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Good Life
It is commonly held that at different times, some words appear to acquire increased or diminished significance or importance in the scheme of things, political thought or influence among those seeking 'the good life'. To look back at what now seems to be a vanished world, one of the elements in the growing explorations among the advocates of change in the 20th century was anarchism.
Opponents of the anarchists saw them as people who wanted to destroy what we think of as law and order. This was because the anarchist ideal was a society in which there would be a complete absence of law or government, which, the anarchists thought, would result in a harmonious society in which law would be unnecessary. Every person would govern himself (or herself) without the need for any laws or government.
If you find this difficult to understand, you are among the great majority but that did not prevent the people who thought they did understand from trying to bring about the ideal, no state, no law society.
Some of them became desperate and decided that the only way to bring about the change in society they saw as being essential would be to destroy established government by terrorism. Hence the caricatures of the anarchists as men carrying large, spherical metal bombs with a lighted fuse spluttering on the top of each. This made anarchists appear ridiculous or just plain mad.
We, as Christians, need to be very careful in how we react to ideas and the people who hold them. There have been times when Christians were regarded in much the same way as anarchists. The Society of Friends, for example, in their early years were regarded as being lawless people who wanted (it was thought) to destroy the established church.
As I write, in early December, we look forward to the birth at Bethlehem. I am neither qualified nor even tempted to advocate any new kind of state, whatever the basis of such a state might be. The child born at Bethlehem became the man who preached the Sermon on the Mount, which gave what was then a new law and who taught us to say "Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven". We need the love of the Teacher to even begin to further that law. The law of the Father and of the Teacher is no other than the Father's love brought to us by the Teacher.
Bob Mclean
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