Successful living hinges on the capacity to believe. The unconquered and unconquerable of this world are those who have mastered the art of faith. They draw constantly on this inner source of strength, for they have acquired and hold ever freshin their hearts an abiding faith in a Higher Power, and in their own destiny. Without such faith they are defenseless before the inevitable difficulties that all must face; With it they are armored against even the most cruel of adversaries. No age has a monopoly on misery, although our own can claim more than its full share, and, at that, misery of a most particular kind. For in the midst of economic plenty we starve spiritually. Surounded by unmatched potentialties for the good life,we are overwhelmed by the deadly fear that all is lost!
Then the ironic fact emerges that physical medicine, which has triumphed over so many of the bodily diseases that once sourged mankind, has proved uterly inadequate in the treatment of the maladies that canker the modern soul. Hosts of emotional ills gnawat the rocks of our serenity and health, and plague us with shadowy terrors.
But certainly the appearance betrays the reality. Euerything is not lost, as one would think! The persistence of such happy affirmations as young people falling in love and, thereby, removing man's parennial lease on Eden; of teachers unfolding newwonders, and perpetuating old omes, in the minds of youth; of parents nurturing children through unsung years of patience and sacrifice-all of these are the unanswerable rebutal to the "all is lost" school of thought. All of these and ten thousand othersyes-saying acceptances of life reasure us that there is an inexhaustible reservoir from which the human race can draw sustaining strength and hope.
At one time Captain Eddie Rickenbacker, one of the outstanding heroes and loaders of our time, was talking to a group of airmen in a veterans' hospital. The veterans were all men who had been seriously wounded and were, manyof them, badly shaken psychologically.
Captain Rickenbacker was a man of inspired and demonstrated faith, and in the midst of his talk he passed, and then said ernestly, "If there is any one of you who has mot yet had an experience of God my advice to him is to go ouu after it and get it".There was a hush in that hospital room. They knew that he had uncovered to them the secret that had brought him through to safety. They realized that this flying ace had pointed out to them the surest way out of their uncertainty and despair.
Rickenbacker did not say such words idly. He did believe that faith is the key of life. "Think positively and masterfully,, with confidence and faith", he has said,"and life become more secure, more frought with action, richer in achievement and experience. This is the sure way to win victories over inner defeat. It is the way a humble man meets life or death".
But unfortunately all too many of us have erected barriers in our everyday lives to the healthly operation of belief, to the acquisition of this power-giving faith. A perverse blockage dams the flood of energy that should flow with irresistible force intothe healthy heart. What stops this flow? What diverts this stream of hope and belief and confidence that should irrigate the dry and hopeless hearts of men?
These arethe questions that are a challenge to every clergyman, to every teacher, to every physician (and especially to every phychiatrist) in our society. Neither are they academic questions. With mounting insistence they enter the lives of breakingpoint, are unable to live happily in this world until their emotional problems are solved.
In quiet rooms in the Marble Collegiate Church, shut off from the brawlhng traffic of New York's Fifth Avenue is a clinic where religion and psychiatry have, we believe, been welded into a powerful therapy for the ills that wrack the human spirit. Here, under the joint directim of a clergyman and a psychiatrist, many harrowed men and women are learming to break down the barriers that keep them from living successfully. Here, day after day, the anxious and the depressed, the worried and the frightened, are gaining the priceless secret of inner peace.
