Having been raised for the first five years of my life by my Quaker grandmother, going to public school was a significant change for me. For twelve years, I received a very secular and homogenized education, especially regarding issues of faith and our country’s history. When my father returned from the Korean War, my family moved from Philadelphia to Columbus, Ohio. I was five years old, so the daily influence that my grandmother had exercised over me would now have to be maintained through the vehicle of a copybook.
Every month, my grandmother would send me a small notebook with inspirational sayings at the top of every other page. Most days, I would write short reflections about what my grandmother had written at the top of each page. She would then call or write at least once a week to briefly question me about my responses.
About once a month, my grandfather would send me a letter, more often than not accompanied by an article or poem that he thought might interest me. His enclosures always included a sports article and, frequently, something from his collection of original Rudyard Kipling materials that I still have in my office today.
Perhaps without my knowing it, these inspirational notes from my grandparents continue to influence my thoughts and writings. As I reflect on the events that have occurred over the past twenty-five years in our country, I see how two parallel realities have emerged in our culture and politics. I have observed before that it becomes increasingly difficult to find common consensus when the moral foundations that either side operates upon are not grounded in the same pillars of reason and faith.
I was probably fifteen or sixteen when I first read Kipling’s “The Gods of the Copybook Headings.” In this poem, the “Copybook Gods” represented the eternal truths passed down through generations—common sense, wisdom, and biblical and classical philosophical truths very much like the ones my grandmother wrote at the top of every other page in my copybook. Honesty, hard work, responsibility and duty, reverence for God, and the folly of self-worship were always part of the overall message. To Kipling, and to me as a reader of his poetry, the “gods of virtue” were the copybook gods.
The gods of the marketplace, to me, represent the gods of secular humanism—the seductive but unreliable promises of social changes that have no moral foundations and the promise of utopian prosperity that history has proven, since the beginning of time, always leads to serfdom and subjugation.
The poem contrasts the glibness and superficiality of secular humanism’s promises and the lie of their utopian vision of social change with the old common-sense natural law principles that remind us of the sinfulness of all humanity and our inability ever to “save ourselves” by our own devices.
Gods of the Copybook Headings: Symbolize eternal, common-sense truths and traditional moral wisdom—conservative Christian principles
Gods of the Marketplace: Represent fleeting, seductive ideas, progress, and idealistic aspirations—humanistic, progressive socialist principles
I would like to highlight just two passages from this lengthy poem to demonstrate how almost 150 years ago, when Marxism and Fascism were just beginning to rear their ugly heads across the Western world, the ideas that seem to separate the left and the right today were present even before World War I.
“As I pass through my incarnations in every age and race,
I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market Place.
Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all.”
The point of this opening stanza is that biblical natural truths that ground and serve as the basis for how a virtuous people are supposed to live their lives always outlast the promises of the “flash-in-the-pan” utopians. Our great doxology informs us that “as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be”—the rules of life are constant, no matter what the flim-flam man might say.
“That after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!”
The best way for two opposing sides to come together in argument, is for them to both agree upon the moral predicates upon which the arguments are grounded. If that can’t happen then political and philosophical factions are created that only will increase over time.
I hope it is not too late for us to find that common ground.
