86 The Rice Institute Pamphlet
umphs by the free world over a series of upheavals of bar-
barism and tyranny. The First World War was a great heroic
action—whose greatness is now almost totally obscured be-
cause it failed of any final triumph. Then another World
War, another epic victory, and another shattering demorali-
zation, and then Korea and Indo-China and Suez; then
Algiers and Lebanon—and God only knows what next. Is it to
be peace or catastrophe—or a further stretching out of “the
neither and both”? How are we to live and work and con-
duct our affairs in such a Time Being after an epoch that
promised us a world safe for democracy and before another
which could very well be the end of civilization?
Still a third illustration of our situation. We stand between
the vast changes wrought by the First Industrial Revolution
and the vaster changes which are in prospect from the
Second Industrial Revolution. Oh, brave new world—yet how
disquieting? We are on the threshold of the age of super-
technology: of the peaceful atom, of fusion power, of the
genetic control and direction of life, of the banishment of the
fears and privations which have stultified the good fife for
men in earlier generations. But the hydrogen that can be
fused slowly enough for peaceful power can also be imploded
in a lethal Boooom! The rocket that put a ton-and-a-half
satellite into orbit can throw a bomb that size across an
ocean. And it’s no comfort to be told that the guidance
systems in those things aren’t yet really precise and accurate!
If something like this is the context of our existence, is
there any wisdom and faith which could shape our ventures
into the unknown and so help to redeem the Time Being
from insignificance? I have already said that I can not begin
to imagine the actual crises through which you will have to
struggle, the battles you may win or lose, the frustrations you