James Keller

A Seattle lawyer once interrupted his lengthy cross-examination of a witness and exclaimed, "Your Honor, one of the jurors is asleep." "You put him to sleep," replied the judge. "Suppose you wake him up."

Sir William Blackstone, the great English jurist, writing in his Commentaries on the Laws of England in 1769, was most explicit in emphasizing the weakness of man's nature. As he observed: ". . . if our reason were always, as in our first ancestor before his transgression, clear and perfect,unruffled by passions, unclouded by prejudice, unimpaired by disease or intemperance, the task would be pleasant and easy; we should need no other guide but this. But every man now finds the contrary in his own experience; that his reason is corrupt, and his understanding full of ignorance and error. This has given manifold occasion for the benign interposition of divine Providence, which in compassion to the frailty, the imperfection, and the blindness of human reason, hath been pleased at sundry times and in divers manners, to discover and enforce its laws by an immediate and direct revelation. The doctrines thus delivered we call the revealed or divine law . . ."

Some time ago we heard a strange story. The pilot of a small plane said that he had been caught in a one hundred fifty mile gale, which held his plane perfectly still. The motor was roaring, he claimed, but the plane was not moving. "It was weird," he said , "to be going one hundred fifty miles an hour and yet not be going anywhere at all."

As she read the ten commandments for the first time, a Chinese woman said, "I don't see how anyone can very well get on without them."

Recently a large group of 'problem' children were given the assignment of writing essays on the difficulties they had with their parents. The papers they turned in were misspelled but lively, listing a number of rather predicable faults - gushing, nagging, refusing affection, and so on. But oddly enough the quality most children felt their parents lacked was truthfulness. None of us, of course, likes to think of himself as a liar. In important things we make it a point to be scrupulously honest. But if we examine our daily lives closely we may find dozens of examples of small compromises, trivial evasions. These seemingly unimportant deceits should be guarded against, since they can all too easily become a part of the fabric of our existence, influencing our relationships with others. An unflagging desire for truth in every aspect of our behavior does much to provide that sense of security for which all people yearn.

High up in the Rockies a small boy and his mother were visiting. One day, after he had been punished, the boy ran to the edge of the cliff and shouted at his mother, "I hate you! I hate you!" Across the ravine came the echo, "I hate you! I hate you!" Thoroughly frightened the boy ran to his mother and said . "Who is that bad man over there who said, 'I hate you'?" Taking the boy's hand, the mother led him back to the top of the cliff, "Now," she said, "call out 'I love you! I love you!'" Clearly and sweetly the echo came, repeating his words. "My boy," said the mother, taking him into her arms, "that is the law of life - what you give, you get in return."

Some time ago I took a trip on the Hudson and Manhattan Transit System. Not being familiar with the names of the various stops, I asked the man next to me the name of the station where we had just stopped. He replied, "I've been riding this line for fifteen years and I only know two stops: where I get on and where I get off."

In one of the decisive battles of World War I, disastrous reports poured into the headquarters of Marshal Foch, the commander of the Allied forces. The great general never lost heart. When things were at their worst, he drafted his famous order which is now in all textbooks of military strategy: "My center is giving way, my right is pushed back, my left is wavering. The situation is excellent. I shall attack!"

"I think we'll have a good potato crop this year," a newspaper editor told his housekeeper one morning. "No such thing," asserted the housekeeper. "I think the crop will be poor." Ignoring her remark, the editor caused to be inserted in the evening paper his estimate of the crop situation. That night when he returned home he found the housekeeper waiting for him with a sheepish grin on her face and a copy of the paper in her hand. "I was wrong," she said apologetically. "It says right here in the paper that the crop will be excellent this fall."

We heard recently the touching story of a young flier who was killed in action. Before he died, he had time to scrawl only a few words as a brief final message to his parents back home. The note read: "Dear Mom and Pop; I had time to say my prayers. Jack."