is man-made, produced and to be altered by expediences and
practicalities, always in flux. But the essence of a civilization is
the humanistic conviction that there is something fixed and abiding
around which life may order and maintain itself.

Progress rests on the Platonic theory that laws are not made by man
but discovered by him; that they exist as eternal distinctions
beyond the reach of his alteration. Again, an unashamed and rampant
naturalism has just been sweeping this country in the wave of mean
and cruel intolerance which insists upon the continued imprisonment
of political heretics, which would prohibit freedom of speech by
governmental decree and oppose new or distasteful ideas by the
physical suppression of the thinker. The several and notorious
attempts beginning with deportations and ending with the unseating of
the New York assemblymen, to combat radical thinking by physical
or political persecution--attempts uniformly mean and universally
impotent in history--are as sinister as they are stupid. The only
law which justifies the persecution and imprisonment of religious and
political heretics is neither the law of reason nor the law of
love, but the law of fear, hence of tyranny and force. When a
twentieth-century nation begins to raise the ancient cry, "Come now
and let us kill this dreamer and we shall see what will become of his
dreams," that nation is declining to the naturalistic level. For
this clearly indicates that the humane and religious resources of
civilization, of which the church is among the chief confessed and
appointed guardians, are utterly inadequate to the strain imposed
upon them. Hence force, not justice, though they may sometimes have
happened to coincide, and power, not reason or faith, are becoming the
embodiment of the state today.