WHAT A MAN CAN DO
Mayer, Milton
What a Man Can Do by MILTON MAYER The world is no better for A. J . Muste's having been in it. If it were, it would be better than it was eighty-two years ago; and it isn't. There doesn't...
...They will have their hands full leaving themselves no worse...
...A. J . Muste stood pat...
...Now the Lord doesn't need money or men, because the Lord doesn't need anybody or anything...
...No hits...
...He never despaired of the world, because he did not live by the world...
...What he lived by was the old-time religion of Christ crucified and risen...
...what he was called to be was right...
...But he knows now...
...He must have wanted A. J. badly, to cut him off like that in his prime...
...There doesn't seem to be much good that a man can do, not even if he spends a long life at it...
...Poplicola got nowhere, while Nero with his phosphorous and his napalm and his torture and his poison brought down an empire (his own...
...500 B.C...
...Let him be a lesson to those who are young in heart and full of beans and will soon be old in heart and full of resentment...
...For all that they do—or just as well don't do—they will leave the world no better than they found it...
...Like his friend Red Schaal, now gone, too, A. J . believed that a man had no call to be effective...
...But he wants men—there's a difference between needing and wanting—and winnows the world for them...
...You can't buy a man—not a man—with money...
...The youngest is far needier...
...10960, is needy...
...If what you want is to get something done, do evil...
...when he left the labor movement in 1936, to go back to Christ and stay there, one of the labor skates dismissed him with the words, "Once a Christer, always a Christer...
...put a twenty-dollar gold-piece on his watch-chain...
...no runs...
...He did not even change himself: Reinhold Niebuhr once called him "the perfect innocent"—but so he was born and so he died...
...I am sorry to have to say it in mixed-up company, but the fact of the matter is that A. J . wanted to be a Christian...
...He was never demoralized, because he did not live by morality...
...But he needed men worse than he needed money, and men are harder to come by...
...It is the Committee for Nonviolent Action, 5 Beekman Street, New York, N.Y...
...Maybe he had a place for a tall man in the back row of the Choir, and A. J . Muste looked pretty tall to him...
...10038...
...He was never disenchanted with men, because he was never enchanted by them...
...whose memory and name are nowhere to be found except in Plutarch under the cognomen Poplicola, "lover of the people...
...That's the Christian Church which is not the same thing at all...
...Put a twenty-dollar gold-piece on my watch-chain," the ballad singer sings, "so the boys will know I died standing pat...
...His probation is over...
...A. J . needed men for the Army of the Lord, which is worse outnumbered than the Vietcong...
...I don't know if A. J . made it, or even if he knew...
...If you want to be a Christian, it's polite to wait until you're asked...
...You don't get to be a Christian by joining...
...What a Man Can Do by MILTON MAYER The world is no better for A. J . Muste's having been in it...
...I never cease to marvel at the futility of the noblest Roman of them all, "the most eminent among the Romans, as well for the greatness of his virtue as his power...
...and no incorrigible or uncorrected errors...
...A. J . did not change the world, not so much as by one man...
...This was A. J.'s puny triumph, this and the reproduction of his puny kind of Poplicolas...
...A. J.'s ineffectiveness brings to mind that of Publius Valerius...
...He left orphans behind him, and he won't be providing for them because he won't be fixing the rich through his tin-rimmed specs any more...
...The oldest of his orphans, the Fellowship of Reconciliation, Box 271, Nyack, N.Y...
...He held his own...
Vol. 31 • April 1967 • No. 4
