The Sojourn at Rome

132:1.1It was with Ang­a­mon, the leader of the Sto­ics, that Je­sus had an all-night talk early dur­ing his so­journ in Rome. This man sub­se­quently be­came a great friend of Paul and proved to be one of the strong sup­port­ers of the Chris­tian church at Rome. In sub­stance, and re­stated in mod­ern phrase­ol­ogy, Je­sus taught Ang­a­mon:

132:1.2The stan­dard of true val­ues must be looked for in the spir­i­tual world and on di­vine lev­els of eter­nal re­al­ity. To an as­cend­ing mor­tal all lower and ma­te­rial stan­dards must be rec­og­nized as tran­sient, par­tial, and in­fe­rior. The sci­en­tist, as such, is lim­ited to the dis­cov­ery of the re­lat­ed­ness of ma­te­rial facts. Tech­ni­cally, he has no right to as­sert that he is ei­ther ma­te­ri­al­ist or ide­al­ist, for in so do­ing he has as­sumed to for­sake the at­ti­tude of a true sci­en­tist since any and all such as­ser­tions of at­ti­tude are the very essence of phi­los­o­phy.

132:1.3Un­less the moral in­sight and the spir­i­tual at­tain­ment of man­kind are pro­por­tion­ately aug­mented, the un­lim­ited ad­vance­ment of a purely ma­te­ri­al­is­tic cul­ture may even­tu­ally be­come a men­ace to civ­i­liza­tion. A purely ma­te­ri­al­is­tic sci­ence har­bors within it­self the po­ten­tial seed of the de­struc­tion of all sci­en­tific striv­ing, for this very at­ti­tude presages the ul­ti­mate col­lapse of a civ­i­liza­tion which has aban­doned its sense of moral val­ues and has re­pu­di­ated its spir­i­tual goal of at­tain­ment.

132:1.4The ma­te­ri­al­is­tic sci­en­tist and the ex­treme ide­al­ist are des­tined al­ways to be at log­ger­heads. This is not true of those sci­en­tists and ide­al­ists who are in pos­ses­sion of a com­mon stan­dard of high moral val­ues and spir­i­tual test lev­els. In ev­ery age sci­en­tists and re­li­gion­ists must rec­og­nize that they are on trial be­fore the bar of hu­man need. They must es­chew all war­fare be­tween them­selves while they strive valiantly to jus­tify their con­tin­ued sur­vival by en­hanced de­vo­tion to the ser­vice of hu­man prog­ress. If the so-called sci­ence or re­li­gion of any age is false, then must it ei­ther pu­rify its ac­tiv­i­ties or pass away be­fore the emer­gence of a ma­te­rial sci­ence or spir­i­tual re­li­gion of a truer and more wor­thy or­der.