NO FRIENDS, NO ENEMIES, JUST INTERESTS

Jesse Jones's Houston CHRONICLE:

IT is high time the United States quit throwing money and materials around the world like a drunken sailor and settled on a foreign policy clearly consonant with our national interests first and foremost. We pile deficit on deficit until we threaten ourselves with bankruptcy.

The British still operate on the maxim of one of their great statesmen that England has no friends, no enemies, but only interests. Would that this country had statesmen who possessed a similar regard for our own.

THE DEVIL'S FAVORITE BIBLICAL TEXTS

Columnist SIMEON STYLITES (Halford E. Luccock), in the Protestant weekly CHRISTIAN CENTURY:

WHAT would you say is the devil's favorite text from the Bible? High among the devil's preferences in Holy Writ must be the verses that can be perversely warped out of their real meaning to make nice booby traps. Here is a beauty: "For you always have the poor with you." That has been continuously twisted by knaves to induce the belief that the evil of poverty is set in the world as permanently as gravitation. Another honey, lifted out of its context and distorted, is, "I have not come to bring peace, but a sword." And the devil whispers behind the leaves of the Book, "There is your blessing on war." Another good one is, "Let your moderation be known to all men." The devil gets many folks to take that as their motto, many of them pulpit spellbinders, and they let their moderation be known—immoderately!

But the devil's first choice certainly must be, "Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's and unto God the things that are God's." What could be more reasonable? The catch lies in dividing the "things." It develops that nearly everything that matters much is claimed by Caesar, and the leftovers for God are pretty slim. Increasingly Caesar, in the form of large business concerns, takes over everything from the up-and-coming executive, even to the kind of car he drives, the clothes his wife wears and his opinions on every subject except geometry. Caesar, as the government, increasingly says, "Your ideas are mine to determine. If you think anything except the least common denominator of conformity, you are out of line. Your conscience is my affair. I will take over your thinking on war and foreign policy. Better come along quietly." A reasonable text, "Render unto God the things that are God's"—if you can discover anything that Caesar has overlooked.

BOTH BRITISH PARTIES FAVOR APPEASEMENT

The Anglophobe New York DAILY

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