A Spurious Diagnosis

A recurrent topic in the newspapers is the dismal failure of modern man to find an answer to the stresses and strains of Western society. "Experts" of various kinds continually harangue the public on this subject. Both in their diagnosis of the cause of the malady, and their prescription for its cure, these "experts are in shocking disarray. Here is a comment which met our eye recently in a leading daily newspaper:

"Boredom - with work and surroundings - is reaching crisis pitch for many people and is being translated into a new and frightening phenomenon ... the Vicious society. Large-scale continuous mass production does not provide the creative outlet people need in their jobs and, increasingly, leisure pursuits are failing to satisfy this need. The result for the many is that violence and destructiveness, be it vandalism, promiscuous sex or aggression, becomes the only release valve.

But the malaise penetrates much deeper than simple job dissatisfaction. Our society has lost its goal, it no longer has any definable purpose. The struggle for physical survival is over, and while pockets of poverty remain to prick the collective conscience, for the mass of the population the great fight to earn enough to eat has ended. Gone, too, are the constraints of mutual defence, for the society is no longer threatened by outside forces.

Now, deprived of any point of focus-survival, national defence, or other convenient symbol - our society, like its contemporaries in the rest of Europe and America is threshing about in search of something.

Education, the great panacea, is now regarded with scepticism as the pathway out of the present trough. Viciousness is not, after all, the prerogative of the uneducated. What is the solution? Quite simply, there is no ready-made one".

The fallacy of this sort of analysis, shrewd in its way, and containing an element of truth, is that it does not penetrate deeply enough. It deals with secondary causes, with the symptoms rather than the disease. A complete and searching diagnosis of the problem which confronts modern man, but is not peculiar to him, is found in the opening chapters of Paul's letter to the Romans. With insight given by the Spirit of God Paul goes to the root of the human problem, and then reaches this conclusion: "They are all under sin; as it is written, There is none righteous, no not one; ... There is none that seeketh after God" (Rom. 3:9-11).

If the newspaper comment we have quoted falls short in its analysis of the cause of mankind's troubles, the folly of its reasoning is exposed when it attempts to answer the question, "What is the solution?." After stating that there is no readymade answer. the writer concludes:

"The solution is within man. Evolution and animal inventiveness have taught him to protect himself from his environment. Now man must learn protection from himself".

What a hope! It leaves man to his own resources, seeking no help from God, no saviour but himself. This is the pitiable gospel of humanism. Our Lord's imperishable claim is rejected out of hand:

"Jesus said unto them, I am the bread of life: he that cometh to Me shall not hunger, and he that believeth on Me shall never thirst" (John 6:35).

Those who have found in our Lord Jesus Christ the answer to the spiritual hunger innate in the human heart echo the lament of saintly Samuel Rutherford:

"0, pity for evermore that there should be such an one as Christ Jesus, so boundless, so bottomless, and so incomparable in infinite excellency and sweetness, and so few to take Him l"

unknown | Jun 1971
Comment By Torchlight