalized Medicine; Hormone Disorders;

Gene Therapy Reverses Type 1 Diabetes in Mice, Study Finds

June 6, 2011 — An experimental cure for type 1 diabetes has a nearly 80 percent success rate in curing diabetic mice. The results offer possible hope of curing a disease that affects 3 million … > full story
Microbes and More; Organic Chemistry; Biochemistry; Soil Types; Organic; Chemistry;

Tiny Talk on a Barnacle’s Back: Scientists Use New Imaging Technique to Reveal Complex Microbial Interactions

June 6, 2011 — Researchers report using a new form of imaging mass spectrometry to dramatically visualize multiplex microbial … > full story
Joint Pain; Arthritis; Lyme Disease; Diseases and Conditions; Chronic Illness; Bacteria;

Attention Hotshot Interaction Designers!

BY Cliff KuangToday

Interaction designers face some of the world’s hardest design problems: How do you fit the entire Internet on a handheld screen? How do you create a toy that teaches, but is still fun? How should a website behave, for it to go viral? … READ»

XBOX | Comment

Xbox’s E3 Secrets Revealed: Voice-Controlled TV, Face-Scanning Avatars, New “Halos,” More [Updated]

BY Kit EatonToday

With mere moments to go before the E3 presentation where Microsoft will show its future wares, many of the choice details have leaked…READ»

Deer Tick Bacteria DNA in Joint Fluid Not Reliable Marker of Active Lyme Arthritis, Study Finds

June 6, 2011 — New research shows that polymerase chain reaction (PCR) testing for Borrelia burgdorferi DNA–the spirochetal bacteria transmitted by deer ticks–in joint fluid may confirm the diagnosis of Lyme arthritis, but is not a reliable indicator for active … > full story
Physics; Vehicles; Detectors; Optics; Materials Science; Thermodynamics;

Perfect Welds for Car Bodies

June 6, 2011 — Surface welding instead of penetration welding, allows a laser to produce a weld that is only visible on one side. But how do you control the laser power to prevent it burning a hole through the sheets of metal? A new camera system analyzes thermal … > full story
Video Games; Math Puzzles; Artificial Intelligence; Anger Management; Computer Graphics; Behavior;

Kinder, Gentler Video Games May Actually Be Good for Players

June 6, 2011 — While violent video games may lead to more aggression and anger in players, a new study shows that the opposite is also true: relaxing video games can make people happier and more kind. “With all the evidence about the dangers of violent video … > full story

2 pm EDT

Mice; Obesity; Diet and Weight Loss; Vaccines; Rodents; Genetically Modified;

Anti-Obesity Vaccine Reduces Food Consumption in Animals

June 6, 2011 — A new therapeutic vaccine to treat obesity by suppressing the appetite-stimulating hormone ghrelin decreases food intake and increases calorie burning in mice, a new study … > full story
Fish; Fisheries; Marine Biology; Caving; Zoology; Wild Animals;

Darkness Stifles Reproduction of Surface-Dwelling Fish

June 6, 2011 — There’s a reason to be afraid of the dark. Fish accustomed to living near the light of the water’s surface become proverbial “fish out of water” when they move to dark environments like those found in caves, according to a … > full story
Blood Clots; Colon Cancer; Breast Cancer; Leukemia; Cancer; Lung Cancer;

50 Ways to Add Joy to Your Day

By Carolyn L. Rubenstein on June 6, 2011 in Now is Everything

It’s summer – you should be happy. Sunshine is abundant, the birds are singing, and the ice cream truck can be heard from a mile away. But, if you’re a bit like me, your mood may not match the weather outside. And that can make you feel even worse. It’s a yucky downward spiral of negative thoughts. Read More

Happiness

Revenge Is Good for You! Part 1

By Robert Biswas-Diener on June 6, 2011 in Significant Results

Although revenge has a bad reputation new research suggests that it can be psychologically healthy! Read More

Animal Behavior

Extended Double Standard: The Bible as Killer App

By Dr. Jeremy Sherman on June 6, 2011 in Ambigamy

Highlights from the evolution of exceptionalism, from natural history and religious history where we really lean into saying”You may think I’m being selfish when I say I deserve more than you do, but notice how generous I am in saying that my clanspeople deserve more than you do also.” Read More

Blood Clotting and Bowel Cancer Risk

June 6, 2011 — People whose blood clots more easily than normal are more often affected by cancer. Scientists have discovered that a number of variants of clotting factor genes have an influence on bowel cancer risk. They found out that carriers of a particular … > full story
Materials Science; Spintronics; Graphene; Electronics; Civil Engineering; Nanotechnology;

Applying Conductive Nanocoatings to Textiles

June 6, 2011 — Imagine plugging a USB port into a sheet of paper, and turning it into a tablet computer. It might be a stretch, but ideas like this have researchers examining the use of conductive nanocoatings on simple textiles — like woven cotton or even a … > full story
ADD and ADHD; Perception; Memory; Brain Injury; Intelligence; Neuroscience;

Your Brain Can Pay Attention to Something Without You Being Aware That It’s There

June 6, 2011 — Paying attention to something and being aware of it seems like the same thing — they both involve somehow knowing the thing is there. However a new study finds that these are actually separate; your brain can pay attention to something without you … > full story

11 am EDT

Stem Cells; Bone and Spine; Osteoporosis; Leukemia; Skin Cancer; Prostate Cancer;

Stem Cell Treatment May Offer Option for Broken Bones That Don’t Heal

June 6, 2011 — Researchers have shown in an animal study that transplantation of adult stem cells enriched with a bone-regenerating hormone can help mend bone fractures that are not healing … > full story
Trees; Climate; Forest; Global Warming; Nature; Environmental Issues;

Will Global Climate Change Enhance Boreal Forest Growth?

June 6, 2011 — With an increasingly warmer climate, there is a trend for springs to arrive earlier and summers to be hotter. Since spring and summer are the prime growing seasons for plants — when flowers bloom and trees increase in girth and height — do these … > full story
Men’s Health; Diabetes; Prostate Cancer; Hormone Disorders; Diseases and Conditions; Prostate Health;

Hormone Deprivation Therapy for Prostate Cancer May Raise Diabetes Risk

June 6, 2011 — Men with prostate cancer are at higher risk of developing diabetes or diabetes risk factors if they receive androgen deprivation therapy to block the production or action of male hormones that can fuel the growth of this … > full story
Solar Energy; Thermodynamics; Optics; Electronics; Vehicles; Inorganic Chemistry;

First Polymer Solar-Thermal Device Heats Home, Saves Money

June 6, 2011 — A new polymer-based solar-thermal device is the first to generate power from both heat and visible sunlight — an advance that could shave the cost of heating a home by as much as 40 … > full story
Anger Management; Social Psychology; Behavior; Psychology; Racial Issues; Intelligence;

Pain of Ostracism Can Be Deep, Long-Lasting

June 6, 2011 — Ostracism or exclusion may not leave external scars, but it can cause pain that often is deeper and lasts longer than a physical injury, according to an … > full story

8 am EDT

Osteoporosis; Bone and Spine; Skin Care; Menopause; Women’s Health; Cosmetic Surgery;

Severity of Facial Wrinkles May Predict Bone Density in Early Menopause, Study Suggests

June 6, 2011 — A new study finds that the worse a woman’s skin wrinkles are during the first few years of menopause, the lower her bone density … > full story
Headaches; Headache Research; Eye Care; Nervous System; Neuroscience; Disorders and Syndromes;

Precision-Tinted Lenses Offer Real Migraine Relief, Reveals New Study

June 6, 2011 — Precision tinted lenses have been used widely to reduce visual perceptual distortions in poor readers, and are increasingly used for migraine sufferers, but until now the science behind these effects has been unclear. Now research uses functional … > full story
Stem Cells; Today’s Healthcare; Skin Cancer; Prostate Cancer; Wounds and Healing; Personalized Medicine;

Pioneering Stem Cell Bandage Receives Approval in UK for Clinical Trial

June 6, 2011 — Millions of people with knee injuries could benefit from a new type of stem cell bandage treatment if clinical trials are successful. The world’s first clinical trial for the treatment of patients with torn meniscal cartilage has received approval … > full story
Aviation; Transportation Science; Vehicles; Information Technology; Engineering; Technology;

BATTERY TECH | Comment

Can “Cambridge Crude” Sludge Revolutionize EV Battery Charging?

BY Kit EatonToday

Breakthrough battery tech from MIT could mean recharging your EV would still involve the phrase “fill ‘er up.”READ»

New Communication Systems to Bring Order to Air Traffic Chaos

June 6, 2011 — Averting chaos in Europe’s skies will require replacing systems that are up to 50 years old. Air traffic throughout Europe is being reorganized to meet the challenges ahead. Whereas pilots currently communicate verbally with air traffic … > full story
Educational Policy; Educational Psychology; Stress; Privacy Issues; Social Psychology; Relationships;

Wikipedia Improves Students’ Work: Students Become Much More Concerned With Accuracy When Their Research Is Posted Online, Study Finds

June 6, 2011 — A student writing an essay for their teacher may be tempted to plagiarize or leave facts unchecked. A new study shows that if you ask that same student to write something that will be posted on Wikipedia, he or she suddenly becomes determined to … > full story

5 am EDT

Breast Cancer; Cancer; Women’s Health; Obesity; Ovarian Cancer; Colon Cancer;

Obesity Raises Breast Cancer Survivors’ Risk of Dying of the Cancer, Study Finds

June 6, 2011 — Women with a healthy body weight before and after diagnosis of breast cancer are more likely to survive the disease long term, a new study … > full story
Wild Animals; Extreme Survival; Biology; Nature; Mammals; Zoology;

Big City Holds Empty Promise for Bats

June 6, 2011 — In the treeless, flat Prairie, you’d think a city would provide a good home for bats who like to snuggle up and roost in trees and buildings. But researchers made the surprising discovery that the urban landscape is far from ideal for these … > full story
Skin Cancer; Brain Tumor; Stem Cells; Lymphoma; Dietary Supplement; Lung Cancer;

Leucine Deprivation Proves Deadly to Malignant Melanoma Cells

June 6, 2011 — Researchers have found that depriving human melanoma cells of the amino acid leucine can be lethal to the cells, suggesting a possible strategy for therapeutic intervention. The researchers observed the effect in melanoma cells with a mutation in … > full story
Food; Environmental Issues; Sustainability; Organic; Energy Technology; Earth Science;

It All Depends on the Coffee: The Eco-Balance of Coffee Capsules

June 6, 2011 — Exactly how environmentally friendly are the various capsule systems and other ways of making coffee? Swiss researchers have taken a close look at the ecological balances of the various systems currently in use. The result: it all depends on the … > full story
Behavior; Gender Difference; Consumer Behavior; Spirituality; Psychology; Educational Psychology;

Is the Description-Experience Gap in Risky Choice Limited to Rare Events?

June 6, 2011 — Researchers have found people confronted with risky choices respond differently when they rely on past experiences, rather than when they just focus on the odds of winning or … > full story

2 am EDT

Obesity; Men’s Health; Diet and Weight Loss; Erectile Dysfunction; Wounds and Healing; Fitness;

Diet

The Tyranny of “Helpful Hints”

By Zanthe Taylor, MFA on June 6, 2011 in A Million Meals

One of the best things about getting older (and older, and older…) is weeding out the unhelpful voices in my life. As a girl, I was an avid reader of women’s magazines–starting with Seventeen (at 11, of course), working my way up through Glamour, Elle, Marie Claire and finally, In Style. Read More

Surgery-Related Weight Loss in Men Reverses Testosterone Deficiency, Study Finds

June 6, 2011 — Low testosterone levels and symptoms of male sexual dysfunction due to obesity may be reversible with weight loss after bariatric surgery, a new study … > full story
Fossils; Floods; Origin of Life; Oceanography; Geography; El Nino and La Nina;

What the Margins of Spain’s Ebro River Basin Looked Like 6 Million Years Ago

June 6, 2011 — A Spanish research team, using 3-D reflection seismology, has for the first time mapped the geomorphological features of the Ebro river basin 5 to 6 million years ago. The images obtained show that the surface analyzed is today 2.5 or 3 kilometres … > full story
Breast Cancer; Women’s Health; Cancer; Lymphoma; Lung Cancer; Colon Cancer;

Breast Cancer Surgery Patients Benefit from Adding Radiation Therapy, Study Suggests

June 6, 2011 — Additional radiation treatment improves disease free survival lessening the chance of cancer recurring in women with early breast cancer who have had breast conserving surgery (lumpectomy), interim results of a new study … > full story
Optics; Nanotechnology; Physics; Electronics; Graphene; Quantum Physics;

Optical Control of Magnetic Effects at the Nanoscale

June 6, 2011 — Magneto-optical effects, which exploit the interaction between light and magnetic materials, have only been relevant for fundamental research and up to now rarely used for applications. Plasmons – electronic excitations in metals with … > full story
Gender Difference; Educational Psychology; Child Psychology; Psychology;

History Shows That All-Boy Classrooms Might Actually Benefit Girls

June 6, 2011 — New research is both a refutation of the idea that boys’ academic disadvantages can be solved just by removing girls from the equation and a criticism of the present level of … > full story

11 pm EDT

Computers & Math

Computer Science, Math Models, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence …

New Communication Systems to Bring Order to Air Traffic Chaos

Averting chaos in Europe’s skies will require replacing systems that are up to 50 years old. Air traffic throughout Europe is being reorganized to meet the challenges ahead. Whereas pilots currently communicate verbally with air traffic … > full story

Fitness; Diet and Weight Loss; Obesity; Triglycerides; Cholesterol; Pharmacology;

New Generation Asthma Drug Could Improve Metabolism, Research Suggests

June 5, 2011 — Formoterol, a new generation asthma medication, shows great promise for improving fat and protein metabolism, say Australian researchers, who have tested this effect in a small sample of … > full story

Neuroscience

Why Sharing Stories Brings People Together

By Joshua Gowin, MS on June 6, 2011 in You, Illuminated

A new neuroscience study may explain why telling stories builds empathy and also why, when you tell a good one, people act as if they’re watching it unfold before them. Read More

Extinction; New Species; Endangered Animals; Endangered Plants; Nature; Ecology;

New Study Provides Global Analysis of Seagrass Extinction Risk

June 5, 2011 — Scientists have completed the first-ever study of the risk of extinction for individual seagrass species around the world. The new study shows that 10 of the 72 known seagrass species (14 percent) are at an elevated risk of extinction, while 3 … > full story
Women’s Health; Menopause; Breast Cancer; Cancer; Diseases and Conditions; Breastfeeding;

Flaxseed No Cure for Hot Flashes During Breast Cancer or Menopause, Study Finds

June 5, 2011 — Flaxseed provides no benefit in easing hot flashes among breast cancer patients and postmenopausal women, according to a new … > full story
Vehicles; Engineering; Civil Engineering; Energy Technology; Technology; Transportation Science;

Robotic Mine Vehicles Successfully Reanimated by Engineering Students Using Industry Support

June 5, 2011 — Engineering students, with some help from regional industry, rebuilt and successfully tested autonomous robotic vehicles for eventual use in remote areas or underground mines where conditions are too extreme for human … > full story
Alternative Medicine; Fitness; Elder Care; Stroke; Stroke Prevention; Caregiving;

Yoga Helps Older Stroke Victims Improve Balance, Endurance, Study Suggests

June 5, 2011 — A recent study that exposed older veterans with stroke to yoga produced promising results as researchers explore whether this popular mind-body practice can help stroke victims cope with their increased risk for painful and even deadly falls. A … > full story

Science News: By Topic

Health & Biomedical

Biological & Earth

Physical & Applied

Ads by Google

In Other News …

Top White House economist Goolsbee steps down

Prostate Cancer Treatment — Groundbreaking Prostate Cancer Report. New Info You Need To Know! www.JohnsHopkinsHealthAlerts.com

12 Brain Boosting Foods — Learn how to increase your mental health with brain charging foods. www.doctorshealthpress.com

Mind & Brain

Psychology, Mental Health, Child Development, ADHD, Headaches …

Precision-Tinted Lenses Offer Real Migraine Relief, Reveals New Study

Precision tinted lenses have been used widely to reduce visual perceptual distortions in poor readers, and are increasingly used for migraine sufferers, but until now the science behind these effects has been unclear. Now research uses functional … > full story

Walmart knocks down price of iPhone 4 to $147 for month of June

Digital Trends – 8 mins ago

While it still not clear exactly when Apple will be releasing the next version of its iPhone, Walmart announced on Monday that it will be cutting the price of the iPhone 4 for a limited period at its stores (though not via its website) across the country. Full Story »

Gene Therapy Reverses Type 1 Diabetes in Mice, Study Finds

An experimental cure for type 1 diabetes has a nearly 80 percent success rate in curing diabetic mice. The results offer possible hope of curing a disease that affects 3 million … > full story

Earth & Climate

Global Warming, Pollution, Geology, Natural Disasters, Weather …

Darkness Stifles Reproduction of Surface-Dwelling Fish

There’s a reason to be afraid of the dark. Fish accustomed to living near the light of the water’s surface become proverbial “fish out of water” when they move to dark environments like those found in caves, according to a … > full story

Fossils & Ruins

Anthropology, Archaeology, Early Humans, Dinosaurs, Evolution …

What the Margins of Spain’s Ebro River Basin Looked Like 6 Million Years Ago

A Spanish research team, using 3-D reflection seismology, has for the first time mapped the geomorphological features of the Ebro river basin 5 to 6 million years ago. The images obtained show that the surface analyzed is today 2.5 or 3 kilometres … > full story

Ethics and Morality

The Science of Evil and Variations in Empathy

By Darcia Narvaez, Ph.D. on June 6, 2011 in Moral Landscapes

Simon Baron-Cohen’s new book describes empathy and evil. Evil comes from empathy erosion and “turning people into objects.” He gives graphic examples of this kind of evil throughout the book, from sadistic cruelty by soldiers in the Democratic Republic of Congo to the criminal in a supermarket line who robs a woman’s ring, taking her finger with him. Read More

Child Development

Turning Things Upside Down and Inside Out

By Paul C. Holinger, M.D. on June 6, 2011 in Great Kids, Great Parents

“As soon as I could talk, I was ordered to listen” – Cat Stevens

Sometimes turning things on their heads – turning things upside down – allows us to see issues differently and make important changes. Such is the case with two areas in child development. The question at stake involves the importance of learning about the inner world of the child. Read More

Cognition

Ethical Blind Spots: A Lesson from Warren Buffet

By Ann E. Tenbrunsel on June 6, 2011 in Blind Spots

The data seem clear on David Sokol’s conflict of interest in the Berkshire/Lubrizol deal. He bought shares in Lubrizol, and then encouraged Berkshire to buy the company. He claimed that because he didn’t know whether Berskhire would follow his recommendation he didn’t have inside information. Read More

Happiness

What Is the ‘Secret’ to Happiness?

By Jaime Booth Cundy on June 6, 2011 in The Beauty in the Beast

There is wisdom in youth, and in his own celebration this little boy shows us what the true ‘secret’ to happiness is. Read More

Depression

Is Bipolar the Disorder Du Jour?

By Thomas G. Plante, Ph.D. on June 6, 2011 in Do the Right Thing

You may have read or heard about the recent report in the Archives of General Psychiatry (Vol. 28, No. 3) that while the rate of bipolar illness is 4% in the USA it only averages 2% outside of the USA. Twice as many people with bipolar in America than elsewhere? So, what’s up with that? Read More

Sleep

Snoring, Sleep Deprivation and The Bully

By Michael J. Breus, Ph.D. on June 6, 2011 in Sleep Newzzz

It’s becoming more widely known that sleep disordered breathing leads to poor behavior in children. Estimates show that as many of 25% of children diagnosed with ADD or ADHD may actually have an underlying sleep problem that can be treated – resulting in better behavior and improved learning skills. Read More

Human Exposure To Toxic BPA Is Worse Than Previously Thought

BY Ariel SchwartzToday

When you measure BPA levels based on a lifetime of daily exposure, it turns out our bodies are full of the poisonous stuff.READ»

What If A Virus Could Let Blind People See In Infrared?

BY John PavlusToday

Retinal prosthetics — electronic implants that do the work of damaged or missing light-sensitive cells in blind peoples’ eyes — are pretty amazing, but they remain crude at best because of one key design flaw: The human eye is not a … READ»

href="http://ad.doubleclick.net/jump/mansueto.fc/homepage;sz=648x250;pos=top;dcove=d;tile=1;lan=en;c_type=homepage;chn=homepage;cms=homepage;ord=123456789?"
target="_blank"> src="http://ad.doubleclick.net/ad/mansueto.fc/homepage;sz=648x250;pos=top;dcove=d;tile=1;lan=top;c_type=homepage;chn=homepage;cms=homepage;ord=123456789?"
width="648" height="250" border="0" alt=""/>

ICLOUD | Comment

Apple’s Putting Your Music, Documents, And Photos Into iCloud

BY Kit EatonToday

“We’re going to demote the PC and the Mac to just be a device,” said Steve Jobs in his keynote address at Apple’s WWDC today. “We’re going to move your hub, the center of your digital life, into the cloud.”READ»

TWITTERPHONE | Comment

Twitter’s Deep Integration With Apple’s iOS Revealed

BY Kit EatonToday

One touch tweeting on your iPhone or iPad is a handy kick for Apple’s social networking plans, but potentially a massive strap-on rocket booster for Twitter.READ»

The Apple Land Grab: How The Free Cloud Will Help Grow A Nation

BY E.B. BoydToday

Prices so low, Apple must be INSANE! Or, more likely, they’re hooking a whole new world of users with bargain basement prices on OS Lion and iCloud while planning to charge them later for add-ons and premium features. READ»

THE TERRORIST NEXT DOOR: Or how the Obama Regime is deceiving you about the increasing Islamic threat

CMAC — Sat, 14 May 2011 07:35:01 +0000

…not only did the threat of Islamic terrorism not die with Osama bin Laden, Barack Obama’s policies have made the threat of the Islamization of America more likely than ever before.

Author: barenakedislam |

In The Terrorist Next Door, a new book by Eric Stakelbeck, he explains how

National Review - When the president of the United States bows to the king of Saudi Arabia and commands the director of NASA to make Muslim outreach the pillar of our space program, and when his Justice Department intervenes in a local issue and files an amicus brief in support of the aforementioned Murfreesboro mega-mosque, then intervenes again to defend a Muslim teacher’s right to leave her job in Illinois and attend a three-week pilgrimage to Mecca, needless to say, that sends a very welcoming message to Islamists.

So do other Obama moves like increasing Muslim immigration, throwing Israel under the bus, deemphasizing America’s Judeo-Christian heritage, and embracing Muslim Brotherhood front groups. And as I outline in the book, that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

In 2001, there were 1,200 mosques in the United States. Today, ten years later, there are over 2,000. So in the decade since 9/11, the number of mosques in America has nearly doubled. There are now several major mega-mosque projects in the works from coast to coast, including in heartland areas with small Muslim populations. It’s almost as if rich Muslim donors in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and the wealthy Persian Gulf states are funding to Islamize America. And why not? Mosque building, massive Muslim immigration, and self-segregation comprise a strategy for Islamization that has worked to perfection in Europe. Now that a sympathetic administration is in office in the United States, the time is ripe to up the ante here.”

When the president of the United States bows to the king of Saudi Arabia and commands the director of NASA to make Muslim outreach the pillar of our space program, and when his Justice Department intervenes in a local issue and files an amicus brief in support of the Murfreesboro mega-mosque, then intervenes again to defend a Muslim teacher’s right to leave her job in Illinois and attend a three-week pilgrimage to Mecca, needless to say, that sends a very welcoming message to Islamists. So do other Obama moves like increasing Muslim immigration, throwing Israel under the bus, deemphasizing America’s Judeo-Christian heritage, and embracing Muslim Brotherhood front groups.

After two and a half years of foreign-policy and counterterrorism bungling and appeasement, isolating allies and emboldening enemies, and strengthening Islamist forces around the globe and at home, Barack Obama finally got something right – the bin Laden mission. Unfortunately, the administration reverted to its default position of pandering political correctness shortly afterwards by giving OBL a proper Islamic burial and refusing to release photos of his death mask lest Muslims be angry with us.

Share this:

It’s only YOU and the other passengers on the plane between Muslim terrorists and disasater

Posted: May 13, 2011 | Author: barenakedislam | Filed under: Islam in America | 22 Comments »

As Michelle Malkin reported last month, a federal watchdog revealed that TSA’s counterterrorism specialists failed to detect 16 separate jihad operatives who moved through target airports “on at least 23 different occasions.” Neutered by Islamophobia-phobia and an “overtime over security” mentality, our State Department consular offices’ and airline security bureaucracy’s stance toward the al-Murisis slipping through their snaking lines is: “Nothing to see here; move along.”

Michelle Malkin - If you listen to the passengers and crew who flew on American Airlines Flight 1561 last weekend, there’s no doubt about what happened on their harrowing trip: A Yemeni man shrieking “Allahu akbar!” at the top of his lungs more than 30 times rushed the cockpit door twice intending to take down the plane and kill everyone on board.

The clammy, sweaty lone male passenger exhibited classic symptoms of what Middle East scholar and author Daniel Pipes has dubbed “Sudden Jihad Syndrome” — a seemingly random outbreak of threatening behavior or violence by a hysterical Muslim adherent who had not previously exhibited signs of Islamic radicalization. It took at least four men to tackle and restrain Rageh Ahmed Mohammed al-Murisi. “There was no question in everybody’s mind that he was going to do something,” passenger Angelina Marty told the San Francisco Chronicle.

And no, that “something” did not mean enlisting his fellow flyers in a midair flash mob performance of the “Hallelujah Chorus.”

Not everyone was so grounded in reality. Bleeding-heart sympathizers seriously speculated that al-Murisi had simply mistaken clearly marked lavatory doors for the clearly marked cockpit door (because, you know, it’s normal to shout “God is great” repeatedly just before relieving yourself as your plane is about to land). Some federal authorities and media whitewashers proclaimed that al-Murisi’s motives were “unknown.”

If only al-Murisi had been screaming phrases from the Constitution. The Selective Motive Determination Machine — the same one that rushed to pin the Tucson massacre on the Tea Party, the GOP and Fox News without a shred of evidence — would have kicked in to full gear.

On Wednesday, a San Francisco judge denied al-Murisi bail. Unburdened by the paralyzing prissiness of
political correctness, federal prosecutors noted that “Allahu akbar” was the same refrain invoked by the 9/11

…while they allow women in burqas to go through without any enhanced screening because they don’t want to offend their religious sensitivities

hijackers over Shanksville, Pa., and by the would-be Christmas Day bomber over Detroit. Not to mention Fort Hood jihadist Nidal Hasan, the Frankfurt, Germany, jihadist who killed two U.S. airmen on a bus in March, the young Portland, Ore., Christmas tree lighting bomb plotter, every last suicide bomber across Europe, Africa, South Asia and the Middle East, and every last evil al-Qaida beheader broadcast on video over the past decade.

So how, despite a massive transportation and homeland security apparatus, did al-Murisi get into this country and get on a plane? He had no keys, no luggage, $47 cash, two curious posted checks totaling $13,000, and a trove of expired and current state IDs from New York and California — where relatives said he had not notified them that he was coming. He is young, male, brought no family with him, had no job or other discernible income, and hails from the terror-coddling nation of Yemen. Yes, the same Yemen that is Osama bin Laden’s ancestral home, harbors al-Qaida operatives who are burning the “torch of jihad,” and is deemed a “special interest country” whose citizens warrant increased scrutiny by DHS when they cross the border illegally.

At least the heroes of Flight 1561 who refused to sit silent learned the proper 9/11 lesson. “I swore to myself that I would never be a victim” after the 2001 attacks, passenger Larry Wright, one of the men who brought al-Murisi down, told reporters earlier this week. The only effective homeland security begins and ends with a culture of self-defense. Just as there are no atheists in foxholes, there are no “see no jihad, hear no jihad, speak no jihad” delusionists on airplanes with Allahu akbar-chanting flyers beating down doors.

Share th

New Book Details Chavez Involvement in Assassinations and Treachery

CMAC — Sat, 14 May 2011 06:41:30 +0000

Computer files from 2008 show Colombian rebels trained Venezuelan government goons to kill opponents of Hugo Chavez’s regime, computer data indicated.
The New York Times said Tuesday the apparent proof came in the form of …

May 11, 2011 – 8:19 pm EST | 5 Comments From UPI and New Zeal

Castro Cuddling Jesse Jackson calls for Restoration of US/Cuba Relations

May 12, 2011 – 10:17 pm EST | 4 Comments

The life long pro-communist Rev. Jesse Jackson, has issued a call for restoration of relations between Cuba and the United States.
From Cuba’s Granma
The Rev. Jesse Jackson on Wednesday termed the U.S. economic blockade of Cuba …

Read the full story »

Featured »

Castro Cuddling Jesse Jackson calls for Restoration of US/Cuba Relations

May 12, 2011 – 22:17 | 4 Comments
Geert Wilders, In His Own Words

May 12, 2011 – 21:53 | 5 Comments
Communists/Democrats: Spot the Difference

May 12, 2011 – 0:30 | 12 Comments
Glenn Beck From Israel

May 11, 2011 – 20:26 | 5 Comments
New Book Details Chavez Involvement in Assassinations and Treachery

May 11, 2011 – 20:19 | 5 Comments
Did China Win the War on Terror?

May 11, 2011 – 19:12 | 11 Comments
UC Irvine Students Harass Israeli Ambassador

May 10, 2011 – 20:18 | 9 Comments
Gingrich RINO Alert

May 10, 2011 – 19:28 | 11 Comments
Iran Training “Sleeper” Terrorists in Venezuela?

May 10, 2011 – 6:53 | 6 Comments

2012 Election, Barack Obama, Liberty, North America, Radical Islam, Reviews, Social Movements, Socialism/Communism, Socialist Opinion Shapers »

Underdogma – A Book Review

May 13, 2011 – 8:48 pm EST | 2 Comments

By: Terresa Monroe-Hamilton
NoisyRoom

>Click here to purchase…

Michael Prell defines ‘Underdogma’ as a noun that is defined as “the reflexive belief that those who have less power (Underdogs) are good, and that those who have more power (Overdogs) are bad. This belief will even go against the survival instinct as you see here in the West where gays support the Palestinians who would gladly bury them up to their necks and stone them to death or bestow an even more gruesome fate on them if given the chance. Underdogma explains the sheer hatred that emanates from the Progressives for all that the Tea Party and conservatives stand for. It’s as though they find virtue in evil because it does not yet triumph over good. Any idea, stance or thought is championed for if it is not considered the most powerful out there. Thus, you have Progressives heartily defending the 9-11 terrorists and their atrocious, murderous deeds. You have their love affair with radical Islam and the dark hell that it would subject the world to. It also explains their hatred of Israel who is perceived to be an Overdog because of their nuclear weapons, strong military and alliance with the sole super power left on earth, the United States. And lastly, but certainly not the least of these beliefs, is the Progressive love of Marxism and Communism. The idea that the working class should rule and share equally in all things monetary regardless of effort or whether they deserve it – they would rather see a collective 3rd world of poverty and misery, than see some have more than others.

How To Pray

CMAC — Sun, 13 Mar 2011 13:56:34 +0000

How To Pray

R. A. Torrey
1856-1928

THE IMPORTANCE OF PRAYER

In the 6th chapter of Ephesians in the 18th verse we read words which put the tremendous importance of prayer with startling and overwhelming force:

“Praying always with all prayer and supplication in the Spirit, and watching thereunto with all perseverance and supplication for all saints.”

When we stop to weigh the meaning of these words, then note the connection in which they are found, the intelligent child of God is driven to say,

“I must pray, pray, pray. I must put all my energy and all my heart into prayer. Whatever else I do, I must pray.”

The Revised Version is, if possible, stronger than the Authorized:

“With all prayer and supplication praying at all seasons in the spirit, and watching thereunto in all perseverance and supplication for all the saints.”

Note the ALLS: “with ALL prayer,” “at ALL seasons,” “in ALL perseverance,” “for ALL the saints.” Note the piling up of strong words, “prayer,” “supplication,” “perseverance.” Note once more the strong expression, “watching thereunto,” more literally, “being sleepless thereunto.” Paul realized the natural slothfulness of man, and especially his natural slothfulness in prayer. How seldom we pray things through! How often the church and the individual get right up to the verge of a great blessing in prayer and just then let go, get drowsy, quit. I wish that these words “being sleepless unto prayer” might burn into our hearts. I wish the whole verse might burn into our hearts.

But why is this constant, persistent, sleepless, overcoming prayer so needful?

1. First of all, BECAUSE THERE IS A DEVIL. He is cunning, he is mighty, he never rests, he is ever plotting the downfall of the child of God; and if the child of God relaxes in prayer, the devil will succeed in ensnaring him.

This is the thought of the context. The 12th verse reads: “For our wrestling is not against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world rulers of this darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.” (R.V.) Then comes the 13th verse: “Wherefore take up the whole armor of God, that ye may be able to withstand in the evil day, and, having done all, to stand.” (R.V.) Next follows a description of the different parts of the Christian’s armor, which we are to put on if we are to stand against the devil and his mighty wiles. Then Paul brings all to a climax in the 18th verse, telling us that to all else we must add prayer — constant, persistent, untiring, sleepless prayer in the Holy Spirit, or all else will go for nothing.

2. A second reason for this constant, persistent, sleepless, overcoming prayer is that PRAYER IS GOD’S APPOINTED WAY FOR OBTAINING THINGS, AND THE GREAT SECRET OF ALL LACK IN OUR EXPERIENCE, IN OUR LIFE AND IN OUR WORK IS NEGLECT OF PRAYER.

James brings this out very forcibly in the 4th chapter and 2nd verse of his epistle: “Ye have not because ye ask not.” These words contain the secret of the poverty and powerlessness of the average Christian — neglect of prayer.

“Why is it,” many a Christian is asking, “I make so little progress in my Christian life?”

“Neglect of prayer,” God answers. “You have not because you ask not.”

“Why is it,” many a minister is asking, “I see so little fruit from my labors?”

Again God answers, “Neglect of prayer. You have not because you ask not.”

“Why is it,” many a Sunday-School teacher is asking, “that I see so few converted in my Sunday-School class?”

Still God answers, “Neglect of prayer. You have not because you ask not.”

“Why is it,” both ministers and churches are asking, “that the church of Christ makes so little headway against unbelief and error and sin and worldliness?”

Once more we hear God answering, “Neglect of prayer. You have not because you ask not.”

CHAPTER I

3. The third reason for this constant, persistent, sleepless, overcoming prayer is that THOSE MEN WHOM GOD SET FORTH AS A PATTERN OF WHAT HE EXPECTED CHRISTIANS TO BE — THE APOSTLES — REGARDED PRAYER AS THE MOST IMPORTANT BUSINESS OF THEIR LIVES.

When the multiplying responsibilities of the early church crowded in upon them, they “called the multitude of the disciples unto them, and said, It is not reason that we should leave the Word of God, and serve tables. Wherefore, brethren, look ye out among you seven men of honest report, full of the Holy Ghost and wisdom, whom we may appoint over this business. But WE WILL GIVE OURSELVES CONTINUALLY TO PRAYER and to the ministry of the Word.” It is evident from what Paul wrote to the churches and to individuals about praying for them, that very much of his time and strength and thought was given to prayer. (Rom. 1:9, R.V.; Eph. 1:15,16; Col. 1:9, R.V.; 1_Thess. 3:10; 2_Tim. 1:3, R.V.)

All the mighty men of God outside the Bible have been men of prayer. They have differed from one another in many things, but in this they have been alike.

4. But there is a still weightier reason for this constant, persistent, sleepless, overcoming prayer. It is, PRAYER OCCUPIED A VERY PROMINENT PLACE AND PLAYED A VERY IMPORTANT PART IN THE EARTHLY LIFE OF OUR LORD.

Turn, for example, to Mark 1:35. We read, “And in the morning, rising up a great while before day, He went out, and departed into a solitary place, and there prayed.” The preceding day had been a very busy and exciting one, but Jesus shortened the hours of needed sleep that He might arise early and give Himself to more sorely needed prayer.

Turn again to Luke 6:12, where we read, “And it came to pass in those days that He went out into a mountain to pray, and continued all night in prayer to God.” Our Savior found it necessary on occasion to take a whole night for prayer.

The words “pray” and “prayer” are used at least twenty-five times in connection with our Lord in the brief record of His life in the four Gospels, and His praying is mentioned in places where the words are not used. Evidently prayer took much of the time and strength of Jesus, and a man or woman who does not spend much time in prayer, cannot properly be called a follower of Jesus Christ.

5. There is another reason for constant, persistent, sleepless, overcoming prayer that seems if possible even more forcible than this, namely, PRAYING IS THE MOST IMPORTANT PART OF THE PRESENT MINISTRY OF OUR RISEN LORD.

Christ’s ministry did not close with His death. His atoning work was finished then, but when He rose and ascended to the right hand of the Father, He entered upon other work for us just as important in its place as His atoning work. It cannot be divorced from His atoning work; it rests upon that as its basis, but it is necessary to our complete salvation.

What that great present work is, by which He carries our salvation on to completeness, we read in Heb. 7:25, “Wherefore He is able also to save them to the uttermost that come unto God by Him, seeing HE EVER LIVETH TO MAKE INTERCESSION FOR THEM.” This verse tells us that Jesus is able to save us unto the uttermost, not merely FROM the uttermost, but UNTO the uttermost, unto entire completeness, absolute perfection, because He not merely died, but because He also “ever liveth.” The verse also tells us for what purpose He now lives, “TO MAKE INTERCESSION FOR US,” to pray. Praying is the principal thing He is doing in these days. It is by His prayers that He is saving us.

The same thought is found in Paul’s remarkable, triumphant challenge in Rom. 8:34 – “Who is he that shall condemn? It is Christ Jesus that died, yea rather, that was raised from the dead, who is at the right hand of God, WHO ALSO MAKETH INTERCESSION FOR US.” (R.V.)

If we then are to have fellowship with Jesus Christ in His present work, we must spend much time in prayer; we must give ourselves to earnest, constant, persistent, sleepless, overcoming prayer. I know of nothing that has so impressed me with a sense of the importance of praying at all seasons, being much and constantly in prayer, as the thought that that is the principal occupation at present of my risen Lord. I want to have fellowship with Him, and to that end I have asked the Father that whatever else He may make me, to make me at all events an intercessor, to make me a man who knows how to pray, and who spends much time in prayer.

This ministry of intercession is a glorious and a mighty ministry, and we can all have part in it. The man or the woman who is shut away from the public meeting by sickness can have part in it; the busy mother; the woman who has to take in washing for a living can have part — she can mingle prayers for the saints, and for her pastor, and for the unsaved, and for foreign missionaries, with the soap and water as she bends over the washtub, and not do the washing any more poorly on that account; the hard driven man of business can have part in it, praying as he hurries from duty to duty. But of course we must, if we would maintain this spirit of constant prayer, take time — and take plenty of it — when we shall shut ourselves up in the secret place alone with God for nothing but prayer.

6. The sixth reason for constant, persistent, sleepless, overcoming prayer is that PRAYER IS THE MEANS THAT GOD HAS APPOINTED FOR OUR RECEIVING MERCY, AND OBTAINING GRACE TO HELP IN TIME OF NEED.

Heb. 4:16 is one of the simplest and sweetest verses in the Bible, — “Let us therefore come boldly unto the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy, and find grace to help in time of need.” These words make it very plain that God has appointed a way by which we shall seek and obtain mercy and grace. That way is prayer; bold, confident, outspoken approach to the throne of grace, the most holy place of God’s presence, where our sympathizing High Priest, Jesus Christ, has entered in our behalf. (Verses 14, 15.)

Mercy is what we need, grace is what we must have, or all our life and effort will end in complete failure. Prayer is the way to get them. There is infinite grace at our disposal, and we make it ours experimentally by prayer. Oh, if we only realized the fullness of God’s grace, that is ours for the asking, its height and depth and length and breadth, I am sure that we would spend more time in prayer. The measure of our appropriation of grace is determined by the measure of our prayers.

Who is there that does not feel that he needs more grace? Then ask for it. Be constant and persistent in your asking. Be importunate and untiring in your asking. God delights to have us “shameless” beggars in this direction; for it shows our faith in Him, and He is mightily pleased with faith. Because of our “shamelessness” He will rise and give us as much as we need (Luke 11:8). What little streams of mercy and grace most of us know, when we might know rivers overflowing their banks!

7. The next reason for constant, persistent, sleepless, overcoming prayer is that PRAYER IN THE NAME OF JESUS CHRIST IS THE WAY JESUS CHRIST HIMSELF HAS APPOINTED FOR HIS DISCIPLES TO OBTAIN FULLNESS OF JOY.

He states this simply and beautifully in John 16:24, “Hitherto have ye asked nothing in My name; ask, and ye shall receive, that your joy may be fulfilled.” “Made full” is the way the Revised Version reads. Who is there that does not wish his joy filled full? Well, the way to have it filled full is by praying in the name of Jesus. We all know people whose joy is filled full, indeed, it is just running over, is shining from their eyes, bubbling out of their very lips, and running off their finger tips when they shake hands with you. Coming in contact with them is like coming in contact with an electrical machine charged with gladness. Now people of that sort are always people that spend much time in prayer.

Why is it that prayer in the name of Christ brings such fullness of joy? In part, because we get what we ask. But that is not the only reason, nor the greatest. It makes God real. When we ask something definite of God, and He gives it, how real God becomes! He is right there! It is blessed to have a God who is real, and not merely an idea. I remember how once I was taken suddenly and seriously sick all alone in my study. I dropped upon my knees and cried to God for help. Instantly all pain left me — I was perfectly well. It seemed as if God stood right there, and had put out His hand and touched me. The joy of the healing was not so great as the joy of meeting God.

There is no greater joy on earth or in heaven, than communion with God, and prayer in the name of Jesus brings us into communion with Him. The Psalmist was surely not speaking only of future blessedness, but also of present blessedness when he said, “In Thy presence is fullness of joy.” (Ps. 16.11.) O the unutterable joy of those moments when in our prayers we really press into the presence of God!

Does some one say. “I have never known any such joy as that in prayer”?

Do you take enough leisure for prayer to actually get into God’s presence? Do you really give yourself up to prayer in the time which you do take?

8. The eighth reason for constant, persistent, sleepless, overcoming prayer is that PRAYER, IN EVERY CARE AND ANXIETY AND NEED OF LIFE, WITH THANKSGIVING, IS THE MEANS THAT GOD HAS APPOINTED FOR OBTAINING FREEDOM FROM ALL ANXIETY, AND THE PEACE OF GOD WHICH PASSETH ALL UNDERSTANDING.

“Be careful for nothing,” says Paul, “but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known unto God, and the peace of God which passeth all understanding, shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus.” (Phil. 4:6,7.) To many this seems at the first glance, the picture of a life that is beautiful, but beyond the reach of ordinary mortals; not so at all. The verse tells us how the life is attainable by every child of God: “Be careful for nothing,” or as the Revised Version reads, “In nothing be anxious.” The remainder of the verse tells us how, and it is very simple: “But in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known unto God.” What could be plainer or more simple than that? Just keep in constant touch with God, and when any trouble or vexation, great or small, comes up, speak to Him about it, never forgetting to return thanks for what He has already done. What will the result be? “The peace of God which passeth all understanding shall guard your hearts and your thoughts in Christ Jesus.” (R.V.)

That is glorious, and as simple as it is glorious! Thank God, many are trying it. Don’t you know any one who is always serene? Perhaps he is a very stormy man by his natural make-up, but troubles and conflicts and reverses and bereavements may sweep around him, and the peace of God which passeth all understanding guards his heart and his thoughts in Christ Jesus.

We all know such persons. How do they manage it?

Just by prayer, that is all. Those persons who know the deep peace of God, the unfathomable peace that passeth all understanding, are always men and women of much prayer.

Some of us let the hurry of our lives crowd prayer out, and what a waste of time and energy and nerve force there is by the constant worry! One night of prayer will save us from many nights of insomnia. Time spent in prayer is not wasted, but time invested at big interest.

9. The ninth reason for constant, persistent, sleepless, overcoming prayer is that PRAYER IS THE METHOD THAT GOD HIMSELF HAS APPOINTED FOR OUR OBTAINING THE HOLY SPIRIT.

Upon this point the Bible is very plain. Jesus says, “If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to them that ask Him?” (Luke 11:13.) Men are telling us in these days, very good men too, “You must not pray for the Holy Spirit,” but what are they going to do with the plain statement of Jesus Christ, “How much more will your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit TO THEM THAT ASK HIM?”

Some years ago when an address on the baptism with the Holy Spirit was announced, a brother came to me before the address and said with much feeling,

“Be sure and tell them not to pray for the Holy Spirit.”

“I will surely not tell them that, for Jesus says, ‘How much more shall your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to them that ask Him’.”

“Oh, yes,” he replied, “but that was before Pentecost.”

“How about Acts 4:31? was that before Pentecost, or after?”

“After, of course.”

“Read it.”

“‘And when they had prayed, the place was shaken where they were assembled together; and they were all FILLED WITH THE HOLY GHOST, and they spake the Word of God with boldness.’”

“How about Acts 8:15? was that before Pentecost or after?”

“After.”

“Please read.”

“‘Who, when they were come down PRAYED for them, that they might receive the Holy Ghost.’”

He made no answer. What could he answer? It is plain as day in the Word of God that before Pentecost and after, the first baptism and the subsequent fillings with the Holy Spirit were received in answer to definite prayer. Experience also teaches this.

Doubtless many have received the Holy Spirit the moment of their surrender to God before there was time to pray, but how many there are who know that their first definite baptism with the Holy Spirit came while they were on their knees or faces before God, alone or in company with others, and who again and again since that have been filled with the Holy Spirit in the place of prayer!

I know this as definitely as I know that my thirst has been quenched while I was drinking water. Early one morning in the Chicago Avenue Church prayer room, where several hundred people had been assembled a number of hours in prayer, the Holy Spirit fell so manifestly, and the whole place was so filled with His presence, that no one could speak or pray, but sobs of joy filled the place. Men went out of that room to different parts of the country, taking trains that very morning, and reports soon came back of the out-pouring of God’s Holy Spirit in answer to prayer. Others went out into the city with the blessing of God upon them. This is only one instance among many that might be cited from personal experience.

If we would only spend more time in prayer, there would be more fullness of the Spirit’s power in our work. Many and many a man who once worked unmistakably in the power of the Holy Spirit is now filling the air with empty shoutings, and beating it with his meaningless gesticulations, because he has let prayer be crowded out. we must spend much time on our knees before God, if we are to continue in the power of the Holy Spirit.

10. The tenth reason for constant, persistent, sleepless, overcoming prayer is that PRAYER IS THE MEANS THAT CHRIST HAS APPOINTED WHEREBY OUR HEARTS SHALL NOT BECOME OVERCHARGED WITH SURFEITING AND DRUNKENNESS AND CARES OF THIS LIFE, AND SO THE DAY OF CHRIST’S RETURN COME UPON US SUDDENLY AS A SNARE.

One of the most interesting and solemn passages upon prayer in the Bible is along this line. (Luke 21:34-36) “Take heed to yourselves, lest at any time your hearts be overcharged with surfeiting and drunkenness and cares of this life, and so that day come upon you unawares. For as a snare shall it come on all them that dwell in the face of the whole earth. Watch ye therefore, and PRAY ALWAYS, that ye may be accounted worthy to escape all these things that shall come to pass, and to stand before the Son of man.” According to this passage there is only one way in which we can be prepared for the coming of the Lord when He appears, that is, through much prayer.

The coming again of Jesus Christ is a subject that is awakening much interest and much discussion in our day; but it is one thing to be interested in the Lord’s return, and to talk about it, and quite another thing to be prepared for it. We live in an atmosphere that has a constant tendency to unfit us for Christ’s coming. The world tends to draw us down by its gratifications and by its cares. There is only one way by which we can rise triumphant above these things–by constant watching unto prayer, that is, by sleeplessness unto prayer. “Watch” in this passage is the same strong word used in Eph. 6:18, and “always” the same strong phrase “in every season.” The man who spends little time in prayer, who is not steadfast and constant in prayer, will not be ready for the Lord when He comes. But we may be ready. How? Pray! Pray! Pray!

11. There is one more reason for constant, persistent, sleepless, overcoming prayer, and it is a mighty one: BECAUSE OF WHAT PRAYER ACCOMPLISHES. Much has really been said upon that already, but there is much also that should be added.
- (1) Prayer promotes our spiritual growth as almost nothing else, indeed as nothing else but Bible study; and true prayer and true Bible study go hand in hand.
It is through prayer that my sin is brought to light, my most hidden sin. As I kneel before God and pray, “Search me, O God, and know my heart; try me, and know my thoughts; and see if there be any wicked way in me,” (Ps.139:23,24), God shoots the penetrating rays of His light into the innermost recesses of my heart, and the sins I never suspected are brought to view. In answer to prayer, God washes me from mine iniquity and cleanses me from my sin (Ps. 51:2). In answer to prayer my eyes are opened to behold wondrous things out of God’s Word (Ps. 119:18). In answer to prayer I get wisdom to know God’s way (Jas. 1:5) and strength to walk in it. As I meet God in prayer and gaze into His face, I am changed into His own image from glory to glory ( 2_Cor. 3:18). Each day of true prayer life finds me liker to my glorious Lord.

John Welch, son-in-law to John Knox, was one of the most faithful men of prayer this world ever saw. He counted that day ill-spent in which seven or eight hours were not used alone with God in prayer and the study of His Word. An old man speaking of him after his death said, “He was a type of Christ.”

How came he to be so like his Master?

His prayer life explains the mystery.
- (2) Prayer brings power into our work.
If we wish power for any work to which God calls us, be it preaching, teaching, personal work, or the rearing of our children, we can get it by earnest prayer.

A woman with a little boy who was perfectly incorrigible, once came to me in desperation and said:

“What shall I do with him?”

I asked, “Have you ever tried prayer?”

She said that she had prayed for him, she thought. I asked if she had made his conversion and his character a matter of definite, expectant prayer. She replied that she had not been definite in the matter. She began that day, and at once there was a marked change in the child, and he grew up into Christian manhood.

How many a Sunday-school teacher has taught for months and years, and seen no real fruit from his labors, and then has learned the secret of intercession, and by earnest pleading with God, has seen his scholars brought one by one to Christ! How many a poor preacher has become a mighty man of God by casting away his confidence in his own ability and gifts, and giving himself up to God to wait upon Him for the power that comes from on high! John Livingstone spent a night, with some others likeminded, in prayer to God and religious conversation, and when he preached next day in the Kirk of Shotts five hundred people were converted, or dated some definite uplift in their life to that occasion. Prayer and power are inseparable.
- (3) Prayer avails for the conversion of others. There are few converted in this world unless in connection with some one’s prayers. I formerly thought that no human being had anything to do with my own conversion, for I was not converted in church or Sunday-school, or in personal conversation with any one. I was awakened in the middle of the night and converted. As far as I can remember I had not the slightest thought of being converted, or of anything of that character, when I went to bed and fell asleep; but I was awakened in the middle of the night and converted probably inside of five minutes. A few minutes before I was about as near eternal perdition as one gets. I had one foot over the brink and was trying to get the other one over. I say I thought no human being had anything to do with it, but I had forgotten my mother’s prayers, and I afterward learned that one of my college classmates had chosen me as one to pray for until I was saved.
Prayer often avails where everything else fails. How utterly all of Monica’s efforts and entreaties failed with her son, but her prayers prevailed with God, and the dissolute youth became St. Augustine, the mighty man of God. By prayer the bitterest enemies of the Gospel have become its most valiant defenders, the greatest scoundrels the truest sons of God, and the vilest women the purest saints. Oh, the power of prayer to reach down, down, down, where hope itself seems vain, and lift men and women up, up, up into fellowship with and likeness to God. It is simply wonderful! How little we appreciate this marvelous weapon!
- (4) Prayer brings blessings to the church.
The history of the church has always been a history of grave difficulties to overcome. The devil hates the church and seeks in every way to block its progress; now by false doctrine, again by division, again by inward corruption of life. But by prayer, a clear way can be made through everything. Prayer will root out heresy, allay misunderstanding, sweep away jealousies and animosities, obliterate immoralities, and bring in the full tide of God’s reviving grace. History abundantly proves this. In the hour of darkest portent, when the case of the church, local or universal, has seemed beyond hope, believing men and believing women have met together and cried to God and the answer has come.

It was so in the days of Knox, it was so in the days of Wesley and Whitfield, it was so in the days of Edwards and Brainerd, it was so in the days of Finney, it was so in the days of the great revival of 1857 in this country and of 1859 in Ireland, and it will be so again in your day and mine. Satan has marshalled his forces. Christian science with its false Christ– a woman–lifts high its head. Others making great pretensions of apostolic methods, but covering the rankest dishonesty and hypocrisy with these pretensions, speak with loud assurance. Christians equally loyal to the great fundamental truths of the Gospel are glowering at one another with a devil-sent suspicion. The world, the flesh and the devil are holding high carnival. It is now a dark day, BUT–now “it is time for Thee, Lord, to work; for they have made void Thy law.” (Ps. 199:126). And He is getting ready to work, and now He is listening for the voice of prayer. Will He hear it? Will He hear it from you? Will He hear it from the church as a body? I believe He will.

.

Back to Top

CHAPTER II

PRAYING UNTO GOD

We have seen something of the tremendous importance and the resistless power of prayer, and now we come directly to the question- -how to pray with power.

1. In the 12th chapter of the Acts of the Apostles we have the record of a prayer that prevailed with God, and brought to pass great results. In the 5th verse of this chapter, the manner and method of this prayer is described in few words:

“Prayer was made without ceasing of the church UNTO GOD for him.”

The first thing to notice in this verse is the brief expression “unto God.” The prayer that has power is the prayer that is offered unto God.

But some will say, “Is not all prayer unto God?”

No. Very much of so-called prayer, both public and private, is not unto God. In order that a prayer should be really unto God, there must be a definite and conscious approach to God when we pray; we must have a definite and vivid realization that God is bending over us and listening as we pray. In very much of our prayer there is really but little thought of God. Our mind is taken up with the thought of what we need, and is not occupied with the thought of the mighty and loving Father of whom we are seeking it. Oftentimes it is the case that we are occupied neither with the need nor with the One to whom we are praying, but our mind is wandering here and there throughout the world. There is no power in that sort of prayer. But when we really come into God’s presence, really meet Him face to face in the place of prayer, really seek the things that we desire FROM HIM, then there is power.

If, then, we would pray aright, the first thing that we should do is to see to it that we really get an audience with God, that we really get into His very presence. Before a word of petition is offered, we should have the definite and vivid consciousness that we are talking to God, and should believe that He is listening to our petition and is going to grant the thing that we ask of Him. This is only possible by the Holy Spirit’s power, so we should look to the Holy Spirit to really lead us into the presence of God, and should not be hasty in words until He has actually brought us there.

One night a very active Christian man dropped into a little prayer-meeting that I was leading. Before we knelt to pray, I said something like the above, telling all the friends to be sure before they prayed, and while they were praying, that they really were in God’s presence, that they had the thought of Him definitely in mind, and to be more taken up with Him than with their petition. A few days after I met this same gentleman, and he said that this simple thought was entirely new to him, that it had made prayer an entirely new experience to him.

If then we would pray aright, these two little words must sink deep into our hearts, “UNTO GOD.”

2. The second secret of effective praying is found in the same verse, in the words “WITHOUT CEASING.”

In the Revised Version, “without ceasing” is rendered “earnestly.” Neither rendering gives the full force of the Greek. The word means literally “stretched-out-ed-ly.” It is a pictorial word, and wonderfully expressive. It represents the soul on a stretch of earnest and intense desire. “Intensely” would perhaps come as near translating it as any English word. It is the word used of our Lord in Luke 22:44 where it is said, “He prayed more earnestly: and His sweat was as it were great drops of blood falling down to the ground.”

We read in Heb. 5:7 that “in the days of His flesh” Christ “offered up prayers and supplications with strong crying and tears.” In Rom. 15:30, Paul beseeches the saints in Rome to STRIVE together with him in their prayers. The word translated “strive” means primarily to contend as in athletic games or in a fight. In other words, the prayer that prevails with God is the prayer into which we put our whole soul, stretching out toward God in intense and agonizing desire. Much of our modern prayer has no power in it because there is no heart in it. We rush into God’s presence, run through a string of petitions, jump up and go out. If someone should ask us an hour afterward for what we prayed, oftentimes we could not tell. If we put so little heart into our prayers, we cannot expect God to put much heart into answering them.

We hear much in our day of the rest of faith, but there is such a thing as the fight of faith in prayer as well as in effort. Those who would have us think that they have attained to some sublime height of faith and trust because they never know any agony of conflict or of prayer, have surely gotten beyond their Lord, and beyond the mightiest victors for God, both in effort and prayer, that the ages of Christian history have known. When we learn to come to God with an intensity of desire that wrings the soul, then shall we know a power in prayer that most of us do not know now.

But how shall we attain to this earnestness in prayer?

Not by trying to work ourselves up into it. The true method is explained in Rom. 8:26, “And in like manner the Spirit also helpeth our infirmity: for we know not how to pray as we ought; but the Spirit Himself maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered.” (R.V.) The earnestness that we work up in the energy of the flesh is a repulsive thing. The earnestness wrought in us by the power of the Holy Spirit is pleasing to God. Here again, if we would pray aright, we must look to the Spirit of God to teach us to pray.

It is in this connection that fasting comes. In Dan. 9:3 we read that Daniel set his face “unto the Lord God, to seek by prayer and supplications, with fasting, and sackcloth, and ashes.” There are those who think that fasting belongs to the old dispensation; but when we look at Acts 14:23, and Acts 13:2,3, we find that it was practised by the earnest men of the apostolic day.

If we would pray with power, we should pray with fasting. This of course does not mean that we should fast every time we pray; but there are times of emergency or special crisis in work or in our individual lives, when men of downright earnestness will withdraw themselves even from the gratification of natural appetites that would be perfectly proper under other circumstances, that they may give themselves up wholly to prayer. There is a peculiar power in such prayer. Every great crisis in life and work should be met in that way. There is nothing pleasing to God in our giving up in a purely Pharisaic and legal way things which are pleasant, but there is power in that downright earnestness and determination to obtain in prayer the things of which we sorely feel our need, that leads us to put away everything, even the things in themselves most right and necessary, that we may set our faces to find God, and obtain blessings from Him.

3. A third secret of right praying is also found in this same verse, Acts 12:5. It appears in the three words “OF THE CHURCH.”

There is power in UNITED PRAYER. Of course there is power in the prayer of an individual, but there is vastly increased power in united prayer. God delights in the unity of His people, and seeks to emphasize it in every way, and so He pronounces a special blessing upon united prayer. We read in Matt. 18:19, “If two of you shall agree on earth as touching anything that they shall ask, it shall be done for them of My Father which is in heaven.” This unity, however, must be real. The passage just quoted does not say that if two shall agree in asking, but if two shall agree AS TOUCHING anything they shall ask. Two persons might agree to ask for the same thing, and yet there be no real agreement as touching the thing they asked. One might ask it because he really desired it, the other might ask it simply to please his friend. But where there is real agreement, where the Spirit of God brings two believers into perfect harmony as concerning that which they may ask of God, where the Spirit lays the same burden on two hearts; in all such prayer there is absolutely irresistible power.

.

Back to Top

CHAPTER III

OBEYING AND PRAYING

1. One of the most significant verses in the Bible on prayer is 1_John 3:22. John says, “And whatsoever we ask, we receive of Him, because we keep His commandments, and do those things that are pleasing in His sight.”

What an astounding statement! John says in so many words, that everything he asked for he got. How many of us can say this: “Whatsoever I ask I receive”? But John explains why this was so, “Because we keep His commandments, and do those things that are pleasing in His sight.” In other words, the one who expects God to do as he asks Him, must on his part DO WHATEVER GOD BIDS HIM. If we give a listening ear to all God’s commands to us, He will give a listening ear to all our petitions to Him. If, on the other hand, we turn a deaf ear to His precepts, He will be likely to turn a deaf ear to our prayers. Here we find the secret of much unanswered prayer. We are not listening to God’s Word, and therefore He is not listening to our petitions.

I was once speaking to a woman who had been a professed Christian, but had given it all up. I asked her why she was not a Christian still. She replied, because she did not believe the Bible. I asked her why she did not believe the Bible.

“Because I have tried its promises and found them untrue.”

“Which promises?”

“The promises about prayer.”

“Which promises about prayer?”

“Does it not say in the Bible, ‘Whatsoever ye ask believing ye shall receive’?”

“It says something nearly like that.”

“Well, I asked fully expecting to get and did not receive, so the promise failed.”

“Was the promise made to you?”

“Why, certainly, it is made to all Christians, is it not?”

“No, God carefully defines who the ‘ye’s’ are, whose believing prayers He agrees to answer.”

I then turned her to 1_John 3:22, and read the description of those whose prayers had power with God.

“Now,” I said, “were you keeping His commandments and doing those things which are pleasing in His sight?”

She frankly confessed that she was not, and soon came to see that the real difficulty was not with God’s promises, but with herself. That is the difficulty with many an unanswered prayer to-day: the one who offers it is not obedient.

If we would have power in prayer, we must be earnest students of His Word to find out what His will regarding us is, and then having found it, do it. One unconfessed act of disobedience on our part will shut the ear of God against many petitions.

2. But this verse goes beyond the mere keeping of God’s commandments. John tells us that we must DO THOSE THINGS THAT ARE PLEASING IN HIS SIGHT.

There are many things which it would be pleasing to God for us to do which He has not specifically commanded us. A true child is not content with merely doing those things which his father specifically commands him to do. He studies to know his father’s will, and if he thinks that there is any thing that he can do that would please his father, he does it gladly, though his father has never given him any specific order to do it. So it is with the true child of God. He does not ask merely whether certain things are commanded or certain things forbidden. He studies to know his Father’s will in all things.

There are many Christians to-day who are doing things that are not pleasing to God, and leaving undone things which would be pleasing to God. When you speak to them about these things they will confront you at once with the question, “Is there any command in the Bible not to do this thing?” And if you cannot show them some verse in which the matter in question is plainly forbidden, they think they are under no obligation whatever to give it up; but a true child of God does not demand a specific command. If we make it our study to find out and to do the things which are pleasing to God, He will make His study to do the things which are pleasing to us. Here again we find the explanation of much unanswered prayer: We are not making it the study of our lives to know what would please our Father, and so our prayers are not answered.

Take as an illustration of questions that are constantly coming up, the matter of theater going, dancing and the use of tobacco. Many who are indulging in these things will ask you triumphantly if you speak against them, “Does the Bible say, ‘Thou shalt not go to the theater’?” “Does the Bible say,’Thou shalt not dance’?” “Does the Bible say,’Thou shalt not smoke’?” That is not the question. The question is, Is our heavenly Father well pleased when He sees one of His children in the theater, at the dance, or smoking? That is a question for each to decide for himself, prayerfully, seeking light from the Holy Spirit. “Where is the harm in these things?” many ask. It is aside from our purpose to go into the general question, but beyond a doubt there is this great harm in many a case; they rob our prayers of power.

3. Psalm 145:18 throws a great deal of light on the question of how to pray: “The Lord is nigh unto all them that call upon Him, to all that call upon Him in truth.”

That little expression “in truth” is worthy of study. If you will take your concordance and go through the Bible, you will find that this expression means “in reality,” “in sincerity.” The prayer that God answers is the prayer that is real, the prayer that asks for something that is sincerely desired.

Much prayer is insincere. People ask for things which they do not wish. Many a woman is praying for the conversion of her husband, who does not really wish her husband to be converted. She thinks that she does, but if she knew what would be involved in the conversion of her husband, how it would necessitate an entire revolution in his manner of doing business, and how consequently it would reduce their income and make necessary an entire change in their method of living, the real prayer of her heart would be, if she were to be sincere with God:

“O God, do not convert my husband.”

She does not wish his conversion at so great cost.

Many a church is praying for a revival that does not really desire a revival. They think they do, for to their minds a revival means an increase of membership, an increase of income, an increase of reputation among the churches, but if they knew what a real revival meant, what a searching of hearts on the part of professed Christians would be involved, what a radical transformation of individual, domestic and social life would be brought about, and many other things that would come to pass if the Spirit of God was poured out in reality and power; if all this were known, the real cry of the church would be:

“O God, keep us from having a revival.”

Many a minister is praying for the baptism with the Holy Spirit who does not really desire it. He things he does, for the baptism with the Spirit means to him new joy, new power in preaching the Word, a wider reputation among men, a larger prominence in the church of Christ. But if he understood what a baptism with the Holy Spirit really involved, how for example it would necessarily bring him into antagonism with the world, and with unspiritual Christians, how it would cause his name to be “cast out as evil,” how it might necessitate his leaving a good comfortable living and going down to work in the slums, or even in some foreign land; if he understood all this, his prayer quite likely would be–if he were to express the real wish of his heart,–

“O God, save me from being baptized with the Holy Ghost.”

But when we do come to the place where we really desire the conversion of friends at any cost, really desire the outpouring of the Holy Spirit whatever it may involve, really desire the baptism with the Holy Ghost come what may, where we desire anything “in truth” and then call upon God for it “in truth,” God is going to hear.

.

Back to Top

CHAPTER IV

PRAYING IN THE NAME OF CHRIST AND ACCORDING TO THE WILL OF GOD

1. It was a wonderful word about prayer that Jesus spoke to His disciples on the night before His crucifixion, “Whatsoever ye shall ask IN MY NAME, that will I do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If ye shall ask anything in My name, I will do it.”

Prayer in the name of Christ has power with God. God is well pleased with His Son Jesus Christ. He hears Him always, and He also hears always the prayer that is really in His name. There is a fragrance in the name of Christ that makes acceptable to God every prayer that bears it.

But what is it to pray in the name of Christ?

Many explanations have been attempted that to ordinary minds do not explain. But there is nothing mystical or mysterious about this expression. If one will go through the Bible and examine all the passages in which the expression “in My name” or “in His name” or synonymous expressions are used, he will find that it means just about what it does in modern usage. If I go to a bank and hand in a check with my name signed to it, I ask of that bank IN MY OWN NAME. If I have money deposited in that bank, the check will be cashed; if not, it will not be. If, however, I go to a bank with somebody else’s name signed to the check, I am asking IN HIS NAME, and it does not matter whether I have money in that bank or any other, if the person whose name is signed to the check has money there, the check will be cashed.

If, for example, I should go to the First National Bank of Chicago, and present a check which I had signed for $50.00, the paying teller would say to me:

“Why, Mr. Torrey, we cannot cash that. You have no money in this bank.”

But if I should go to the First National Bank with a check for $5,000.00 made payable to me, and signed by one of the large depositors in that bank, they would not ask whether I had money in that bank or in any bank, but would honor the check at once.

So it is when I go to the bank of heaven, when I go to God in prayer. I have nothing deposited there, I have absolutely no credit there, and if I go in my own name I will get absolutely nothing; but Jesus Christ has unlimited credit in heaven, and He has granted to me the privilege of going to the bank with His name on my checks, and when I thus go, my prayers will be honored to any extent.

To pray then in the name of Christ is to pray on the ground, not of my credit, but His; to renounce the thought that I have any claims on God whatever, and approach Him on the ground of God’s claims. Praying in the name of Christ is not merely adding the phrase “I ask these things in Jesus’ name” to my prayer. I may put that phrase in my prayer and really be resting in my own merit all the time. But when I really do approach God, not on the ground of my merit, but on the ground of Christ’s merit, not on the ground of my goodness, but on the ground of the atoning blood (Heb. 10:19), God will hear me. Very much of our modern prayer is vain because men approach God imagining that they have some claim upon God whereby He is under obligations to answer their prayers.

Years ago when Mr. Moody was young in Christian work, he visited a town in Illinois. A judge in the town was an infidel. This judge’s wife besought Mr. Moody to call upon her husband, but Mr. Moody replied:

“I cannot talk with your husband. I am only an uneducated young Christian, and your husband is a book infidel.”

But the wife would not take no for an answer, so Mr. Moody made the call. The clerks in the outer office tittered as the young salesman from Chicago went in to talk with the scholarly judge.

The conversation was short. Mr. Moody said:

“Judge, I can’t talk with you. You are a book infidel, and I have no learning, but I simply want to say if you are ever converted, I want you to let me know.”

The judge replied: “Yes, young man, if I am ever converted I will let you know. Yes, I will let you know.”

The conversation ended. The clerks tittered still louder when the zealous young Christian left the office, but the judge was converted within a year. Mr. Moody visiting the town again asked the judge to explain how it came about. The judge said:

“One night, when my wife was at prayer meeting, I began to grow very uneasy and miserable. I did not know what was the matter with me, but finally retired before my wife come home. I could not sleep all that night. I got up early, told my wife that I would eat no breakfast, and went down to the office. I told the clerks they could take a holiday, and shut myself up in the inner office. I kept growing more and more miserable, and finally I got down and asked God to forgive my sins, but I would not say `for Jesus’ sake,’ for I was a Unitarian and I did not believe in the atonement. I kept praying ‘God forgive my sins’; but no answer came. At last in desperation I cried, ‘O God, for Christ’s sake forgive my sins,’ and found peace at once.”

The judge had no access to God until he came in the name of Christ, but when he thus came, he was heard and answered at once.

2. Great light is thrown upon the subject “How to Pray” by 1_John 5:14,15: “And this is the boldness which we have toward Him, that if we ask anything ACCORDING TO HIS WILL, He heareth us; and if we know that He heareth us whatsoever we ask, we know that we have the petitions which we have asked of Him.” (R.V.)

This passage teaches us plainly that if we are to pray aright, we must pray according to God’s will, then will we beyond a peradventure get the thing we ask of Him.

But can we know the will of God? Can we know that any specific prayer is according to His will?

We most surely can.

How?

(1) First by the Word. God has revealed His will in His Word. When anything is definitely promised in the Word of God, we know that it is His will to give that thing. If then when I pray, I can find some definite promise of God’s Word and lay that promise before God, I know that He hears me, and if I know that He hears me, I know that I have the petition that I have asked of Him. For example, when I pray for wisdom I know that it is the will of God to give me wisdom, for He says so in James 1:5: “If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, that giveth to all men liberally, and upbraideth not; and it shall be given him.” So when I ask for wisdom I know that the prayer is heard, and that wisdom will be given me. In like manner when I pray for the Holy Spirit I know from Luke 11:13 that it is God’s will, that my prayer is heard, and that I have the petition that I have asked of Him: “If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to them that ask Him?”

Some years ago a minister came to me at the close of an address on prayer at a Y.M.C.A. Bible school, and said,

“You have produced upon those young men the impression that they can ask for definite things and get the very things that they ask.”
I replied that I did not know whether that was the impression that I produced or not, but that was certainly the impression that I desired to produce.

“But,” he replied, “that is not right. We cannot be sure, for we don’t know God’s will.”

I turned him at once to James 1:5, read it and said to him, “Is it not God’s will to give us wisdom, and if you ask for wisdom do you not know that you are going to get it?”

“Ah!” he said, “we don’t know what wisdom is.” I said, “No, if we did, we would not need to ask; but whatever wisdom may be, don’t you know that you will get it?”

Certainly it is our privilege to know. When we have a specific promise in the Word of God, if we doubt that it is God’s will, or if we doubt that God will do the thing that we ask, we make God a liar.

Here is one of the greatest secrets of prevailing prayer: To study the Word to find what God’s will is as revealed there in the promises, and then simply take these promises and spread them out before God in prayer with the absolutely unwavering expectation that He will do what He has promised in His Word.

(2) But there is still another way in which we may know the will of God, that is, by the teaching of His Holy Spirit. There are many things that we need from God which are not covered by any specific promise, but we are not left in ignorance of the will of God even then. In Rom. 8:26,27 we are told, “And in like manner the Spirit also helpeth our infirmity: for we know not how to pray as we ought; but the Spirit Himself maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered; and He that searcheth the hearts knoweth what is the mind of the spirit, because He maketh intercession for the saints ACCORDING TO THE WILL OF GOD.” (R.V.) Here we are distinctly told that the Spirit of God prays in us, draws out our prayer, in the line of God’s will. When we are thus led out by the Holy Spirit in any direction, to pray for any given object, we may do it in all confidence that it is God’s will, and that we are to get the very thing we ask of Him, even though there is no specific promise to cover the case. Often God by His Spirit lays upon us a heavy burden of prayer for some given individual. We cannot rest, we pray for him with groanings which cannot be uttered. Perhaps the man is entirely beyond our reach, but God hears the prayer, and in many a case it is not long before we hear of his definite conversion.

The passage 1_John 5:14,15 is one of the most abused passages in the Bible: “This is THE CONFIDENCE that we have in Him, that, if we ask anything according to His will, He heareth us; and if we know that He hear us, whatsoever we ask, we know that we have the petitions that we desired of Him.” The Holy Spirit beyond a doubt put it into the Bible to encourage our faith. It begins with “This is THE CONFIDENCE that we have in Him,” and closes with “WE KNOW that we have the petitions that we desired of Him;” but one of the most frequent usages of this passage, which was so manifestly given to beget confidence, is to introduce an element of uncertainty into our prayers. Oftentimes when one waxes confident in prayer, some cautious brother will come and say:

“Now, don’t be too confident. If it is God’s will He will do it. You should put in, `If it be Thy will.’”

Doubtless there are many times when we do not know the will of God, and in all prayer submission to the excellent will of God should underlie it; but when we know God’s will, there need be no “ifs”; and this passage was not put into the Bible in order that we might introduce “ifs” into all our prayers, but in order that we might throw our “ifs” to the wind, and have “CONFIDENCE” and “KNOW that we have the petitions which we have asked of Him.”

.

Back to Top

CHAPTER V

PRAYING IN THE SPIRIT

1. Over and over again in what has already been said, we have seen our dependence upon the Holy Spirit in prayer. This comes out very definitely in Eph. 6:18, “Praying always with all prayer and supplication IN THE SPIRIT,” and in Jude 20, “Praying IN THE HOLY GHOST.” Indeed the whole secret of prayer is found in these three words, “in the Spirit.” It is the prayer that God the Holy Spirit inspires that God the Father answers.

The disciples did not know how to pray as they ought, so they came to Jesus and said,”Lord teach us to pray.” We know not how to pray as we ought, but we have another Teacher and Guide right at hand to help us (John 14:16,17), “The Spirit helpeth our infirmity” (Rom. 8:26, R.V.). He teaches us how to pray. True prayer is prayer in the Spirit; that is, the prayer the Spirit inspires and directs. When we come into God’s presence we should recognize “our infirmity,” our ignorance of what we should pray for or how we should pray for it, and in the consciousness of our utter inability to pray aright we should look up to the Holy Spirit, casting ourselves utterly upon Him to direct our prayers, to lead out our desires and to guide our utterance of them.

Nothing can be more foolish in prayer than to rush heedlessly into God’s presence, and ask the first thing that comes into our mind, or that some thoughtless friend has asked us to pray for. When we first come into God’s presence we should be silent before Him. We should look up to Him to send His Holy Spirit to teach us how to pray. We must wait for the Holy Spirit, and surrender ourselves to the Spirit, then we shall pray aright.

Oftentimes when we come to God in prayer, we do not feel like praying. What shall one do in such a case? cease praying until he does feel like it? Not at all. When we feel least like praying is the time when we most need to pray. We should wait quietly before God and tell Him how cold and prayerless our hearts are, and look up to Him and trust Him and expect Him to send the Holy Spirit to warm our hearts and draw them out in prayer. It will not be long before the glow of the Spirit’s presence will fill our hearts, and we will begin to pray with freedom, directness, earnestness and power. Many of the most blessed seasons of prayer I have ever known have begun with a feeling of utter deadness and prayerlessness, but in my helplessness and coldness I have cast myself upon God, and looked to Him to send His Holy Spirit to teach me to pray, and He has done it.

When we pray in the Spirit, we will pray for the right things and in the right way. There will be joy and power in our prayer.

2. If we are to pray with power we must pray WITH FAITH. In Mark 11:24 Jesus says, “Therefore I say unto you, What things soever ye desire, when ye pray, believe that ye receive them, and ye shall have them.” No matter how positive any promise of God’s Word may be, we will not enjoy it in actual experience unless we confidently expect its fulfillment in answer to our prayer. “If any of you lack wisdom,” says James, “let him ask of God that giveth to all men liberally, and upbraideth not; and it shall be given him.” Now that promise is as positive as a promise can be, but the next verse adds, “But let him ask in faith, nothing doubting: for he that doubteth is like the surge of the sea driven by the wind and tossed. For let not that man think that he shall receive anything of the Lord.” (R.V.) There must then be confident unwavering expectation. But there is a faith that goes beyond expectation, that believes that the prayer is heard and the promise granted. This comes out in the Revised Version of Mark 11:24, “Therefore I say unto you, All things whatsoever ye pray and ask for, believe that ye HAVE received them, and ye shall have them.”

But how can one get this faith?

Let us say with all emphasis, it cannot be pumped up. Many a one reads this promise about the prayer of faith, and then asks for things that he desires and tries to make himself believe that God has heard the prayer. This ends only in disappointment, for it is not real faith and the thing is not granted. It is at this point that many people make a collapse of faith altogether by trying to work up faith by an effort of their will, and as the thing they made themselves believe they expected to get is not given, the very foundation of faith is oftentimes undermined.

But how does real faith come?

Rom 10:17 answers the question: “So then faith cometh by hearing, and hearing BY THE WORD OF GOD.” If we are to have real faith, we must study the Word of God and find out what is promised, then simply believe the promises of God. Faith must have a warrant. Trying to believe something that you want to believe is not faith. Believing what God says in His Word is faith. If I am to have faith when I pray, I must find some promise in the Word of God on which to rest my faith. Faith furthermore comes through the Spirit. The Spirit knows the will of God, and if I pray in the Spirit, and look to the Spirit to teach me God’s will, He will lead me out in prayer along the line of that will, and give me faith that the prayer is to be answered; but in no case does real faith come by simply determining that you are going to get the thing that you want to get.

If there is no promise in the Word of God, and no clear leading of the Spirit, there can be no real faith, and there should be no upbraiding of self for lack of faith in such a case. But if the thing desired is promised in the Word of God, we may well upbraid ourselves for lack of faith if we doubt; for we are making God a liar by doubting His Word.

.

Back to Top

CHAPTER VI

ALWAYS PRAYING AND NOT FAINTING

In two parables in the Gospel of Luke, Jesus teaches with great emphasis the lesson that men ought always to pray and not to faint. The first parable is found in Luke 11:5-8, and the other in Luke 18:1-8.

“And He said unto them, Which of you shall have a friend, and shall go unto him at midnight, and say unto him: ‘Friend, lend me three loaves; for a friend of mine in his journey is come to me, and I have nothing to set before him?’ And he from within shall answer and say: ‘Trouble me not: the door is now shut, and my children are with me in bed. I cannot rise and give thee.’ I say unto you, Though he will not rise and give him because he is his friend, yet because of his importunity he will rise and give him as many as he needeth.” (Luke 11:5-8)

“And He spake a parable unto them to this end, that men always ought to pray and not to faint, saying: There was in a city a judge which feared not God, neither regarded man; and there was a widow in that city; and she came to him, saying:

“‘Avenge me of mine adversary.’

“And he would not for a while; but afterward he said within himself: ‘Though I fear not God, nor regard man, yet because this widow troubleth me I will avenge her, lest by her continual coming she weary me.’

“And the Lord said, Hear what the unjust judge saith. And shall not God avenge his own elect, which cry day and night unto Him, though He bear long with them? I tell you that He will avenge them speedily. Nevertheless when the Son of man cometh, shall He find faith on the earth?” (Luke 18:1-8)

In the former of these two parables Jesus sets forth the necessity of importunity in prayer in a startling way. The word rendered “importunity” means literally “shamelessness,” as if Jesus would have us understand that God would have us draw nigh to Him with a determination to obtain the things we seek that will not be put to shame by any seeming refusal or delay on God’s part. God delights in the holy boldness that will not take “no” for an answer. It is an expression of great faith, and nothing pleases God more than faith.

Jesus seemed to put the Syro-Phoenician woman away almost with rudeness, but she would not be put away, and Jesus looked upon her shameless importunity with pleasure, and said, “O woman, great is thy faith; be it unto thee even as thou wilt.” (Matt. 15:28) God does not always let us get things at our first effort. He would train us and make us strong men by compelling us to work hard for the best things. So also He does not always give us what we ask in answer to the first prayer; He would train us and make us strong men of prayer by compelling us to pray hard for the best things. He makes us PRAY THROUGH.

I am glad that this is so. There is no more blessed training in prayer than that that comes through being compelled to ask again and again and again even through a long period of years before one obtains that which he seeks from God. Many people call it submission to the will of God when God does not grant them their requests at the first or second asking, and they say:

“Well, perhaps it is not God’s will.”

As a rule this is not submission, but spiritual laziness. We do not call it submission to the will of God when we give up after one or two efforts to obtain things by action; we call it lack of strength of character. When the strong man of action starts out to accomplish a thing, if he does not accomplish it the first, or second or one hundredth time, he keeps hammering away until he does accomplish it; and the strong man of prayer when he starts to pray for a thing keeps on praying until he prays it through, and obtains what he seeks. We should be careful about what we ask from God, but when we do begin to pray for a thing we should never give up praying for it until we get it, or until God makes it very clear and very definite to us that it is not His will to give it.

Some would have us believe that it shows unbelief to pray twice for the same thing, that we ought to “take it” the first time that we ask. Doubtless there are times when we are able through faith in the Word or the leading of the Holy Spirit to CLAIM the first time that which we have asked of God; but beyond question there are other times when we must pray again and again and again for the same thing before we get our answer. Those who have gotten beyond praying twice for the same thing have gotten beyond their Master, (Matt. 26:44). George Muller prayed for two men daily for upwards of sixty years. One of these men was converted shortly before his death, I think at the last service that George Muller held, the other was converted within a year after his death. One of the great needs of the present day is men and women who will not only start out to pray for things, but pray on and on and on until they obtain that which they seek from the Lord.

.

Back to Top

CHAPTER VII

ABIDING IN CHRIST

“If ye abide in Me, and My words abide in you, ye shall ask what ye will, and it shall be done unto you.” (John 15:7) The whole secret of prayer is found in these words of our Lord. Here is prayer that has unbounded power: “Ask WHAT YE WILL, and it shall be done unto you.”

There is a way then of asking and getting precisely what we ask and getting all we ask. Christ gives two conditions of this all- prevailing prayer:

1. The first condition is, “If ye abide in Me.”

What is it to abide in Christ?

Some explanations that have been given of this are so mystical or so profound that to many simple-minded children of God they mean practically nothing at all; but what Jesus meant was really very simple.

He had been comparing Himself to a vine, His disciples to the branches in the vine. Some branches continued in the vine, that is, remained in living union with the vine, so that the sap or life of the vine constantly flowed into these branches. They had no independent life of their own. Everything in them was simply the outcome of the life of the vine flowing into them. Their buds, their leaves, their blossoms, their fruit, were really not theirs, but the buds, leaves, blossoms and fruit of the vine. Other branches were completely severed from the vine, or else the flow of the sap or life of the vine into them was in some way hindered. Now for us to abide in Christ is for us to bear the same relation to Him that the first sort of branches bear to the vine; that is to say, to abide in Christ is to renounce any independent life of our own, to give up trying to think our thoughts, or form our resolutions, or cultivate our feelings, and simply and constantly look to Christ to think His thoughts in us, to form His purposes in us, to feel His emotions and affections in us. It is to renounce all life independent of Christ, and constantly to look to Him for the inflow of His life into us, and the outworking of His life through us. When we do this, and in so far as we do this, our prayers will obtain that which we seek from God.

This must necessarily be so, for our desires will not be our own desires, but Christ’s, and our prayers will not in reality be our own prayers, but Christ praying in us. Such prayers will always be in harmony with God’s will, and the Father heareth Him always. When our prayers fail it is because they are indeed our prayers. We have conceived the desire and framed the petition of ourselves, instead of looking to Christ to pray through us.

To say that one should be abiding in Christ in all his prayers, looking to Christ to pray through Him rather than praying himself, is simply saying in another way that one should pray “in the Spirit.” When we thus abide in Christ, our thoughts are not our own thoughts, but His, our joys are not our own joys, but His, our fruit is not our own fruit, but His; just as the buds, leaves, blossoms and fruit of the branch that abides in the vine are not the buds, leaves, blossoms and fruit of the branch, but of the vine itself whose life is flowing into the branch and manifests itself in these buds, leaves, blossoms and fruit.

To abide in Christ, one must of course already be in Christ through the acceptance of Christ as an atoning Savior from the guilt of sin, a risen Savior from the power of sin, and a Lord and Master over all his life. Being in Christ, all that we have to do to abide (or continue) in Christ is simply to renounce our self-life–utterly renouncing every thought, every purpose, every desire, every affection of our own, and just looking day by day and hour by hour for Jesus Christ to form His thoughts, His purposes, His affections, His desires in us. Abiding in Christ is really a very simple matter, though it is a wonderful life of privilege and of power.

2. But there is another condition stated in this verse, though it is really involved in the first: “And My words abide in you.”

If we are to obtain from God all that we ask from Him, Christ’s words must abide or continue in us. We must study His words, fairly devour His words, let them sink into our thought and into our heart, keep them in our memory, obey them constantly in our life, let them shape and mold our daily life and our every act.

This is really the method of abiding in Christ. It is through His words that Jesus imparts Himself to us. The words He speaks unto us, they are spirit and they are life. (John 6:33) It is vain to expect power in prayer unless we meditate much upon the words of Christ, and let them sink deep and find a permanent abode in our hearts. There are many who wonder why they are so powerless in prayer, but the very simple explanation of it all is found in their neglect of the words of Christ. They have not hidden His words in their hearts; His words do not abide in them. It is not by seasons of mystical meditation and rapturous experiences that we learn to abide in Christ; it is by feeding upon His word, His written word as found in the Bible, and looking to the Holy Spirit to implant these words in our hearts and to make them a living thing in our hearts. If we thus let the words of Christ abide in us, they will stir us up in prayer. They will be the mold in which our prayers are shaped, and our prayers will be necessarily along the line of God’s will, and will prevail with Him. Prevailing prayer is almost an impossibility where there is neglect of the study of the Word of God.

Mere intellectual study of the Word of God is not enough; there must be meditation upon it. The Word of God must be revolved over and over and over in the mind, with a constant looking to God by His Spirit to make that Word a living thing in the heart. The prayer that is born of meditation upon the Word of God is the prayer that soars upward most easily to God’s listening ear.

George Muller, one of the mightiest men of prayer of the present generation, when the hour for prayer came would begin by reading and meditating upon God’s Word until out of the study of the Word a prayer began to form itself in his heart. Thus God Himself was a real author of the prayer, and God answered the prayers which He Himself had inspired.

The Word of God is the instrument through which the Holy Spirit works, it is the sword of the Spirit in more senses than one; and the one who would know the work of the Holy Spirit in any direction must feed upon the Word. The one who would pray in the Spirit must meditate much upon the Word, that the Holy Spirit may have something through which He can work. The Holy Spirit works His prayers in us through the Word, and neglect of the Word makes praying in the Holy Spirit an impossibility. If we would feed the fire of our prayers with the fuel of God’s Word, all our difficulties in prayer would disappear.

.

Back to Top

CHAPTER VIII

PRAYING WITH THANKSGIVING

There are two words often overlooked in the lesson about prayer which Paul gives us in Phil. 4:6,7, “In nothing be anxious; but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known unto God. And the peace of God, which passeth all understanding, shall guard your hearts and your thoughts in Christ Jesus.” (R.V.) The two important words often overlooked are, “WITH THANKSGIVING.”

In approaching God to ask for new blessings, we should never forget to return thanks for blessings already granted. If any one of us would stop and think how many of the prayers which we have offered to God have been answered, and how seldom we have gone back to God to return thanks for the answers thus given, I am sure we would be overwhelmed with confusion. We should be just as definite in returning thanks as we are in prayer. We come to God with most specific petitions, but when we return thanks to Him, our thanksgiving is indefinite and general.

Doubtless one reason why so many of our prayers lack power is because we have neglected to return thanks for blessings already received. If any one were to constantly come to us asking help from us, and should never say “Thank you” for the help thus given, we would soon tire of helping one so ungrateful. Indeed, regard for the one we were helping would hold us back from encouraging such rank ingratitude. Doubtless our heavenly Father out of a wise regard for our highest welfare oftentimes refuses to answer petitions that we send up to Him in order that we may be brought to a sense of our ingratitude and taught to be thankful.

God is deeply grieved by the thanklessness and ingratitude of which so many of us are guilty. When Jesus healed the ten lepers and only one came back to give Him thanks, in wonderment and pain He exclaimed,

“Were not the ten cleansed? but where are the nine?” (Luke 17:17, R.V.)

How often must He look down upon us in sadness at our forgetfulness of His repeated blessings, and His frequent answer to our prayers.

Returning thanks for blessings already received increases our faith and enables us to approach God with new boldness and new assurance. Doubtless the reason so many have so little faith when they pray, is because they take so little time to meditate upon and thank God for blessings already received. As one meditates upon the answers to prayers already granted, faith waxes bolder and bolder, and we come to feel in the very depths of our souls that there is nothing too hard for the Lord. As we reflect upon the wondrous goodness of God toward us on the one hand, and upon the other hand upon the little thought and strength and time that we ever put into thanksgiving, we may well humble ourselves before God and confess our sin.

The mighty men of prayer in the Bible, and the mighty men of prayer throughout the ages of the church’s history have been men who were much given to thanksgiving and praise. David was a mighty man of prayer, and how his Psalms abound with thanksgiving and praise. The apostles were mighty men of prayer; of them we read that “they were continually in the temple, praising and blessing God.” Paul was a mighty man of prayer, and how often in his epistles he bursts out in definite thanksgiving to God for definite blessings and definite answers to prayers. Jesus is our model in prayer as in everything else. We find in the study of His life that His manner of returning thanks at the simplest meal was so noticeable that two of His disciples recognized Him by this after His resurrection.

Thanksgiving is one of the inevitable results of being filled with the Holy Spirit and one who does not learn “in everything to give thanks” cannot continue to pray in the Spirit. If we would learn to pray with power we would do well to let these two words sink deep into our hearts: “WITH THANKSGIVING.”

.

Back to Top

CHAPTER IX

HINDRANCES TO PRAYER

We have gone very carefully into the positive conditions of prevailing prayer; but there are some things which hinder prayer. These God has made very plain in His Word.

1. The first hindrance to prayer we will find in James 4:3, “Ye ask and receive not BECAUSE YE ASK AMISS, THAT YE MAY SPEND IT IN YOUR PLEASURES.”

A selfish purpose in prayer robs prayer of power. Very many prayers are selfish. These may be prayers for things for which it is perfectly proper to ask, for things which it is the will of God to give, but the motive of the prayer is entirely wrong, and so the prayer falls powerless to the ground. The true purpose in prayer is that God may be glorified in the answer. If we ask any petition merely that we may receive something to use in our pleasures or in our own gratification in one way or another, we “ask amiss” and need not expect to receive what we ask. This explains why many prayers remain unanswered.

For example, many a woman is praying for the conversion of her husband. That certainly is a most proper thing to ask; but many a woman’s motive in asking for the conversion of her husband is entirely improper, it is selfish. She desires that her husband may be converted because it would be so much more pleasant for her to have a husband who sympathized with her; or it is so painful to think that her husband might die and be lost forever. For some such selfish reason as this she desires to have her husband converted. The prayer is purely selfish. Why should a woman desire the conversion of her husband? First of all and above all, that God may be glorified; because she cannot bear the thought that God the Father should be dishonored by her husband trampling underfoot the Son of God.

Many pray for a revival. That certainly is a prayer that is pleasing to God, it is along the line of His will; but many prayers for revivals are purely selfish. The churches desire revivals in order that the membership may be increased, in order that the church may have a position of more power and influence in the community, in order that the church treasury may be filled, in order that a good report may be made at the presbytery or conference or association. For such low purposes as these, churches and ministers oftentimes are praying for a revival, and oftentimes too God does not answer the prayer. Why should we pray for a revival? For the glory of God, because we cannot endure it that God should continue to be dishonored by the worldliness of the church, by the sins of unbelievers, by the proud unbelief of the day; because God’s Word is being made void; in order that God may be glorified by the outpouring of His Spirit on the Church of Christ. For these reasons first of all and above all, we should pray for a revival.

Many a prayer for the Holy Spirit is a purely selfish prayer. It certainly is God’s will to give the Holy Spirit to them that ask Him–He has told us so plainly in His Word (Luke 11:13), but many a prayer for the Holy Spirit is hindered by the selfishness of the motive that lies back of the prayer. Men and women pray for the Holy Spirit in order that they may be happy, or in order that they may be saved from the wretchedness of defeat in their lives, or in order that they may have power as Christian workers, or for some other purely selfish motive. Why should we pray for the Spirit? In order that God may no longer be dishonored by the low level of our Christian lives and by our ineffectiveness in service, in order that God may be glorified in the new beauty that comes into our lives and the new power that comes into our service.

2. The second hindrance to prayer we find in Is. 59:1,2: “Behold, the Lord’s hand is not shortened, that it cannot save; neither His ear heavy, that it cannot hear. But YOUR INIQUITIES HAVE SEPARATED BETWEEN YOU AND YOUR GOD, and YOUR SINS HAVE HID HIS FACE FROM YOU, THAT HE WILL NOT HEAR.”…

Sin hinders prayer. Many a man prays and prays and prays, and gets absolutely no answer to his prayer. Perhaps he is tempted to think that it is not the will of God to answer, or he may think that the days when God answered prayer, if He ever did, are over. So the Israelites seem to have thought. They thought that the Lord’s hand was shortened, that it could not save, and that His ear had become heavy that it could no longer hear.

“Not so,” said Isaiah, “God’s ear is just as open to hear as ever, His hand just as mighty to save; but there is a hindrance. That hindrance is your own sins. Your iniquities have separated between you and your God, and your sins have hid His face from you that He will not hear.”

It is so to-day. Many and many a man is crying to God in vain, simply because of sin in his life. It may be some sin in the past that has been unconfessed and unjudged, it may be some sin in the present that is cherished, very likely is not even looked upon as sin, but there the sin is, hidden away somewhere in the heart or in the life, and God “will not hear.”

Any one who finds his prayers ineffective should not conclude that the thing which he asks of God is not according to His will, but should go alone with God with the Psalmist’s prayer, “Search me, O God, and know my heart: try me, and know my thoughts: and see if there be any wicked way in me” (Ps. 139:23,24), and wait before Him until He puts His finger upon the thing that is displeasing in His sight. Then this sin should be confessed and put away.

I well remember a time in my life when I was praying for two definite things that it seemed that I must have, or God would be dishonored; but the answer did not come. I awoke in the middle of the night in great physical suffering and great distress of soul. I cried to God for these things, reasoned with Him as to how necessary it was that I get them, and get them at once; but no answer came. I asked God to show me if there was anything wrong in my own life. Something came to my mind that had often come to it before, something definite but which I was unwilling to confess as sin. I said to God, “If this is wrong I will give it up”; but still no answer came. In my innermost heart, though I had never admitted it, I knew it was wrong.

At last I said:

“This is wrong. I have sinned. I will give it up.”

I found peace. In a few moments I was sleeping like a child. In the morning I woke well in body, and the money that was so much needed for the honor of God’s name came.

Sin is an awful thing, and one of the most awful things about it is the way it hinders prayer, the way it severs the connection between us and the source of all grace and power and blessing. Any one who would have power in prayer must be merciless in dealing with his own sins. “If I regard iniquity in my heart, the Lord will not hear me.”(Ps. 66:18) So long as we hold on to sin or have any controversy with God, we cannot expect Him to heed our prayers. If there is anything that is constantly coming up in your moments of close communion with God, that is the thing that hinders prayer: put it away.

3. The third hindrance to prayer is found in Ez. 14:3, “Son of man, these men have taken their idols into their heart, and put the stumbling block of their iniquity before their face: should I be inquired of at all by them?”(R.V.) IDOLS IN THE HEART CAUSE GOD TO REFUSE TO LISTEN TO OUR PRAYERS.

What is an idol? An idol is anything that takes the place of God, anything that is the supreme object of our affection. God alone has the right to the supreme place in our hearts. Everything and

everyone else must be subordinate to Him.

Many a man makes an idol of his wife. Not that a man can love his wife any too much, but he can put her in the wrong place, he can put her before God; and when a man regards his wife’s pleasure before God’s pleasure, when he gives her the first place and God the second place, his wife is an idol, and God cannot hear his prayers.

Many a woman makes an idol of her children. Not that we can love our children too much. The more dearly we love Christ, the more dearly we love our children; but we can put our children in the wrong place, we can put them before God, and their interests before God’s interests. When we do this our children are our idols.

Many a man makes an idol of his reputation or his business. Reputation or business is put before God. God cannot hear the prayers of such a man.

One great question for us to decide, if we would have power in prayer is, Is God absolutely first? Is He before wife, before children, before reputation, before business, before our own lives? If not, prevailing prayer is impossible.

God often calls our attention to the fact that we have an idol, by not answering our prayers, and thus leading us to inquire as to why our prayers are not answered, and so we discover the idol, put it away, and God hears our prayers.

4. The fourth hindrance to prayer is found in Prov. 21:13, “WHOSO STOPPETH HIS EARS AT THE CRY OF THE POOR, HE ALSO SHALL CRY HIMSELF, BUT SHALL NOT BE HEARD.”

There is perhaps no greater hindrance to prayer than stinginess, the lack of liberality toward the poor and toward God’s work. It is the one who gives generously to others who receives generously from God. “Give, and it shall be given unto you; good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, shall they give into your bosom. For with what measure ye mete it shall be measured to you again.” (Luke 6:38, R.V.) The generous man is the mighty man of prayer. The stingy man is the powerless man of prayer.

One of the most wonderful statements about prevailing prayer (already referred to) 1_John 3:22, “Whatsoever we ask we receive of Him, because we keep His commandments, and do those things that are pleasing in His sight,” is made in direct connection with generosity toward the needy. In the context we are told that it is when we love, not in word or in tongue, but in deed and in truth, when we open our hearts toward the brother in need, it is then and only then we have confidence toward God in prayer.

Many a man and woman who is seeking to find the secret of their powerlessness in prayer need not seek far; it is nothing more nor less than downright stinginess. George Muller, to whom reference has already been made, was a mighty man of prayer because he was a mighty giver. What he received from God never stuck to his fingers; he immediately passed it on to others. He was constantly receiving because he was constantly giving. When one thinks of the selfishness of the professing church to-day, how the orthodox churches of this land do not average $1.oo per year per member for foreign missions, it is no wonder that the church has so little power in prayer. If we would get from God, we must give to others. Perhaps the most wonderful promise in the Bible in regard to God’s supplying our need is Phil. 4:19, “And my God shall fulfill every need of yours according to His riches in glory in Christ Jesus.” (R.V.) This glorious promise was made to the Philippian church, and made in immediate connection with their generosity.

5. The fifth hindrance to prayer is found in Mark 11:25, “And when ye stand praying, FORGIVE, if ye have ought against any; that your Father also which is in heaven may forgive you your trespasses.”

An unforgiving spirit is one of the commonest hindrances to prayer. Prayer is answered on the basis that our sins are forgiven; and God cannot deal with us on the basis of forgiveness while we are harboring ill-will against those who have wronged us. Any one who is nursing a grudge against another has fast closed the ear of God against his own petition. How many there are crying to God for the conversion of husband, children, friends, and wondering why it is that their prayer is not answered, when the whole secret is some grudge that they have in their hearts against some one who has injured them, or who they fancy has injured them. Many and many a mother and father are allowing their children to go down to eternity unsaved, for the miserable gratification of hating somebody.

6. The sixth hindrance to prayer is found in 1_Peter 3:7, “Ye husbands, in like manner, dwell with your wives according to knowledge, giving honor unto the woman, as unto the weaker vessel as being also joint-heirs of the grace of life; to the end that your prayers be not hindered.” (R.V.) Here we are plainly told that A WRONG RELATION BETWEEN HUSBAND AND WIFE IS A HINDRANCE TO PRAYER.

In many and many a case the prayers of husbands are hindered because of their failure of duty toward their wives. On the other hand, it is also doubtless true that the prayers of wives are hindered because of their failure in duty toward their husbands. If husbands and wives should seek diligently to find the cause of their unanswered prayers, they would often find it in their relations to one another.

Many a man who makes great pretentions to piety, and is very active in Christian work, shows but little consideration in his treatment of his wife, and is oftentimes unkind, if not brutal; then he wonders why it is that his prayers are not answered. The verse that we have just quoted explains the seeming mystery. On the other hand, many a woman who is very devoted to the church, and very faithful in attendance upon all services, treats her husband with the most unpardonable neglect, is cross and peevish toward him, wounds him by the sharpness of her speech, and by her ungovernable temper; then wonders why it is that she has no power in prayer.

There are other things in the relations of husbands and wives which cannot be spoken of publicly, but which doubtless are oftentimes a hindrance in approaching God in prayer. There is much of sin covered up under the holy name of marriage that is a cause of spiritual deadness, and of powerlessness in prayer. Any man or woman whose prayers seem to bring no answer should spread their whole married life out before God, and ask Him to put His finger upon anything in it that is displeasing in His sight.

7. The seventh hindrance to prayer is found in James 1:5-7, “But if any of you lacketh wisdom, let him ask of God, who giveth to all liberally and upbraideth not; and it shall be given him. But let him ask IN FAITH, NOTHING DOUBTING: for he that doubteth is like the surge of the sea driven by the wind and tossed. For let not that man think that he shall receive anything of the Lord.” (R.V.)

Prayers are hindered by unbelief. God demands that we shall believe His Word absolutely. To question it is to make Him a liar. Many of us do that when we plead His promises, and is it any wonder that our prayers are not answered? How many prayers are hindered by our wretched unbelief! We go to God and ask Him for something that is positively promised in His Word, and then we do not more than half expect to get it. “Let not that man think that he shall receive anything of the Lord.”

.

Back to Top

CHAPTER X

WHEN TO PRAY

If we would know the fulness of blessing that there is in the prayer life, it is important not only that we pray in the right way, but also that we pray at the right time. Christ’s own example is full of suggestiveness as to the right time for prayer.

1. In the 1st chapter of Mark, the 35th verse, we read, “And IN THE MORNING, rising up A GREAT WHILE BEFORE DAY, He went out, and departed into a solitary place, and there prayed.”

JESUS CHOSE THE EARLY MORNING HOUR FOR PRAYER. Many of the mightiest men of God have followed the Lord’s example in this. In the morning hour the mind is fresh and at its very best. It is free from distraction, and that absolute concentration upon God which is essential to the most effective prayer is most easily possible in the early morning hours. Furthermore, when the early hours are spent in prayer, the whole day is sanctified, and power is obtained for overcoming its temptations, and for performing its duties. More can be accomplished in prayer in the first hours of the day than at any other time during the day. Every child of God who would make the most out of his life for Christ, should set apart the first part of the day to meeting God in the study of His Word and in prayer. The first thing we do each day should be to go alone with God and face the duties, the temptations, and the service of that day, and get strength from God for all. We should get victory before the hour of trial, temptation or service comes. The secret place of prayer is the place to fight our battles and gain our victories.

2. In the 6th chapter of Luke in the 12th verse, we get further light upon the right time to pray. We read, “And it came to pass in those days, that He went out into a mountain to pray, and continued ALL NIGHT in prayer to God.”

Here we see Jesus praying in the night, spending the entire night in prayer. Of course we have no reason to suppose that this was the constant practice of our Lord, nor do we even know how common this practice was, but there were certainly times when the whole night was given up to prayer. Here too we do well to follow in the footsteps of the Master.

Of course there is a way of setting apart nights for prayer in which there is no profit; it is pure legalism. But the abuse of this practice is no reason for neglecting it altogether. One ought not to say, “I am going to spend a whole night in prayer,” with the thought that there is any merit that will win God’s favor in such an exercise; that is legalism. But we oftentimes do well to say, “I am going to set apart this night for meeting God, and obtaining His blessing and power; and if necessary, and if He so leads me, I will give the whole night to prayer.” Oftentimes we will have prayed things through long before the night has passed, and we can retire and find more refreshing and invigorating sleep than if we had not spent the time in prayer. At other times God doubtless will keep us in communion with Himself away into the morning, and when He does this in His infinite grace, blessed indeed are these hours of night prayer!

Nights of prayer to God are followed by days of power with men. In the night hours the world is hushed in slumber, and we can easily be alone with God and have undisturbed communion with Him. If we set apart the whole night for prayer, there will be no hurry, there will be time for our own hearts to become quiet before God, there will be time for the whole mind to be brought under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, there will be plenty of time to pray things through. A night of prayer should be put entirely under God’s control. We should lay down no rules as to how long we will pray, or as to what we shall pray about, but be ready to wait upon God for a short time or a long time as He may lead, and to be led out in one direction or another as He may see fit.

3. Jesus Christ prayed BEFORE ALL THE GREAT CRISES IN HIS EARTHLY LIFE.

He prayed before choosing the twelve disciples; before the sermon on the mount; before starting out on an evangelistic tour; before His anointing with the Holy Spirit and His entrance upon His public ministry; before announcing to the twelve His approaching death; before the great consummation of His life at the cross. (Luke 6:12,13; Luke 9:18,21,22; Luke 3:21,22; Mark 1:35-38; Luke 22:39 -46.) He prepared for every important crisis by a protracted season of prayer. So ought we to do also. Whenever any crisis of life is seen to be approaching, we should prepare for it by a season of very definite prayer to God. We should take plenty of time for this prayer.

4. Christ prayed not only before the great events and victories of His life, but He also prayed AFTER ITS GREAT ACHIEVEMENTS AND IMPORTANT CRISES.

When He had fed the five thousand with the five loaves and two fishes, and the multitude desired to take Him and make Him king, having sent them away He went up into the mountain apart to pray, and spent hours there alone in prayer to God (Matt. 14:23; Jn. 6:15). So He went on from victory to victory.

It is more common for most of us to pray before the great events of life than it is to pray after them, but the latter is as important as the former. If we would pray after the great achievements of life, we might go on to still greater; as it is we are often either puffed up or exhausted by the things that we do in the name of the Lord, and so we advance no further. Many and many a man in answer to prayer has been endued with power and thus has wrought great things in the name of the Lord, and when these great things were accomplished, instead of going alone with God and humbling himself before Him, and giving Him all the glory for what was achieved, he has congratulated himself upon what has been accomplished, has become puffed up, and God has been obliged to lay him aside. The great things done were not followed by humiliation of self, and prayer to God, and so pride has come in and the mighty man has been shorn of his power.

5. Jesus Christ gave a special time to prayer WHEN LIFE WAS UNUSUALLY BUSY. He would withdraw at such a time from the multitudes that thronged about Him, and go into the wilderness and pray. For example, we read in Luke 5:15,16, “But so much the more went abroad the report concerning Him: and great multitudes came together to hear, and to be healed of their infirmities. But He withdrew Himself in the deserts and prayed.” (R.V.)

Some men are so busy that they find no time for prayer. Apparently the busier Christ’s life was, the more He prayed. Sometimes He had no time to eat (Mark 3:20), sometimes He had no time for needed rest and sleep (Mark 6:31,33,46), but He always took time to pray; and the more the work crowded the more He prayed.

Many a mighty man of God has learned this secret from Christ, and when the work has crowded more than usual they have set an unusual amount of time apart for prayer. Other men of God, once mighty, have lost their power because they did not learn this secret, and allowed increasing work to crowd out prayer.

Years ago it was the writer’s privilege, with other theological students, to ask questions of one of the most useful Christian men of the day. The writer was led to ask,

“Will you tell us something of your prayer life?”

The man was silent a moment, and then, turning his eyes earnestly upon me, replied:

“Well, I must admit that I have been so crowded with work of late that I have not given the time I should to prayer.”

Is it any wonder that that man lost power, and the great work that he was doing was curtailed in a very marked degree? Let us never forget that the more the work presses on us, the more time must we spend in prayer.

6. Jesus Christ prayed BEFORE THE GREAT TEMPTATIONS OF HIS LIFE.

As He drew nearer and nearer to the cross, and realized that upon it was to come the great final test of His life, Jesus went out into the garden to pray. He came “unto a place called Gethsemane, and saith unto the disciples, Sit ye here while I go and pray yonder.” (Matt. 26:36) The victory of Calvary was won that night in the garden of Gethsemane. The calm majesty of His bearing in meeting the awful onslaughts of Pilate’s Judgment Hall and of Calvary, was the outcome of the struggle, agony and victory of Gethsemane. While Jesus prayed the disciples slept, so He stood fast while they fell ignominiously.

Many temptations come upon us unawares and unannounced, and all that we can do is to lift a cry to God for help then and there; but many of the temptations of life we can see approaching from the distance, and in such cases the victory should be won before the temptation really reaches us.

7. In 1_Thess. 5:17 we read, “Pray WITHOUT CEASING,” and in Eph. 6:18, R.V., “praying AT ALL SEASONS.”

Our whole life should be a life of prayer. We should walk in constant communion with God. There should be a constant upward looking of the soul to God. We should walk so habitually in His presence that even when we awake in the night it would be the most natural thing in the world for us to speak to Him in thanksgiving or in petition.

.

Back to Top

Chapter XI

THE NEED OF A GENERAL REVIVAL

If we are to pray aright in such a time as this, much of our prayer should be for a general revival. If there was ever a time in which there was need to cry unto God in the words of the Psalmist, “Wilt Thou not revive us again, that Thy people may rejoice in Thee?” (Ps. 85:6) it is this day in which we live. It is surely time for the Lord to work, for men have made void His law (Ps. 199:126). The voice of the Lord given in the written Word is set at naught both by the world and the church. Such a time is not a time for discouragement–the man who believes in God and believes in the Bible can never be discouraged; but it is a time for Jehovah Himself to step in and work. The intelligent Christian, the wide-awake watchman on the walls of Zion, may well cry with the Psalmist of old, “It is time for Jehovah to work, for they have made void Thy law.” (Ps. 119:126, Am.R.V.)

The great need of the day is a general revival.

Let us consider first of all what a general revival is.

A revival is a time of quickening or impartation of life. As God alone can give life, a revival is a time when God visits His people and by the power of His Spirit imparts new life to them, and through them imparts life to sinners dead in trespasses and sins. We have religious excitements gotten up by the cunning methods and hypnotic influence of the mere professional evangelist; but these are not revivals and are not needed. They are the devil’s imitations of a revival. NEW LIFE FROM GOD–that is a revival. A general revival is a time when this new life from God is not confined to scattered localities, but is general throughout Christendom and the earth.

The reason why a general revival is needed is that spiritual dearth and desolation and death is general. It is not confined to any one country, though it may be more manifest in some countries than in others. It is found in foreign mission fields as well as in home fields. We have had local revivals. The life-giving Spirit of God has breathed upon this minister and that, this church and that, this community and that; but we need, we sorely need, a revival that shall be widespread and general.

Let us look for a few moments at the results of a revival. These results are apparent in ministers, in the church and in the unsaved.

1. The results of a revival in a minister are:
- (1) The minister has a new love for souls. We ministers as a rule have no such love for souls as we ought to have, no such love for souls as Jesus had, no such love for souls as Paul had. But when God visits His people the hearts of ministers are greatly burdened for the unsaved. They go out in great longing for the salvation of their fellow men. They forget their ambition to preach great sermons and for fame, and simply long to see men brought to Christ.
- (2) When true revivals come ministers get a new love for God’s Word and a new faith in God’s Word. They fling to the winds their doubts and criticisms of the Bible and of the creeds, and go to preaching the Bible and especially Christ crucified. Revivals make ministers who are loose in their doctrines orthodox. A genuine wide- sweeping revival would do more to turn things upside down and thus get them right side up than all the heresy trials ever instituted.
- (3) Revivals bring to ministers new liberty and power in preaching. It is no week-long grind to prepare a sermon, and no nerve-consuming effort to preach it after it has been prepared. Preaching is a joy and a refreshment, and there is power in it in times of revival.
2. The results of a revival on Christians generally are as marked as its results upon the ministry.
- (1) In times of revival Christians come out from the world and live separated lives. Christians who have been dallying with the world, who have been playing cards and dancing and going to the theater and indulging in similar follies, give them up. These things are found to be incompatible with increasing life and light.
- (2) In times of revival Christians get a new spirit of prayer. Prayer-meetings are no longer a duty, but become the necessity of a hungry, importunate heart. Private prayer is followed with new zest. The voice of earnest prayer to God is heard day and night. People no longer ask, “Does God answer prayer?” They know He does, and besiege the throne of grace day and night.
- (3) In times of revival Christians go to work for lost souls. They do not go to meeting simply to enjoy themselves and get blessed. They go to meeting to watch for souls and to bring them to Christ. They talk to men on the street and in the stores and in their homes. The cross of Christ, salvation, heaven and hell become the subjects of constant conversation. Politics and the weather and new bonnets and the latest novels are forgotten.
- (4) In times of revival Christians have new joy in Christ. Life is joy, and new life is new joy. Revival days are glad days, days of heaven on earth.
- (5) In times of revival Christians get a new love for the Word of God. They want to study it day and night. Revivals are bad for saloons and theaters, but they are good for bookstores and Bible agencies.
3. But revivals also have a decided influence on the unsaved world.
- (1) First of all, they bring deep conviction of sin. Jesus said that when the Spirit was come He would convince the world of sin (Jn. 16:7,8). Now we have seen that a revival is a coming of the Holy Spirit, and therefore there must be a new conviction of sin, and there always is. If you see something men call a revival, and there is no conviction of sin, you may know at once that it is bogus. It is a sure mark.
- (2) Revivals bring also conversion and regeneration. When God refreshes His people, He always converts sinners also. The first result of Pentecost was new life and power to the one hundred and twenty disciples in the upper room; the second result was three thousand conversions in a single day. It is always so. I am constantly reading of revivals here and there, where Christians were greatly helped but there were no conversions. I have my doubts about that kind. If Christians are truly refreshed, they will get after the unsaved by prayer and testimony and persuasion, and there will be conversions.

WHY A GENERAL REVIVAL IS NEEDED

We see what a general revival is, and what it does; let us now face the question why it is needed at the present time.

I think that the mere description of what it is and what it does shows that it is needed, sorely needed, but let us look at some specific conditions that exist to-day that show the need of it. In showing these conditions one is likely to be called a pessimist. If facing the facts is to be called a pessimist, I am willing to be called a pessimist. If in order to be an optimist one must shut his eyes and call black white, and error truth, and sin righteousness, and death life, I don’t want to be called an optimist. But I am an optimist all the same. Pointing out the real condition will lead to a better condition.

1. Look first at the ministry.
- (1) Many of us who are professedly orthodox ministers are practically infidels. That is plain speech, but it is also indisputable fact. There is no essential difference between the teachings of Tom Paine and Bob Ingersoll and the teachings of some of our theological professors. The latter are not so blunt and honest about it; they phrase it in more elegant and studied sentences; but it means the same. Much of the so-called new learning and higher criticism is simply Tom Paine infidelity sugar-coated. Prof. Howard Osgood, who is a real scholar and not a mere echo of German infidelity, once read a statement of some positions, and asked if they did not fairly represent the scholarly criticism of to-day, and when it was agreed that they did, he startled his audience by saying:
“I am reading from Tom Paine’s `Age of Reason.’”

There is little new in the higher criticism. Our future ministers oftentimes are being educated under infidel professors, and being immature boys when they enter the college or seminary, they naturally come out infidels in many cases, and then go forth to poison the church.
- (2) Even when our ministers are orthodox–as thank God so very many are!–they are oftentimes not men of prayer. How many modern ministers know what it is to wrestle in prayer, to spend a good share of a night in prayer? I do not know how many, but I do know that many do not.
- (3) Many of us who are ministers have no love for souls. How many preach because they MUST preach, because they feel that men every where are perishing, and by preaching they hope to save some? And how many follow up their preaching as Paul did, by beseeching men everywhere to be reconciled to God?
Perhaps enough has been said about us ministers; but it is evident that a revival is needed for our sake or some of us will have to stand before God overwhelmed with confusion in an awful day of reckoning that is surely coming.
2. Look now at the church:
- (1) Look at the doctrinal state of the church. It is bad enough. Many do not believe in the whole Bible. The book of Genesis is a myth, Jonah is an allegory, and even the miracles of the Son of God are questioned. The doctrine of prayer is old-fashioned, and the work of the Holy Spirit is sneered at. Conversion is unnecessary, and hell is no longer believed in. Then look at the fads and errors that have sprung up out of this loss of faith, Christian Science, Unitarianism, Spiritualism, Universalism, Babism, Metaphysical Healing, etc., etc., a perfect pandemonium of doctrines of devils.
- (2) Look at the spiritual state of the church. Worldliness is rampant among church members. Many church members are just as eager as any in the rush to get rich. They use the methods of the world in the accumulation of wealth, and they hold just as fast to it as any when they have gotten it.
Prayerlessness abounds among church members on every hand. Some one has said that Christians on the average do not spend more than five minutes a day in prayer.

Neglect of the Word of God goes hand in hand with neglect of prayer to God. Very many Christians spend twice as much time every day wallowing through the more of the daily papers as they do bathing in the cleansing laver of God’s Holy Word. How many Christians average an hour a day spent in Bible study?

Along with neglect of prayer and neglect of the Word of God goes a lack of generosity. The churches are rapidly increasing in wealth, but the treasuries of the missionary societies are empty. Christians do not average a dollar a year for foreign missions. It is simply appalling.

Then there is the increasing disregard for the Lord’s Day. It is fast becoming a day of worldly pleasure, instead of a day of holy service. The Sunday newspaper with its inane twaddle and filthy scandal takes the place of the Bible; and visiting and golf and bicycle, the place of the Sunday-school and church service.

Christians mingle with the world in all forms of questionable amusements. The young man and young woman who does not believe in dancing with its rank immodesties, the card table with its drift toward gambling, and the theater with its ever-increasing appeal to lewdness, is counted an old fogy.

Then how small a proportion of our membership has really entered into fellowship with Jesus Christ in His burden for souls! Enough has been said of the spiritual state of the church.
3. Now look at the state of the world.
- (1) Note how few conversions there are. The Methodist church, which has led the way in aggressive work has actually lost more members than it has gained the last year. Here and there a church has a large number of accessions upon confession of faith, but these churches are rare exceptions; and where there are such accessions, in how few cases are the conversions deep, thorough and satisfactory.
- (2) There is lack of conviction of sin. Seldom are men overwhelmed with a sense of their awful guilt in trampling under foot the Son of God. Sin is regarded as a “misfortune” or as “infirmity,” or even as “good in the making”; seldom as enormous wrong against a holy God.
- (3) Unbelief is rampant. Many regard it as a mark of intellectual superiority to reject the Bible, and even faith in God and immortality. It is about the only mark of intellectual superiority many possess, and perhaps that is the reason they cling to it so tenaciously.
- (4) Hand in hand with this widespread infidelity goes gross immorality, as has always been the case. Infidelity and immorality are Siamese twins. They always exist and always grow and always fatten together. This prevailing immorality is found everywhere.
Look at the legalized adultery that we call divorce. Men marry one wife after another, and are still admitted into good society; and women do likewise. There are thousands of supposedly respectable men in America living with other men’s wives, and thousands of supposedly respectable women living with other women’s husbands.

This immorality is found in the theater. The theater at its best is bad enough, but now “Sapphos,” and the “Degenerates,” and all the unspeakable vile accessories of the stage rule the day, and the women who debauch themselves by appearing in such plays are defended in the newspapers and welcomed by supposedly respectable people.

Much of our literature is rotten, but decent people will read books as bad as “Trilby” because it is the rage. Art is oftentimes a mere covering for shameless indecency. Women are induced to cast modesty to the winds that the artist may perfect his art and defile his morals.

Greed for money has become a mania with rich and poor. The multi-millionaire will often sell his soul and trample the rights of his fellow men under foot in the mad hope of becoming a billionaire, and the laboring man will often commit murder to increase the power of the union and keep up wages. Wars are waged and men shot down like dogs to improve commerce, and to gain political prestige for unprincipled politicians who parade as statesmen.

The licentiousness of the day lifts its serpent head everywhere. You see it in the newspapers, you see it on the bill- boards, you see it on the advertisements of cigars, shoes, bicycles, patent medicines, corsets and everything else. You see it on the streets at night. You see it just outside the church door. You find it not only in the awful cesspools set apart for it in the great cities, but it is crowding further and further up our business streets and into the residence portions of our cities. Alas! now and then you find it, if you look sharp, in supposedly respectable homes; indeed it will be borne to your ears by the confessions of broken- hearted men and women. The moral condition of the world in our day is disgusting, sickening, appalling.

We need a revival, deep, widespread, general, in the power of the Holy Ghost. It is either a general revival or the dissolution of the church, of the home, of the state. A revival, new life from God, is the cure, and the only cure. That will stem the awful tide of immorality and unbelief. Mere argument will not do it; but a sign from heaven, a new outpouring of the Spirit of God, It was not discussion but the breath of God that relegated Tom Paine, Voltaire, Volney and other of the old infidels to the limbo of forgetfulness; and we need a new breath from God to send the Wellhausens and the Kuenens and the Grafs and the parrots they have trained to occupy chairs and pulpits in England and America to keep them company. I believe that breath from God is coming.

The great need of to-day is a general revival. The need is clear. It admits of no honest difference of opinion. What then shall we do? Pray. Take up the Psalmist’s prayer, “Revive us again, that Thy people may rejoice in Thee.” Take up Ezekiel’s prayer, “Come from the four winds, O breath (breath of God), and breathe upon these slain that they may live.” Hark, I hear a noise! Behold a shaking! I can almost feel the breeze upon my cheek. I can almost see the great living army rising to their feet. Shall we not pray and pray and pray and pray, till the Spirit comes, and God revives His people?

.

Back to Top

Chapter XII

THE PLACE OF PRAYER BEFORE AND DURING REVIVALS

No treatment of the subject How to Pray would be at all complete if it did not consider the place of prayer in revivals.

The first great revival of Christian history had its origin on the human side in a ten-days’ prayer-meeting. We read of that handful of disciples, “These all with one accord continued steadfastly in prayer.” (Acts 1:14, R.V.) The result of that prayer- meeting we read of in the 2nd chapter of the Acts of the Apostles, “They were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance.” (v.4) Further on in the chapter we read that “there were added unto them in that day about three thousand souls.” (v.41,R.V.) This revival proved genuine and permanent. The converts “continued steadfastly in the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of bread and the prayers.” (v.42,R.V.) “And the Lord added to them day by day those that were being saved.” (v.47,R.V.)

Every true revival from that day to this has had its earthly origin in prayer. The great revival under Jonathan Edwards in the 18th century began with his famous call to prayer. The marvelous work of grace among the Indians under Brainerd had its origin in the days and nights that Brainerd spent before God in prayer for an enduement of power from on high for this work.

A most remarkable and widespread display of God’s reviving power was that which broke out at Rochester, New York, in 1830, under the labors of Charles G. Finney. It not only spread throughout the State but ultimately to Great Britain as well. Mr. Finney himself attributed the power of this work to the spirit of prayer that prevailed. He describes it in his autobiography in the following words:
“When I was on my way to Rochester, as we passed through a village, some thirty miles east of Rochester, a brother minister whom I knew, seeing me on the canal-boat, jumped aboard to have a little conversation with me, intending to ride but a little way and return. He, however, became interested in conversation, and upon finding where I was going, he made up his mind to keep on and go with me to Rochester. We had been there but a few days when this minister became so convinced that he could not help weeping aloud at one time as we passed along the street. The Lord gave him a powerful spirit of prayer, and his heart was broken. As he and I prayed together, I was struck with his faith in regard to what the Lord was going to do there. I recollect he would say, `Lord, I do not know how it is; but I seem to know that Thou art going to do a great work in this city.’ The spirit of prayer was poured out powerfully, so much so that some persons stayed away from the public services to pray, being unable to restrain their feelings under preaching.

“And here I must introduce the name of a man, whom I shall have occasion to mention frequently, Mr. Abel Clary. He was the son of a very excellent man, and an elder of the church where I was converted. He was converted in the same revival in which I was. He had been licensed to preach; but his spirit of prayer was such, he was so burdened with the souls of men, that he was not able to preach much, his whole time and strength being given to prayer. The burden of his soul would frequently be so great that he was unable to stand, and he would writhe and groan in agony. I was well acquainted with him, and knew something of the wonderful spirit of prayer that was upon him. He was a very silent man, as almost all are who have that powerful spirit of prayer.

“The first I knew of his being in Rochester, a gentleman who lived about a mile west of the city, called on me one day and asked me if I knew a Mr. Abel Clary, a minister. I told him that I knew him well. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘he is at my house, and has been there for some time, and I don’t know what to think of him.’ I said, ‘I have not seen him at any of our meetings.’ ‘No,’ he replied, ‘he cannot go to meeting, he says. He prays nearly all the time, day and night, and in such agony of mind that I do not know what to make of it. Sometimes he cannot even stand on his knees, but will lie prostrate on the floor, and groan and pray in a manner that quite astonishes me.’ I said to the brother, ‘I understand it: please keep still. It will all come out right; he will surely prevail.’

“I knew at the time a considerable number of men who were exercised in the same way. A Deacon P—, of Camden, Oneida county; a Deacon T—, of Rodman, Jefferson county; a Deacon B—, of Adams, in the same county; this Mr. Clary and many others among the men, and a large number of women partook of the same spirit, and spent a great part of their time in prayer. Father Nash, as we called him, who in several of my fields of labor came to me and aided me, was another of those men that had such a powerful spirit of prevailing prayer. This Mr. Clary continued in Rochester as long as I did, and did not leave it until after I had left. He never, that I could learn, appeared in public, but gave himself wholly to prayer.

“I think it was the second Sabbath that I was at Auburn at this time, I observed in the congregation the solemn face of Mr. Clary. He looked as if he was borne down with an agony of prayer. Being well acquainted with him, and knowing the great gift of God that was upon him, the spirit of prayer, I was very glad to see him there. He sat in the pew with his brother, the doctor, who was also a professor of religion, but who had nothing by experience, I should think, of his brother Abel’s great power with God.

“At intermission, as soon as I came down from the pulpit, Mr. Clary, with his brother, met me at the pulpit stairs, and the doctor invited me to go home with him and spend the intermission and get some refreshments. I did so.

“After arriving at his house we were soon summoned to the dinner table. We gathered about the table, and Dr. Clary turned to his brother and said, ‘Brother Abel, will you ask the blessing?’ Brother Abel bowed his head and began, audibly, to ask a blessing. He had uttered but a sentence or two when he broke instantly down, moved suddenly back from the table, and fled to his chamber. The doctor supposed he had been taken suddenly ill, and rose up and followed him. In a few moments he came down and said, ‘Mr. Finney, brother Abel wants to see you.’ Said I, ‘What ails him?’ Said he, ‘I do not know but he says, you know. He appears in great distress, but I think it is the state of his mind.’ I understood it in a moment, and went to his room. He lay groaning upon the bed, the Spirit making intercession for him, and in him, with groanings that could not be uttered. I had barely entered the room, when he made out to say, ‘Pray, brother Finney.’ I knelt down and helped him in prayer, by leading his soul out for the conversion of sinners. I continued to pray until his distress passed away, and then I returned to the dinner table.

“I understood that this was the voice of God. I saw the spirit of prayer was upon him, and I felt his influence upon myself, and took it for granted that the work would move on powerfully. It did so. The pastor told me afterward that he found that in the six weeks that I was there, five hundred souls had been converted.”

Mr. Finney in his lectures on revivals tells of other remarkable awakenings in answer to the prayers of God’s people. He says in one place, “A clergyman in W—-n told me of a revival among his people, which commenced with a zealous and devoted woman in the church. She became anxious about sinners, and went to praying for them; she prayed, and her distress increased; and she finally came to her minister, and talked with him, and asked him to appoint an anxious meeting, for she felt that one was needed. The minister put her off, for he felt nothing of it. The next week she came again, and besought him to appoint an anxious meeting, she knew there would be somebody to come, for she felt as if God was going to pour out His Spirit. He put her off again. And finally she said to him, ‘If you do not appoint an anxious meeting I shall die, for there is certainly going to be a revival.’ The next Sabbath he appointed a meeting, and said that if there were any who wished to converse with him about the salvation of their souls, he would meet them on such an evening. He did not know of one, but when he went to the place, to his astonishment he found a large number of anxious inquirers.”

In still another place he says, “The first ray of light that broke in upon the midnight which rested on the churches in Oneida county, in the fall of 1825, was from a woman in feeble health, who, I believe had never been in a powerful revival. Her soul was exercised about sinners. She was in agony for the land. She did not know what ailed her, but she kept praying more and more, till it seemed as if her agony would destroy her body. At length she became full of joy and exclaimed, ‘God has come! God has come! There is no mistake about it, the work is begun, and is going over all the region!’ And sure enough the work began, and her family were almost all converted, and the work spread all over that part of the country.”

The great revival of 1857 in the United States began in prayer and was carried on by prayer more than by anything else. Dr. Cuyler in an article in a religious newspaper some years ago said, “Most revivals have humble beginnings, and the fire starts in a few warm hearts. Never despise the day of small things. During all my own long ministry, nearly every work of grace had a similar beginning. One commenced in a meeting gathered at a few hour’s notice in a private house. Another commenced in a group gathered for Bible study by Mr. Moody in our mission chapel. Still another–the most powerful of all–was kindled on a bitter January evening at a meeting of young Christians under my roof. Dr. Spencer, in his `Pastor’s Sketches’, (the most suggestive book of its kind I have ever read), tells us that a remarkable revival in his church sprang from the fervent prayers of a godly old man who was confined to his room by lameness. That profound Christian, Dr. Thomas H. Skinner, of the Union Theological Seminary, once gave me an account of a remarkable coming together of three earnest men in his study when he was the pastor of the Arch Street Church in Philadelphia. They literally wrestled in prayer. They made a clean breast in confession of sin, and humbled themselves before God. One and another church officer came in and joined them. The heaven-kindled flame soon spread through the whole congregation in one of the most powerful revivals ever known in that city.”

In the early part of the seventeenth century there was a great religious awakening in Ulster, Ireland. The lands of the rebel chiefs which had been forfeited to the British crown, were settled up by a class of colonists who for the most part were governed by a spirit of wild adventure. Real piety was rare. Seven ministers, five from Scotland and two from England, settled in that country, the earliest arrivals being in 1613. Of one of these ministers named Blair it is recorded by a contemporary, “He spent many days and nights in prayer, alone and with others, and was vouchsafed great intimacy with God.” Mr. James Glendenning, a man of very meager natural gifts, was a man similarly minded as regards prayer. The work began under this man Glendenning. The historian of the time says, “He was a man who never would have been chosen by a wise assembly of ministers nor sent to begin a reformation in this land. Yet this was the Lord’s choice to begin with him the admirable work of God which I mention on purpose that all may see how the glory is only the Lord’s in making a holy nation in this profane land, and that it was ‘not by might, nor by power, nor by man’s wisdom, but by My Spirit, saith the Lord.’” In his preaching at Oldstone multitudes of hearers felt in great anxiety and terror of conscience. They looked on themselves as altogether lost and damned, and cried out, “Men and brethren, what shall we do to be saved?” They were stricken into a swoon by the power of His Word. A dozen in one day were carried out of doors as dead. These were not women, but some of the boldest spirits of the neighborhood; “some who had formerly feared not with their swords to put a whole market town into a fray.” Concerning one of them, then a mighty strong man, now a mighty Christian, say that his end in coming into church was to consult with his companions how to work some mischief.”

This work spread throughout the whole country. By the year 1626 a monthly concert of prayer was held in Antrim. The work spread beyond the bounds of Down and Antrim to the churches of the neighboring counties. So great became the religious interest that Christians would come thirty or forty miles to the communions, and continue from the time they came until they returned without wearying or making use of sleep. Many of them neither ate nor drank, and yet some of them professed that they “went away most fresh and vigorous, their souls so filled with the sense of God.”

This revival changed the whole character of northern Ireland.

Another great awakening in Ireland in 1859 had a somewhat similar origin. By many who did not know, it was thought that this marvelous work came without warning and preparation, but Rev. William Gibson, the moderator of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland in 1860, in his very interesting and valuable history of the work tells how there had been preparation for two years. There had been constant discussion in the General Assembly of the low estate of religion, and of the need of a revival. There had been special sessions for prayer. Finally four young men, who became leaders in the origin of the great work, began to meet together in an old schoolhouse in the neighborhood of Kells. About the spring of 1858 a work of power began to manifest itself. It spread from town to town, and from county to county. The congregations became too large for the buildings, and the meetings were held in the open air, oftentimes attended by many thousands of people. Many hundreds of persons were frequently convicted of sin in a single meeting. In some places the criminal courts and jails were closed for lack of occupation. There were manifestations of the Holy Spirit’s power of a most remarkable character, clearly proving that the Holy Spirit is as ready to work to-day as in apostolic days, when ministers and Christians really believe in Him and begin to prepare the way by prayer.

Mr. Moody’s wonderful work in England and Scotland and Ireland that afterwards spread to America had its origin on the manward side in prayer. Mr. Moody made little impression until men and women began to cry to God. Indeed his going to England at all was in answer to the importunate cries to God of a bed-ridden saint. While the spirit of prayer continued the revival abode in strength, but in the course of time less and less was made of prayer and the work fell off very perceptibly in power. Doubtless one of the great secrets of the unsatisfactoriness and superficiality and unreality of many of our modern so-called revivals, is that more dependence is put upon man’s machinery than upon God’s power, sought and obtained by earnest, persistent, believing prayer. We live in a day characterized by the multiplication of man’s machinery and the diminution of God’s power. The great cry of our day is work, work, work, new organizations, new methods, new machinery; the great need of our day is prayer. It was a master stroke of the devil when he got the church so generally to lay aside this mighty weapon of prayer. The devil is perfectly willing that the church should multiply its organizations, and deftly contrive machinery for the conquest of the world for Christ if it will only give up praying. He laughs as he looks at the church to-day and says to himself:

“You can have your Sunday-schools and your Young People’s Societies, your Young Men’s Christian Associations and your Women’s Christian Temperance Unions, your Institutional Churches and your Industrial Schools, and your Boy’s Brigades, your grand choirs and your fine organs, your brilliant preachers and your revival efforts too, if you don’t bring the power of Almighty God into them by earnest, persistent, believing, mighty prayer.”

Prayer could work as marvelous results today as it ever could, if the church would only betake itself to it.

There seem to be increasing signs that the church is awakening to this fact. Here and there God is laying upon individual ministers and churches a burden of prayer that they have never known before. Less dependence is being put upon machinery and more dependence upon God. Ministers are crying to God day and night for power. Churches and portions of churches are meeting together in the early morning hours and the late night hours crying to God for the latter rain. There is every indication of the coming of a mighty and widespread revival. There is every reason why, if a revival should come in any country at this time, it should be more widespread in its extent than any revival of history. There is the closest and swiftest communication by travel, by letter, and by cable between all parts of the world. A true fire of God kindled in America would soon spread to the uttermost parts of the earth. The only thing needed to bring this fire is prayer.

It is not necessary that the whole church get to praying to begin with. Great revivals always begin first in the hearts of a few men and women whom God arouses by His Spirit to believe in Him as a living God, as a God who answers prayer, and upon whose heart He lays a burden from which no rest can be found except in importunate crying unto God.

May God use this book to arouse many others to pray that the greatly-needed revival may come, and come speedily.

.
LET US PRAY

End
.
HOW TO PRAY
by R.A.Torrey,
a “classic” on developing a strong devotional life

How To Pray

R. A. Torrey
1856-1928

A Voice from the Philadelphian Church Age

by Rueben Archer Torrey

.
SPIRE BOOKS, FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY,
OLD TAPPAN, NEW JERSEY
How to Pray, A Spire Book,
published by Pyramid Publications
for
Fleming H. Revell Company,
Fifth printing March, 1975
printed in the United States of America,
from the 1900 edition.

SPIRE BOOKS are published by Fleming H. Revell Company,
Old Tappan, New Jersey 07675, USA.

Entered into electronic media by Clyde C. Price, Jr. from a print-media edition published.
Editorial assistance by Harry Whitehead of Mableton, GA,
SysOp of REVELATION BBS -ACNet- 770-944-8059.
Reformatted for Project Gutenberg June 1996.

Reformatted again, with corrections discovered in titles of Chapters 11 and 12,
also in Table of Contents– by Katie Stewart

Table of Contents

Chapter I. The Importance of Prayer

Chapter II. Praying unto God

Chapter III. Obeying and Praying

Chapter IV. Praying in the Name of Christ and According to the Will of God

Chapter V. Praying in the Spirit

Chapter VI. Always Praying and Not Fainting

Chapter VII. Abiding in Christ

Chapter VIII. Praying with Thanksgiving

Chapter IX. Hindrances to Prayer

Chapter X. When to Pray

Chapter XI. The Need of A General Revival

Chapter XII. The Place of Prayer Before and During Revivals

The Road To Serfdom (VIDEO)

CMAC — Thu, 11 Nov 2010 22:23:02 +0000

by F.A. Hayek

This is a condensed and abridged version, reproduced without permission.

The full book is available from Laissez Faire Books Their book reviews are great reading, and you can order books by email.

THE AUTHOR has spent about half his adult life in his native Austria, in close touch with German thought, and the other half in the United States and England. In the latter period he has become increasingly convinced that some of the forces which destroyed freedom in Germany are also at work here. The very magnitude of the outrages committed by the National Socialists has strengthened the assurance that a totalitarian system cannot happen here. But let us remember that 15 years ago the possibility of such a thing happening in Germany would have appeared just as fantastic not only to nine tenths of the Germans themselves but also to the most hostile foreign observer.

There are many features which were then regarded as “typically German” which are now equally familiar in America and England, and many symptoms that point to a further development in the same direction: the increasing veneration for the state, the fatalistic acceptance of “inevitable trends,” the enthusiasm for “organization” of everything (we now call it “planning”).

The character of the danger is, if possible, even less understood here than it was in Germany. The supreme tragedy is still not seen that in Germany it was largely people of good will, who, by their socialist policies, prepared the way for the forces which stand for everything they detest. Few recognize that the rise of fascism and Nazism was not a reaction against the socialist trends of the preceding period but a necessary outcome of those tendencies. Yet it is significant that many of the leaders of these movements, from Mussolini down (and including Laval and Quisling) began as socialists and ended as fascists or Nazis. In the democracies at present, many who sincerely hate all of Nazism’s manifestations are working for ideals whose realization would lead straight to the abhorred tyranny. Most of the people whose views influence developments are in some measure socialists. They believe that our economic life should be “consciously directed,” that we should substitute “economic planning” for the competitive system. Yet is there a greater tragedy imaginable than that, in our endeavor consciously to shape our future in accordance with high ideals, we should in fact unwittingly produce the very opposite of what we have been striving for?

Planning and Power

IN ORDER to achieve their ends, the planners must create power—power over men wielded by other men—of a magnitude never before known. Their success will depend on the extent to which they achieve such power. Democracy is an obstacle to this suppression of freedom which the centralized direction of economic activity requires. Hence arises the clash between planning- and democracy.

Many socialists have the tragic illusion that by depriving private individuals of the power they possess in an individualist system, and transferring this power to society, they thereby extinguish power. What they overlook is that, by concentrating power so that it can be used in the service of a single plan, it is not merely transformed but infinitely heightened. By uniting in the hands of some single body power formerly exercised independently by many, an amount of power is created infinitely greater than any that existed before, so much more far-reaching as almost to be different in kind. It is entirely fallacious to argue that the great power exercised by a central planning board would be “no greater than the power collectively exercised by private boards of directors.” There is, in a competitive society, nobody who can exercise even a fraction of the power which a socialist planning board would possess. To decentralize power is to reduce the absolute amount of power, and the competitive system is the only system designed to minimize the power exercised by man over man. Who can seriously doubt that the power which a millionaire, who may be my employer, has over me is very much less than that which the smallest bureaucrat possesses who wields the coercive power of the state and on whose discretion it depends how I am allowed to live and work?

In every real sense a badly paid unskilled workman in this country has more freedom to shape his life than many an employer in Germany or a much better paid engineer or manager in Russia. If he wants to change his job or the place where he lives, if he wants to profess certain views or spend his leisure in a particular way, he faces no absolute impediments. There are no dangers to bodily security and freedom that confine him by brute force to the task and environment to which a superior has assigned him. Our generation has forgotten that the system of private property is the most important guaranty of freedom. It is only because the control of the means of production is divided among many people acting independently that we as individuals can decide what to do with ourselves. When all the means of production are vested in a single hand, whether it be nominally that of “society” as a whole or that of a dictator, whoever exercises this control has complete power over us. In the hands of private individuals, what is called economic power can be an instrument of coercion, but it is never control over the whole life of a person. But when economic power is centralized as an instrument of political power it creates a degree of dependence scarcely distinguishable from slavery. It has been well said that, in a country where the sole employer is the state, opposition means death by slow starvation.

Background to Danger

INDIVIDUALISM, in contrast to socialism and all other forms of totalitarianism, is based on the respect of Christianity for the individual man and the belief that it is desirable that men should be free to develop their own individual gifts and bents. This philosophy, first fully developed during the Renaissance, grew and spread into what we know as Western civilization. The general direction of social development was one of freeing the individual from the ties which bound him in feudal society.

Perhaps the greatest result of this unchaining of individual energies was the marvelous growth of science. Only since industrial freedom opened the path to the free use of new knowledge, only since everything could be tried – if somebody could be found to back it at his own risk — has science made the great strides which in the last 150 years have changed the face of the world. The result of this growth surpassed all expectations. Wherever the barriers to the Gee exercise of human ingenuity were removed, man became rapidly able to satisfy ever-widening ranges of desire. By the, beginning of the 20th century the workingman in the Western World had reached a degree of material comfort, security and personal independence which 100 years before had hardly seemed possible. The effect of this success was to create among men a new sense of power over their own fate, the belief in the unbounded possibilities of improving their own lot. What had been achieved came to be regarded as a secure and imperishable possession, acquired once and for all; and the rate of progress began to seem too slow. Moreover, the principles which had made this progress possible came to be regarded as obstacles to speedier progress, impatiently to be brushed away. It might be said that the very success of liberalism became the cause of its decline.

No sensible person should have doubted that the economic principles of the 19th century were only a beginning — that there were immense possibilities of advancement on the lines on which we had moved. But according to the views now dominant, the question is no longer how we can make the best use of the spontaneous forces found in a free society. We have in effect undertaken to dispense with these forces and to replace them by collective and “conscious” direction. It is significant that this abandonment of liberalism, whether expressed as socialism in its more radical form or merely as “organization” or “planning,” was perfected in Germany. During the last quarter of the 19th century and the first quarter of the 20th, Germany moved far ahead in both the theory and the practice of socialism, so that even today Russian discussion largely carries on where the Germans left off. The Germans, long before the Nazis, were attacking liberalism and democracy, capitalism and individualism.

Long before the Nazis, too, the German and Italian socialists were using techniques of which the Nazis and Fascists later made effective use. The idea of a political party which embraces all activities of the individual from the cradle to the grave, which claims to guide his views on everything, was first put into practice by the socialists. It was not the Fascists but the socialists who began to collect children at the tenderest age into political organizations to direct their thinking. It was not the Fascists but the socialists who first thought of organizing sports and games, football and hiking, in party clubs where the members would not be infected by other views. It was the socialists who first insisted that the party member should distinguish himself from others by the modes of greeting and the forms of address. It was they who, by their organization of “cells” and devices for the permanent supervision of private life, created the prototype of the totalitarian party. By the time Hitler came to power, liberalism was dead in Germany. And it was socialism that had killed it. To many who have watched the transition from socialism to fascism at close quarters the connection between the two systems has become increasingly obvious, but in the democracies the majority of people still believe that socialism and freedom can be combined. They do not realize that democratic socialism, the great utopia of the last few generations, is not only unachievable but that to strive for it produces something utterly different – the very destruction of freedom itself. As has been aptly said: “What has always made the state a hell on earth has been precisely that man has tried to make it his heaven.”

It is disquieting to see in England and the United States today the same drawing together of forces and nearly the same contempt of all that is liberal in the old sense. “Conservative socialism” was the slogan under which a large number of writers prepared the atmosphere in which National Socialism succeeded. It is “conservative socialism” which is the dominant trend among us now.

The Liberal Way of Planning

“PLANNING” owes its popularity largely to the fact that everybody desires, of course, that we should handle our common problems with as much foresight as possible. The dispute between the modern planners and the liberals is not on whether we ought to employ systematic thinking in planning our affairs. It is a dispute about what is the best way of so doing. The question is whether we should create conditions under which the knowledge and initiative of individuals are given the best scope so that they can plan most successfully; or whether we should direct and organize all economic activities according to a “blue-print,” that is, “consciously direct the resources of society to conform to the planners’ particular views of who should have what.”

It is important not to confuse opposition against the latter kind of planning with a dogmatic laissez faire attitude. The liberal argument does not advocate leaving things just as they are; it favors making the best possible use of the forces of competition as a means of coordinating human efforts. It is based on the conviction that, where effective competition can be created, it is a better way of guiding individual efforts than any other. It emphasizes that in order to make competition work beneficially a carefully thought-out legal framework is required, and that neither the past nor the existing legal rules are free from grave defects. Liberalism is opposed, however, to supplanting competition by inferior methods of guiding economic activity. And it regards competition as superior not only because in most circumstances it is the most efficient method known but because it is the only method which does not require the coercive or arbitrary intervention of authority. It dispenses with the need for “conscious social control” and gives individuals a chance to decide whether the prospects of a particular occupation are sufficient to compensate for the disadvantages connected with it. The successful use of competition does not preclude some types of government interference. For instance, to limit working hours, to require certain sanitary arrangements, to provide an extensive system of social services is fully compatible with the preservation of competition. There are, too, certain fields where the system of competition is impracticable. For example, the harmful effects of deforestation or of the smoke of factories cannot be confined to the owner of the property in question. But the fact that we have to resort to direct regulation by authority where the conditions for the proper working of competition cannot be created does not prove that we should suppress competition where it can be made to function. To create conditions in which competition will be as effective as possible, to prevent fraud and deception, to break up monopolies— these tasks provide a wide and unquestioned field for state activity. This does not mean that it is possible to find some “middle way” between competition and central direction, though nothing seems at first more plausible, or is more likely to appeal to reasonable people. Mere common sense proves a treacherous guide in this field. Although competition can bear some admixture of regulation, it cannot be combined with planning to any extent we like without ceasing to operate as an effective guide to production. Both competition and central direction become poor and inefficient tools if they are incomplete, and a mixture of the two – means that neither will work. Planning and competition can be combined only by planning for competition, not by planning against competition. The planning against which all our criticism is directed is solely the planning against competition.

The Great Utopia

THERE CAN BE no doubt that most of those in the democracies who demand a central direction of all economic activity still believe that socialism and individual freedom can be combined. Yet socialism was early recognized by many thinkers as the gravest threat to freedom.

It is rarely remembered now that socialism in its beginnings was frankly authoritarian. It began quite openly as a reaction against the liberalism of the French Revolution. The French writers who laid its foundation had no doubt that their ideas could be put into practice only by a strong dictatorial government. The first of modern planners, Saint-Simon, predicted that those who did not obey his proposed planning boards would be “treated as cattle.”

Nobody saw more clearly than the great political thinker de Tocqueville that democracy stands in an irreconcilable conflict with socialism: “Democracy extends the sphere of individual freedom,” he said. “Democracy attaches all possible value to each man,” he said in 1848, “while socialism makes each man a mere agent, a mere number. Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word: equality. But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude.”

To allay these suspicions and to harness to its cart the strongest of all political motives—the craving for freedom — socialists began increasingly to make use of the promise of a “new freedom.” Socialism was to bring “economic freedom,” without which political freedom was “not worth having.”

To make this argument sound plausible, the word “freedom” was subjected to a subtle change in meaning. The word had formerly meant freedom from coercion, from the arbitrary power of other men. Now it was made to mean freedom from necessity, release from the compulsion of the circumstances which inevitably limit the range of choice of all of us. Freedom in this sense is, of course, merely another name for power or wealth. The demand for the new freedom was thus only another name for the old demand for a redistribution of wealth.

The claim that a planned economy would produce a substantially larger output than the competitive system is being progressively abandoned by most students of the problem. Yet it is this false hope as much as anything which drives us along the road to planning.

Although our modern socialists’ promise of greater freedom is genuine and sincere, in recent years observer after observer has been impressed by the unforeseen consequences of socialism, the extraordinary similarity in many respects of the conditions under “communism” and “fascism.” As the writer Peter Drucker expressed it in 1939, “the complete collapse of the belief in the attainability of freedom and equality through Marxism has forced Russia to travel the same road toward a totalitarian society of un-freedom and inequality which Germany has been following. Not that communism and fascism are essentially the same. Fascism is the stage reached after communism has proved an illusion, and it has proved as much an illusion in Russia as in pre-Hitler Germany.”

No less significant is the intellectual outlook of the rank and file in the communist and fascist movements in Germany before 1933. The relative ease with which a young communist could be converted into a Nazi or vice versa was well known, best of all to the propagandists of the two parties. The communists and Nazis clashed more frequently with each other than with other parties simply because they competed for the same type of mind and reserved for each other the hatred of the heretic. Their practice showed how closely they are related. To both, the real enemy, the man with whom they had nothing in common, was the liberal of the old type. While to the Nazi the communist and to the communist the Nazi, and to both the socialist, are potential recruits made of the right timber, they both know that there can be no compromise between them and those who really believe in individual freedom.

What is promised to us as the Road to Freedom is in fact the Highroad to Servitude. For it is not difficult to see what must be the consequences when democracy embarks upon a course of planning. The goal of the planning will be described by some such vague term as “the general welfare.” There will be no real agreement as to the ends to be attained, and the effect of the people’s agreeing that there must be central planning, without agreeing on the ends, will be rather as if a group of people were to commit themselves to take a journey together without agreeing where they want to go: with the result that they may all have to make a journey which most of them do not want at all.

Democratic assemblies cannot function as planning agencies. They cannot produce agreement on everything — the whole direction of the resources of the nation-for the number of possible courses of action will be legion. Even if a congress could, by proceeding step by step and compromising at each point, agree on some scheme, it would certainly in the end satisfy nobody.

To draw up an economic plan in this fashion is even less possible than, for instance, successfully to plan a military campaign by democratic procedure. As in strategy it would become inevitable to delegate the task to experts. And even if, by this expedient, a democracy should succeed in planning every sector of economic activity, it would still have to face the problem of integrating these separate plans into a unitary whole. There will be a stronger and stronger demand that some board or some single individual should be given power to act on their own responsibility. The cry for an economic dictator is a characteristic stage in the movement toward planning. Thus the legislative body will be reduced to choosing the persons who are to have practically absolute power. The whole system will tend toward that kind of dictatorship in which the head of the government is position by popular vote, but where he has all the powers at his command to make certain that the vote will go in the direction he desires. Planning leads to dictatorship because dictatorship is the most effective instrument of coercion and, as such, essential if central planning on a large scale is to be possible. There is no justification for the widespread belief that, so long as power is conferred by democratic procedure, it cannot be arbitrary; it is not the source of power which prevents it from being arbitrary; to be free from dictatorial qualities, the power must also be limited. A true “dictatorship of the proletariat,” even if democratic in form, if it undertook centrally to direct the economic system, would probably destroy personal freedom as completely as any autocracy has ever done.

Individual freedom cannot be reconciled with the supremacy of one single purpose to which the whole of society is permanently subordinated. To a limited extent we ourselves experience this fact in wartime, when subordination of almost everything to the immediate and pressing need is the price at which we preserve our freedom in the long run. The fashionable phrases about doing for the purposes of peace what we have learned.to do for the purposes of war are completely misleading, for it is sensible temporarily to sacrifice freedom in order to make it more secure in the future, but it is quite a different thing to sacrifice liberty permanently in the interests of a planned economy.

To those who have watched the transition from socialism to fascism at close quarters, the connection between the two systems is obvious. The realization of the socialist program means the destruction of freedom. Democratic socialism, the great utopia of the last few generations, is simply not achievable.

Why the Worst Get on Top

NO DOUBT an American or English “fascist” system would greatly differ from the Italian or German models; no doubt, if the transition were effected without violence, we might expect to get a better type of leader. Yet this does not mean that our fascist system would in the end prove very different or much less intolerable than its prototypes. There are strong reasons for believing that the worst features of the totalitarian systems are phenomena which totalitarianism is certain sooner or later to produce.

Just as the democratic statesman who sets out to plan economic life will soon be confronted with the alternative of either assuming dictatorial powers or abandoning his plans, so the totalitarian leader would soon have to choose between disregard of ordinary morals and failure. It is for this reason that the unscrupulous are likely to be more successful in a society tending toward totalitarianism. Who does not see this has not yet grasped the full width of the gulf which separates totalitarianism from the essentially individualist Western civilization.

The totalitarian leader must collect around him a group which is prepared voluntarily to submit to that discipline which they are to impose by force upon the rest of the people. That socialism can be put info practice only by methods which most socialists disapprove is, of course, a lesson learned by many social reformers in the past. The old socialist parties were inhibited by their democratic ideals; they did not possess the ruthlessness required for the performance of their chosen task. It is characteristic that both in Germany and in Italy the success of fascism was preceded by the refusal of the socialist parties to take over the responsibilities of government. They were unwilling wholeheartedly to employ the methods to which they had pointed the way. They still hoped for the miracle of a majority’s agreeing on a particular plan for the organization of the whole of society. Others had already learned the lesson that in a planned society the question can no longer be on what do a majority of the people agree but what the largest single group is whose members agree sufficiently to make unified direction of all affairs possible.

There are three main reasons why such a numerous group, with fairly similar views, is not likely to be formed by the best but rather by the worst elements of any society. First, the higher the education and intelligence of individuals become, the more their tastes and views are differentiated. If we wish to find a high degree of uniformity in outlook, we have to descend to the regions of your moral and intellectual standards where the more primitive instincts prevail. This does not mean that the majority of people have low moral standards; it merely means that the largest group of people whose values are very similar are the people with low standards.

Second, since this group is not large enough to give sufficient weight to the leader’s endeavors, he will have to increase their numbers by converting more to the same simple creed. He must gain the support of the docile and gullible, who have no strong convictions of their own but are ready to accept a ready-made system of values if it is only drummed into their ears sufficiently loudly and frequently. It will be those whose vague and imperfectly formed ideas are easily swayed and whose passions and emotions are readily aroused who will thus swell the ranks of the totalitarian party.

Third, to weld together a closely coherent body of supporters, the leader must appeal to a common human weakness. It seems to be easier for people to agree on a negative program — on the hatred of an enemy, on the envy of those better off – than on any positive task. The contrast between the “we” and the “they” is consequently always employed by those who seek the allegiance of huge masses. The enemy may be internal, like the “Jew” in Germany or the “kulak” in Russia, or he may be external. In any case, this technique has the great advantage of leaving the leader greater freedom of action than would almost any positive program.

Advancement within a totalitarian group or party depends largely on a willingness to do immoral things. The principle that the end justifies the means, which in individualist ethics is regarded as the denial of all morals, in collectivist ethics becomes necessarily the supreme rule. There is literally nothing which the consistent collectivist must not be prepared to do if it serves “the good of the whole,” because that is to him the only criterion of what ought to be done. Once you admit that the individual is merely a means to serve the ends of the higher entity called society or the nation, most of those features of totalitarianism which horrify us follow of necessity. From the collectivist standpoint intolerance and brutal suppression of dissent, deception and spying, the complete disregard of the life and happiness of the individual are essential and unavoidable. Acts which revolt all our feelings, such as the shooting of hostages or the killing of the old or sick, are treated as mere matters of expediency; the compulsory uprooting and transportation of hundreds of thousands becomes an instrument of policy approved by almost everybody except the victims. To be a useful assistant in the running of a totalitarian state, therefore, a man must be prepared to break every moral rule he has ever known if this seems necessary to achieve the end set for him. In the totalitarian machine there will be special opportunities for the ruthless and unscrupulous. Neither the Gestapo nor the administration of a concentration camp, neither the Ministry of Propaganda nor the SA or SS (or their Russian counterparts) are suitable places for the exercise of humanitarian feelings. Yet it is through such positions that the road to the highest positions in the totalitarian state leads. A distinguished American economist, Professor Frank H. Knight, correctly notes that the authorities of a collectivist state “would have to do these things whether they wanted to or not: and the probability of the people in power being individuals who would dislike the possession and exercise of power is on a level with the probability that an extremely tenderhearted person would get the job of whipping master in a slave plantation.”

A further point should be made here: Collectivism means the end of truth. To make a totalitarian system function efficiently, it is not enough that everybody should be forced to work for the ends selected by those in control; it is essential that the people should come to regard these ends as their own. This is brought about by propaganda and by complete control of all sources of information.

The most effective way of making people accept the validity of the values they are to serve is to persuade them that they are really the same as those they have always held, but which were not properly understood or recognized before. And the most efficient technique to this end is to use the old words but change their meaning. Few traits of totalitarian regimes are at the same time so confusing to the superficial observer and yet so characteristic of the whole intellectual climate as this complete perversion of language.

The worst sufferer in this respect is the word “liberty.” It is a word used as freely in totalitarian states as elsewhere. Indeed, it could almost be said that wherever liberty as we know it has been destroyed, this has been done in the name of some new freedom promised to the people. Even among us we have planners who promise us a “collective freedom,” which is as misleading as anything said by totalitarian politicians. “Collective freedom” is not the freedom of the members of society but the unlimited freedom of the planner to do with society that which he pleases. This is the confusion of freedom with power carried to the extreme. It is not difficult to deprive the seat majority of independent thought. But the minority who will retain an inclination to criticize must also be silenced. Public criticism or even expressions of doubt must be suppressed because they tend to weaken support of the regime. As Sidney and Beatrice Webb report of the position in every Russian enterprise: “Whilst the work is in progress, any public expression of doubt that the plan will be successful is an act of disloyalty and even of treachery because of its possible effect on the will and efforts of the rest of the staff.”

Control extends even to subjects which seem to have no political significance. The theory of relativity, for instance, has been opposed as a “Semitic attack on the foundation of Christian and Nordic physics” and because it is “in conflict with dialectical materialism and Marxist dogma.” Every activity must derive its justification from conscious social purpose. There must be no spontaneous, unguided activity, because it might produce results which cannot be foreseen and for which the plan does not provide.

The principle extends even to games and amusements. I leave it to the reader to guess where it was that chess players were officially exhorted that “we must finish once and for all with the neutrality of chess. We must condemn once and for all the formula ‘chess for the sake of chess.’ ”

Perhaps the most alarming fact is that contempt for intellectual liberty is not a thing which arises only once the totalitarian system is established but can be found everywhere among those who have embraced a collectivist faith. The worst oppression is condoned if it is committed in the name of socialism. Intolerance of opposing ideas is openly extolled; The tragedy of collectivist thought is that, while it starts out to make reason supreme, it ends by destroying reason. There is one aspect of the change in moral values brought about by the advance of collectivism which provides special food for thought. It is that the virtues which are held less and less in esteem in Britain and America are precisely those on which Anglo-Saxons justly prided themselves and in which they were generally recognized to excel. These virtues were independence and self-reliance, individual initiative and local responsibility, the successful reliance on voluntary activity, noninterference with one’s neighbor and tolerance of the different, and a healthy suspicion of power and authority. Almost all the traditions and institutions which have molded the national character and the whole moral climate of England and America are those which the progress of collectivism and its centralistic tendencies are progressively destroying.

Planning vs. the Rule of Law

NOTHING distinguishes more clearly a free country from a country under arbitrary government than the observance in the former of the great principles known as the Rule of Law. Stripped of technicalities, this means that government in all its actions is bound by rules fixed and announced beforehand

Two Kinds of Security

LIKE the spurious “economic freedom,” and with more justice, economic security is often represented as an indispensable condition of real liberty. In a sense this is both true and important. Independence of mind or strength of character is rarely found among those who cannot be confident that they will make their way by their own effort.

But there are two kinds of security: the certainty of a given minimum of sustenance for all and the security of a given standard of life, of the relative position which one person or group enjoys compared with others. There is no reason why, in a society which has reached the general level of wealth ours has, the first kind of security should not be guaranteed to all without endangering general freedom; that is: some minimum of food, shelter and clothing, sufficient to preserve health. Nor is there any reason why the state should not help to organize a comprehensive system of social insurance in providing for those common hazards of life against which few can make adequate provision. It is planning for security of the second kind which has such an insidious effect on liberty. It is planning designed to protect individuals or groups against diminutions of their incomes.

Limitation of output so that prices will secure an “adequate” return, is the only way in which in a market economy producers can be guaranteed a certain income. If, as has become increasingly true, in each trade in which conditions improve, the members are allowed to exclude others in order to secure to themselves the full gain in the form of higher wages or profits, those in the trades where demand has fallen have nowhere to go, and every change becomes the cause of large unemployment. There can be little doubt that it is largely a consequence of the striving for security by these means in the last decades that unemployment and thus insecurity have so much increased. The utter hopelessness of the position of those who, in a society which has thus grown rigid, are left outside the range of sheltered occupation, can be appreciated only by those who have experienced it. There has never been a more cruel exploitation of one class by another than that of the less fortunate members of a group of producers by the well-established. This has been made possible by the “regulation” of competition. Few catch-words have done so much harm as the ideal of a “stabilization” of particular prices or wages, which, while securing the income of some, makes the position of the rest more and more precarious. In England and America special privileges, especially in the form of the “regulation” of competition, the “stabilization” of particular prices and wages, have assumed increasing importance. With every grant of such security to one group the insecurity of the rest necessarily increases. If you guarantee to some a fixed part of a variable cake, the share left to the rest is bound to fluctuate proportionally more than the size of the whole. And the essential element of security which the competitive system offers, the great variety of opportunities, is more and more reduced.

The general endeavor to achieve security by restrictive measures, supported by the state, has in the course of time produced a progressive transformation of society – a transformation in which, as in so many other ways, Germany has led and the other countries have followed. This development has been hastened by another effect of socialist teaching, the deliberate disparagement of all activities involving economic risk and the moral opprobrium cast on the gains which make risks worth taking but which only few can win.

We cannot blame our young men when they prefer the safe, salaried position to the risk of enterprise after they have heard from their earliest youth the former described as the superior, more unselfish and disinterested occupation. The younger generation of today has grown up in a world in which, in school and press, the spirit of commercial enterprise has been represented as disreputable and the making of profit as immoral, where to employ 100 people is represented as exploitation but to command the same number as honorable. Older people may regard this as an exaggeration, but the daily experience of the university teacher leaves little doubt that, as a result of anticapitalist propaganda, values have already altered far in advance of the change in institutions which has so far taken place. The question is whether, by changing our institutions to satisfy the new demands, we shall not unwittingly destroy values which we still rate higher.

The conflict with which we have to deal is a fundamental one between two irreconcilable types of social organization, which have often been described as the commercial and the military. In either both choice and risk rest with the individual or he is relieved or both. In the army, work and worker alike are allotted by authority, and this is the only system in which the individual can be conceded full economic security. This security is, however, inseparable from the restrictions on liberty and the hierarchical order of military life – it is the security of the barracks.

In a society used to freedom it is unlikely that many people would be ready deliberately to purchase security ar this price. But the policies which are followed now are nevertheless rapidly creating conditions in which the striving for security tends to become stronger than the love of freedom.

If we are not to destroy individual freedom, competition must be left to function unobstructed. Let a uniform minimum be secured to everybody by all means; but let us admit at the same time that all claims for a privileged security of particular classes must lapse, that all excuses disappear for allowing particular groups to exclude newcomers from sharing their relative prosperity in order to maintain a special standard of their own.

There can be no question that adequate security against severe privation will have to be one of our main goals of policy. But nothing is more fatal than the present fashion of intellectual leaders of extolling security at the expense of freedom. It is essential that we should relearn frankly to face the fact that freedom can be had only at a price and that as individuals we must be prepared to make severe material sacrifices to preserve it.

We must regain the conviction on which liberty in the Anglo-Saxon countries has been based and which Benjamin Franklin expressed in a phrase applicable to us as individuals no less than as nations: “Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

Toward a Better World

TO BUILD a better world, we must have the courage to make a new start. We must clear away the obstacles with which human folly has recently encumbered our path and release the creative energy of individuals; We must create conditions favorable to progress rather than “planning progress. ” It is not those who cry for more “planning” who show the necessary courage, nor those who preach a “New Order,” which is no more than a continuation of the tendencies of the past 40 years; and who can think of nothing better than to imitate Hitler. It is, indeed, those who cry loudest for a planned economy who are most completely under the sway of the ideas which have created this war and most of the evils from which we suffer. The guiding principle in any attempt to create a world of free men must be this: A policy of freedom for the individual is the only truly progressive policy.

VIDEO 4

VIDEO 5