Mrs. Osterhaus, a California housewife, attributes this article to a FEE Seminar she attended recently.
Have you ever stopped to consider what a phenomenal gift you have in that remarkably maneuverable instrument you call your hand? How like us humans to casually take for granted this amazing tool which so faithfully serves us all the days of our lives, for better or for worse as the mind wills it. How fitting that the first thing a baby really notices in the strange new outside world is that fascinating bit of wonderment which waves and floats and sometimes jerks in the air above it like some pretty pink-petaled built-in mobile. Yet this same soft tiny hand, so seemingly fragile, shows surprising strength and tenacity when a giant grown-up finger reaches out to its miniature daintiness!
Think what it must have been like thousands of years ago for the man living like an animal with no clothing, no shelter, no food save that which he could wrest from nature with his only tool—his gnarled, scarred, bare hand. In time his brain, superior to that of other living creatures, began to reason out ways and means for making his lot an easier and more rewarding one. He ingeniously devised ways of augmenting the power and usefulness of his hand by using a stone or a broken branch of a tree, and then by fashioning a crude axe and other rough tools of invaluable worth to his hitherto limited capabilities. The development of man and the emergence from the animal state was painfully slow, with innumerable setbacks over the ages; but now, millennia later, miracles too vast and complex for any single human being to comprehend even an infinitesimal fraction of their wonders are all around us as commonplace as the long-ago Stone Age axe.
To what do we really owe all these extraordinary achievements so painstakingly won? Is it perhaps to a master plan of some all-encompassing human authority which has dictated to man what he may or may not do with his natural abilities? Most emphatically not! For the most astounding forward strides have been made when man’s mind and hand were least fettered, leaving him free to experiment with his own individual ideas and talents. Nowhere, in the history of the human race, has this progress been so marked as during the comparatively brief span since the founding of our own country under seemingly insurmountable hardships and frustrations.
Today, we Americans would do well to take a moment out from our high-pressured existence to really examine our soft and cultured hands and to mentally “transport” ourselves back over the centuries and reflect on the accomplishments of these like implements of our forebears. In retrospect we would see so clearly that individual man can literally be stopped at nothing—even to building “a stairway to the stars”—just so long as he is a free agent left to express with his mind and his obedient hand whatsoever “impossible” dream may arouse his imagination. The infinite bounty of our God-given natural resources is far beyond our understanding and is the material key, of course, to human progress.
If the hand of each human being were allowed and encouraged to follow the opportunity afforded its own purely individual destiny, and if the mind guiding it were in tune with the omniscient Mind which planned and created the universe, the affairs of our world would be as orderly as the stars in their courses. Each man would by nature develop his own potential to the good of himself and, concordantly, of his fellow men by fitting comfortably and happily into the beautiful, fruitful, and harmonious pattern originally designed by the invisible hand of God.
J. Kesner Kahn
The new concept of a Free Society is one where everything is free—except people.
