BE IT RESOLVED
Mayer, Milton
Be It Resolved By MILTON MAYER THE GREAT YEAR draws to a close, the year that saw that turning of the tide in favor of the forces of Light against the forces of Darkness. God ought to be happy in...
...But He gets hopping mad when we know, for instance, that if we do such-and-such, then such-and-such will happen, arrogantly ascribing to our own acts the same necessity involved in adding two and two...
...1 was positnj this would be a bad war before it started...
...But we all know, as do they, that this is just a sop to those schlemiehls who still believe that without God man is handful of dust.' Imagine Stalin on his knees, bewildered as he is, invoking the aid of either God or Trotsky...
...Only, for My sake, get going on the love and repentance, or there will be none of you left to deliver...
...I turned, in particular, to Beelzebub, to whom I bear a greater resemblance than you might think to listen to me prate of my righteousness...
...Now after two years of it...
...I resolve, in a word, to be humble...
...Jones, and, lest I forget, yours, Mr...
...We all of us know things that we don't really know...
...ihat it seems to be a bad war, I find myself more arrogant than ever...
...Hitler...
...God ought to be happy in heaven, as he was at the end of the strenuous six days...
...On the other hand, take Lincoln...
...Unlike all his predecessors and successors in the seats of the mighty, Lincoln vacillated his whole life long...
...What saith His servant, Mayer...
...and that out of killing, burning, torture, and mayhem will come, by next Christmas, good will to men, which, I guess, precedes and does not follow peace on earth...
...Compared to what wo have done to Beelzebub's German and Japanese servitors in the great year of 3943, and what we intend to do to them in the still greater year of 1944, exile seems to be a mild punishment, indeed...
...Smith, and yours, Mr...
...In the still greater year of 1944 that lies aheaa, I must get on the right si.'e of God, even if, in order to do it, I have to get on the wrong side of myseif, I think I will still guess that this is a bad war and that heaven on earth will never arise out of the hell of war...
...These boys all know the score, and knowing the score is what makes a man a tyrant, whether or not he has people to tyrannize...
...You," I can see God saying, as he points to the animal that feeds the hungry, clothes the cold, tends the sick, comforts the dying, and buries the dead, "you are My handiwork, but this," as he points to the animal that kills and bombs and starves and malms his neighbor and drinks up his neighbor's blood, "this is not My handiwork at all...
...nor am 1 even sure that He admits it's His work...
...I will be sorry, and not gleeful, that my guess turns out to be right, if it does...
...but I will not know these things that it is not given to me, or to Churchill or Roosevelt or Hitler, to know...
...Thus saith the Lord, as the great year of 1943 comes to a close...
...They always throw a "God willing," or a "So help me God," into their statements...
...In the course of my contemplation I turned, as who shouldn't, to the experience of other creatures in my situation...
...Imagine Roosevelt, or Churchill, or Hitler, or you, or me, rassing our time in agony wondering wnose side we were on, or giving much of a damn as icng as we had the big battalions or money in the bank...
...The reason Lincoln is our only truly great man is not that he knew what he was doing but that he didn't—and knew that he didn't...
...The Trouble With Us All Thus, saith the Lord, if I hear Him right over the rattle of the battle, over the shrieks of the charging warriors, over the moans and groans of the wounded, over the sobs and sighs of the widow and the orphan...
...How about you, you arrogant stiffs...
...Roosevelt, and yours, Mr...
...He certainly couldn't Have been any madder at anybody than He was at the Archangel of Darkness, who, you will remember, suffered exile for his sins...
...Take Roosevelt, Churchill, Hitler, et al...
...Lincoln Was Different All these things we have learned from experience, and God himself, who invented them, would not deny the truth of them...
...Now Beelzebub's trouble is mine, and yours, Mr...
...and for this you and your seed will be afflicted 400 years, but for your love and your repentance will I deliver you sooner or later...
...I was properly intolerant of those who knew it wouldn't be, but I was improperly intolerant of those who just didn't know for sure...
...And if I fail, I resolve to be humbler still, knowing then that by my own unaided powers I am unable even to be humble...
...that this war really proves to be Armageddon, and maybe even the Second Coming...
...I will hope that my guess turns out to be wrong...
...His sin, in a word, was arrogance, or what the Greeks, just to give you an idea of how smart I am, called hybris...
...God doesn't get mad when we know that two plus two equals four, or that the world revolves around the sun, or that man's nature compels him to love his neighbor as himself...
...that this war proves to be the answer to Rovsseau's complaint that man, born free, is everywhere in chains...
...All this may be very pleasing to me, but it must be displeasing to God, Who knows what I know and what I don't know, and when I am guessing and when I'm not, and whether my glee is at His wonderful works or at my own guess turned prophesy...
...that Teheran and Cairo prove to be the salvation of the world instead of a couple of piddling commentaries on its ruin...
...Mayer says, and says it again and again, and when Mayer says something twice you can bet your boots it's true, that as for himself he resolves to keep out of trouble with the Lord...
...this, My children, is yours...
...Here's His Resolution And so I suspect that God is wroth with the arrogant, and I am one of the arrogant...
...But I am not at all sure that as He looks upon His work of this great year He finds it good...
...And it seemed to me that Beelzebub got into hot water or brimstone, not for any of the ordinary offenses listed on the blotter, but for thinking he was hot stuff...
...Churchill, yours, Mr...
...Beelzebub—I always call him "Bub" when we're together, which is often—got into trouble with the Lord, it seems to me, by thinking he knew more than he knew, by judging more than he knew how to judge, and by assuming, as a result, that he was the Angels' choice for Head Man, or ought to be...
...Where all the rest of us have always asserted that God was on our side, Lincoln prayed that we were on His...
Vol. 7 • December 1943 • No. 52
