By Dr. Josiah Oldfield, President of The Fruitarian Society
There is one great proof of being alive in the fact of continuous and unceasing changes. So long as I continually keep changing myself, I am alive. So long as I am being changed, I know that someone else is alive!
The old writers believed that, day after day, for six full aeons of days, God worked, and that on the seventh day He rested!
But because God “rested” on the seventh day, it is not suggested that He has rested ever since. The sun to-day is not the same sun it was some millions of years ago, and no astronomer would agree that the moon is unchanging. It was a “living world” which was created and it is still a living Cosmos which God keeps under His care and plan.
What lies ahead who can tell? There is one thing certain, and that this is a planned world and that the coming of continuous changes will continue until the plan is fulfilled.
Have we any insight, as yet, as to the changes which will take place in that one tiny grain of soil which we call “Our Earth”?
Ever since men began to think there have been prophets of woe! There is nothing so easy, as for creatures of habit, to mourn over “the good old times” and try to make us believe that through wars and rumours of wars, through class and individual hatred, through lax morality and decaying manners, there is sorrow ahead, and that the world has nothing in front of it but destruction.
This is not the future which science promises nor the changes which history records. Men have dreamed of “the age of gold” but all these dreams have been prophecies of the future and not records of the past. We have pictured to ourselves ideal status. We have created in our poets’ brains, visions of a lost Atlantis buried in the ocean depths.
No flotsam nor jetsam of such an age of gold has ever floated to the surface! Again and again man has been bidden to rise to new heights and to conquer new realms and to learn how to transform the desert, so that it shall blossom as the rose.
Every faithful historian will award the palm of increasing happiness of the race, to the present over the past. The position of women – from drudgery to queenliness – from filth and hunger and want, to well-fed holidays and health – the state of ever-present security and safety, after age-long fear of terror by night and invasions and plagues and human cruelties and terrors of day. No – the world is steadily improving and I can record the vision of a still greater plan unfolding.
If the human race should fail to rise to its great possibilities, the atomic scourge will destroy this race, but a greater and holier one will replace it.
It is for us to spread that Light of Infinite Pity for every single creature that has suffered – that self-sacrificial fellowship which can wipe tears from every eye – that devotion to a Divine Science which teaches that progress is evil from Emnity to Amnity, from slaving to Brotherhood, which fires us with the service and steadfast Faith that in the Fruitarian world of the future we shall march nearer and nearer to that realm of God, wherein there shall be no more need for pain and suffering nor death. We must each one consciously deny to ourselves any comradeship with the butchery of the past, we must joy only in angelic Fellowship of the intermediate Eden with the future of the Eternal.
As I write my faith is illumined by a flash of inspiration and surprise which comes to me in the sunlit evening in the mountains of Jamaica from which I am writing, from a lady whom I knew long years ago and who is blazing her trail in life. Her letter ends “With much love to you and my everlasting gratitude that you taught me long ago to live as a loving fruitarian, friend of all creation.”
World Forum, Winter 1952