Albuquerque Morning Journal

FUNDAMENTALS.

Two thousand years ago was spoken a parable whose interpretation has to a very large extent been spiritual, but has a material application as well. It was the parable of the builders, of the man who built his house on the sand and the man who built his house on a rock. The one house was destroyed; the other stood. In our social, political and economic life today we are building too much on sand and not enough on the solid rock of fundamental principles.

It is a common observation that the people of this day and generation do not seem to be well grounded in fundamental principles. The home, the church and the school are blamed for this shortcoming and the world war is charged with accentuating it. Doubtless each is responsible to some extent and to that extent give attention to their failure. But whatever their failure, it does not excuse the man or woman who persists in building on sand. They are blinded by selfishness from observing the natural and inexorable laws which surround them. Natural laws are not secrets. They are everywhere in evidence, in the simplest relations of matter as well as in the most complex transformation of it. And natural laws govern men themselves in their relations and transformations in the material world.

The principal reason why they do not govern the relations of men as they should is not that men are not aware of them, do not recognize them, but deliberately attempt to set them aside and substitute their own laws for them. They do this though they cannot break a law of nature; rather will themselves be broken.

Moral law is but natural law applied to matters of right or wrong. It is no more man-made than natural law and is as absolute. The fact that one man cannot see right or wrong as another may, does not change what is right or wrong by natural law. The idea that "what is one man's food is another man's poison" is merely a fallacy that the food may not nourish, or the poison act so quickly, in some cases as it does in others.

The laws of nature constitute some things as foods, some as poisons and those laws cannot be changed. So moral law dictates right and wrong as certainly and as absolutely, though the right may not be distinguished with equal discernment by all persons. The failure is their fault, not that of the law.

To any intelligent man or woman it must be evident that there is too much that is artificial and too little that is substantial in the lives of many people, not only in their thinking but in their living. To too large an extent ours is a make-believe sort of living in which we are fooling ourselves that we are succeeding by disregarding the experience of the ages and blazing a new pathway to some ideal condition. Man must live by the sweat of his brow and when there is too little production to satisfy human needs, man will either wake up and work, or succumb to the law of the survival of the fittest. And some will survive longer than others because there is inherent in them more power to keep themselves alive. Men may be born equal, but they do not remain equal.

As long as man defies the simple but eternal laws of nature, he is beating his head vainly against a stone wall.