An Instrument of a Greater Government

An Instrument of a Greater Government

by Glenn Clark

Transcribed from the original recording; may contain errors.

The son-in-law of Servinetti came to St. Paul and paid me a visit, invited me to come down to his college in Carrollton, Georgia, and address the student body. And as I was going to be in Chattanooga on a certain date, I said, “How can you arrange that? I’d have a few more days.” And he said, “Well, you take a late night train to the town of York, I believe it was, in Georgia, and spend the night there. You get there about 10:30 or 11, and take the bus at 7:30 for Carrollton.”

And I very happily met all those arrangements. But I went down ahead of time, thought I’d get a little snatch of a breakfast, perhaps at the station, bus station at 7, but they had nothing there. So I asked them when the bus would arrive. And they said, “About 11:25, and at least in the 11:30, as you know.” I said, “No, I don’t want the 11:30. I want the 7:30 bus.” “Oh, you didn’t realize we’re on daylight saving. That bus left half an hour ago.” Well, the chapel was to be at 10 o’clock. I’d come all the way, you might say, down there, and here I was going to miss the situation. So I phoned to Mr. Kerry Smith, the son-in-law of Trevor Dedy. I had missed the bus and was going to hitchhike, and he’d better have some professor prepared to pinch-hit if I didn’t get there. I took the city bus outside of the city, and then I stood in the right thumb up, and a young man picked me up, and we went merrily onward for a few miles, and then puff, he said, “It’s flat.”

He got out, and he said, “The spare is also flat.” So he went back into the town, and I stood there and stood, and after a while, a little man in a little old Ford stopped and took me in, and we came to a hill, and it went puff. He said, “I don’t know whether we can make these hills. The engine’s not very strong.” And we had nothing but hills. I found his father had fought in the Civil War on the southern side. My father had fought on the northern side, so we had an interesting conversation.

He reached the town, and he said, “This course I go,” and unfortunately stopped at the wrong side. I had to walk clear across the town, and again put up my thumb, and no one came. Finally, nine o’clock came. I saw here, I’ve got to make this by 10 o’clock. So I had a conversation with the Lord. I said, “Now, Lord, I didn’t arrange this. You’ve done the arranging, and it’s very likely that there’s a much better man to give that talk this morning than I am. But if You want me to get there, You will have to arrange all the transportation.” Having done that, that shifted the responsibility where it belonged, and I stood there in peace of mind, watching the cars go by, and finally a car with an old couple stopped. I said, “You’re an answer to prayer.” The old lady said, “We believe in prayer. My husband leads singing in churches everywhere.” And after a while, he was riding along, he said, “Would you like to… Have you ever sung… Have you seen Jesus?” I said, “No. I’d love to hear you sing it.” He said, “Do you want me to sing in bass or tenor?” I said, “Either will suit me.” He sang it at the far time, I think, in one, and one of the other.

And his wife had a high falsetto, very crack voice. And they all joined in. And as we went by the schoolhouses, it was about recess time, I had put down the window, and if they ever heard a calliope going by, this was a calliope. His father had fought in the Civil War on the southern side, so we also had another interesting conversation. We finally reached Buchanan, and I rushed into a telephone booth and said, “We’re on 20 miles from Carrollton. I’m going to take a taxi, and I’ll be there. It’ll pass a little bit late.” And he said, “All right, we just put on a mix of this song, and it’ll be okay.” And then he turned to the dean and said, “He’s at Buchanan. He’s going to take a taxi.” And the dean said, “I have lived in Buchanan many years. If he’d said that from any other town in Georgia, I’d have believed him. But that’s the one town where they have no taxi.”

I immediately discovered that, and someone said, “Maybe the shoemaker could take you.” So I went into the shoemaker’s shop. He wasn’t sitting at the job like I thought they’d usually do. He’s standing there, pounding away. And I said, “Could you take me to Carrollton?” “I reckon I can. After I get the mail.” I said, “When do you get the mail?” “Oh, I don’t get the mail till 11:30.” “Well,” I said, “I’ve got to be there at 10 o’clock.” And a man sitting by said, “There’s a man named Mr. Swift. It was 10 miles from here that he has a little sort of a taxi.” And then somebody else said, “I think I saw Mr. Swift in the town just a few minutes ago, getting in his car.” I said, “Where do you think I could find him?” “Well, maybe he might be at the post office.” So I hurried to block off to the post office. I said, “Is Mr. Swift in here?” And a man came out and he said, “That’s Mr. Swift down there at the courthouse, going in the courthouse.” And so I yelled, “Mr. Swift,” and he paused until I caught up with him. “Could you get me down to Carrollton?” “I reckon I can. After I get a lawyer that I want to for a case in here.”

And he went in and he immediately came out. I said, “Do you think you could make a mile a minute? We have 20 minutes to go. I’d read a poem. I used to recite a poem in my school days about Sheridan, 20 miles away.” And he said, “I reckon I can if the constable doesn’t catch me.” I said, “Was your father in the Civil War on the southern side?” He said, “No, but both of my uncles were and they were both killed in Gettysburg. So my grandmother refused to let her younger son go. And that’s the… So that is the reason I got a trip to Carrollton.” By the way, I’m very much against war. For when I was down at the first Camp Farthest Out in Texas, I discovered, I was telling rather boastfully how my father was in the last charge of the Civil War. After Lee had surrendered, he charged on Fort Blakely. And Mary Welch, who was the co-leader, said, “My grandfather was in there shooting at your father.” And her father was a poor shot. My father’s a poor shot. So we had a Camp Farthest Out. If they’d been good shots, he wouldn’t have been here.

Well, meanwhile, the chapel met down at Carrollton. And Victor Carrius Smith stood before the 600 students, the 700 students. And they were going to hear another one of these old dry talks of some of the bloody or other. So they were going to get out their textbooks to read. And he said, “Just a little while ago, I got word that our speaker, Glenn Clark, is in Buchanan. He said he’s going to take a taxi. And the dean says, there are no taxis. But Glenn Clark raised in prayer, and I think he’ll be here. So I’m going to ask you to sing one extra song.”

And meanwhile, “I’ll walk out the thought hall and go out that door. And when I go out that door, I’ll expect to see him getting out of a car.” As I drove up, as we drove up, I said, “How much do you charge? What will the charge be?” He said, “Three dollars.” That’d be less than the bus fare would it be. And I said, “Well, here’s three and a half.” And I jumped out and my suitcase started to run and Carrie Smith said, “Don’t hurry. They’re singing Jacob’s Ladder.” We came walking in, and if the three angels that visited Abraham had come walking in at that time, that audience of young men and women would not have been any more transfixed and starved and startled than they did when they saw this man from the south who believed, from the north, who believed in prayer from walking in. They sat on the edge of their feet, and I talked to them on prayer, and I had a living light to give to them, and I found they were as well prepared as if they’d been to a camp for a week. It cost me less. I’d had some nice conversations with men whose fathers had fought in the Civil War, and the whole thing worked together for good.

Now, this is what I’m coming to tell you tonight, carrying out the thought that Ruth mentioned, how that property of hers was sold and things like that. Now, it sounds a little like magic, but I’m going to get ready to explain presently how these things come to pass. Beforehand, I want to tell you another thing.

A great many men have wanted me to be on their board of directors. I’ve been called in to three different colleges that were very poor, and we prayed, and infinite money has come rolling into them. I can mention three of them. One from Macalester, one from L College, and one from Phillips University. I think if any college president saw me heard of that, if the president of this college was sitting out there, they’d come rushing in, want me to be along, and I’d say, “Hey, I can’t spread myself and be on all these boards, but I’ll be on your board of spiritual directors.” And so there’s a man named Ben Johnson, president of a lumber company in California, with an income salary of $25,000 a year, and always worrying about his old age, whether they’ll have money enough to his wife and him. And he never felt this comfort, so he begs me to be on his board of directors, which I said I would be on his spiritual board. Hardly, there’s several years, but about every few months, he’d phone me from Texas to wherever he was having a board meeting or some time, some big transaction, to pray about it. And just a few years ago, I was in Prince Albert, I mean, King, well, it was a hotel in New York where I always stay.

Prince George, I believe, and leading a retreat there in the Norman Vincent Peale’s church, and a voice in California. “This is Ben Johnson. The doctors say that I have the cancer, and please, please arrange this journey so you can be out and see me this year sometime.” I said, “My schedule’s all full just to the brim, and I’m sorry, I just can’t make it, but I’ll be praying for you. I’ll certainly be praying for you.” We talked over the phone. It so happened we were to have our first Camp Farthest Out in Hawaii that year. I did rather an unprecedented thing. I found I had a few extra spare days and Roland and Marshall Brown and we’re going to go by automobile here to the coast. “Won’t you go with us? We’ll take your book, Water of Life, and we’re going to read it and discuss it and just live it as we will across the continent.” I want to tell you this, folks. If you can ever take a journey with folks that are completely 100% in tune with heaven, living in the kingdom of heaven every morning and tuning in, and take the opportunity just to be with them a while, you’ll find it will be a most marvelous experience. It was a marvelous experience, but when I reached, when we reached Cheyenne, I said, “I’ve been figuring up our schedule.

We’re going to get there a little earlier than I anticipated and we’re going to get there the day before we leave. We don’t leave until evening in San Francisco. We won’t reach San Francisco that evening, but we’ll come to some little town this side of San Francisco, and I know that Ben Johnson lives in a little town this side. Some lumbering town, but I don’t remember the name of the town. I think it’s Stockton because it’s a reed lumber center and he’s phoned me from there.” So I put in a long distance call and no Ben Johnson, no Johnson at all in Stockton as the fellow phone girl said. And I said, “Well then, the Lord will have to give us the name.” Traveling that way where you’re so completely in tune, you can expect miracles.

We made 600 miles that day into Nevada, got there by supper time and I said, “I’m, it’s constant travel and we’re just living in the kingdom. I’d like to come down and see something of the, of this world by going to a movie this evening.” Only one little movie in that little town and they had a nice one figured up, “Go, that’ll be tomorrow.” “Oh, it’s still a better one, but that’s the F’s tomorrow. Only thing tonight is roughshod western.” “Well,” I said, “let’s go anyway.” Three pretty girls got on a stagecoach, and the stagecoach was routed for Sonora. Sonora, I said, that’s the name of the town where Ben Johnson lives. Of all things, to come into a moving picture show to have the Lord tell you things. And a roughshod of all places. Why, if I go into a seal, go down to the hell when you’re in tune, step two stairs, I’ll find God there. Go to a dance hall, you’ll find the, you can’t get away from God if you just get soon in with Him every morning. Well, I phoned Ben Johnson. We got back about half past nine, about half past eight in California. His wife said he’s just dancing with joy all those 24 hours till we arrived.

He never heard of Glenn, Roland Brown and his wonderful healing power and we prayed with him. Went across the, Ohio, he phoned clear across the island, been reading now the book about Roland Brown and wanted to meet us when he came back, which he did and he took us to our next, next point. And then some months later he sent a letter. “The doctor says he can’t understand it, but I’m completely cured of cancer.” Now the way those things fit together, and when I found that, when I, the name Sonora coming to me, I said, “Now I know God’s in it. I won’t have very much work to do in praying for this man. He wouldn’t have brought us there if He weren’t going to have some power.” Now I’m going to tell you where these things come. They don’t come just, off of like apples thrown on the tree. But 30 years ago I decided to take Jesus at His word. He said, seven times He repeated it and repeated it, “To whatever things you ask in My name will be done,” and they weren’t done. So I said, I’m going to take a year now to study the only lesson He gave in prayer, which is, I may ask Him how to pray.

He gave them a little model prayer called the Lord’s Prayer. It takes 30 seconds to recite it. It’s taken me 30 years to learn how to pray it. And the first year I didn’t try to learn the whole thing. I just said I’m going to concentrate on learning one passage in it. And I selected this. “Thy kingdom come and Thy will be done on earth,” or “in earth.” I like the “in earth,” the inside, in your consciousness, “as it is in heaven.” Now, if I’m asking, almost in the form of a command, do you realize the Lord’s Prayer is the only prayer that’s formulated in the form of a series of commands?

Affirmation. And affirmation, “Thy kingdom come, on earth it is in heaven.” So every morning I’d pray that, but in a different way. I would expect as I walked out the door just to be like Alice through the looking glass, I’d walk right out there and find everything in reverse to what it is on this earth. Instead of meeting a man of the enemy, the lead with the left to your jaw, you’d lead with the right to your hand. I found everything instead of the proud, the Michelin here, the earth. I found I had to conform to that new world. I was like learning to walk in a new world. I got reborn. A little baby, when it’s born, it has to learn how to walk. And it falls down several times. I found I fell many times. I’d get up and start again. And it didn’t like me. And he said a mean thing. And I was going to say a mean thing back. No, hold on. I’m in the kingdom. I will spread nice things about him. I just said, the more he’d talk against me, the more I’d talk for him. I found just by reversing it pretty soon, everything began to, new things began to happen. And I made this discovery. I didn’t have to wait to die to discover it.

I found I’ve looked this into reports of folks who have gone over in the other world and come back. One of them is Twenty Minutes of Reality by Margaret Prescott Montague. When she was told, it was the first camp I ever held in the south. It was a firm in Virginia. I don’t remember where Ruth Robison’s there or not. I think she, were you there? And Louise Eggleston was there, but not as a leader. It was the first thing she’s getting into this guy. She was the secretary and went around and arranged the beds and prayed in each room before anyone came.

And there was Margaret Prescott Montague. Had bad hearing, bad sight. Had hardly see, hardly hear. But when she was in the hospital and they said, “You’re never going to see again or hear,” she just sank back and accepted the kingdom of heaven. And for 20 minutes she was in heaven.

She said, never realized how extraordinarily beautiful every face was that she could see. How extraordinarily beautiful the bird songs were. How sweet and loving the nurses were. Why, she was just in heaven. Starr Daily, perhaps he’d have been hanging in the cup for 15 days, dressed out on the cold solitary confinement. Jesus appeared. He had hated for 40 years, for 25 years. If he hated hard enough, he could stand the punishment and the suffering. But he didn’t know, he had never loved once. But he’d never seen such love as he saw in the eyes of Jesus. And they drew the heat out of him like poison drawn out of the wound. And he simply in heaven, in bliss. He didn’t know there was such bliss. Gradually, their face faded away.

And he told me that someday he’s going back to that penitentiary. He’s going to ask the warden to let him go in to that solitary confinement and be all alone for one night. And just try to recapture that. I discovered this, that when you die and go into heaven, the first thing you’re going to discover is that you’re going to be with the persons you want to be with when you want to be with them. And that is the moment they’ll want to be with you. In the second place, you’ll find that ideas will come to you in perfect sequence and perfect order, just the right ideas at the right time. And you’ll find in heaven that the supply resides in the need. And it’s the larger the need, the larger the supply will come. How do I know? Because every day I stepped out expecting the kingdom of heaven. I just expected it every day. And I found the people that I didn’t like strangely liking me now. Or else they wouldn’t meet me. If I was thrown in with anyone, I was in a kingdom state and I’d find they were there. I had spent years writing an article for the Atlantic Monthly, put all the knowledge of grammar and rhetoric I knew into it, sent the Atlantic, and they sent it back, sent Harper’s and still back.

Now a boy asked me how I prayed. Well, I simply prayed the Lord’s Prayer and let’s see, how do I pray? I went in, said, “Lord, You take hold of this pen and You answer it. And I’m going to be in the kingdom and You let the ideas come in perfect sequence and order.” And I was amazed. I was amazed. Someone said, “Why don’t you send the Atlantic?” And I mailed it. And I knew the Atlantic didn’t accept religious articles, but they said, “Send half a dozen more like it.” I got letters from the South Pole, from all over the world. One from the South Pole said twice, the Byrd party, “Life’s been saved because I carried your book, Life, to my dog slave. And it has enabled me to get so in tune with God that ideas have come in sequence and in order.” One night, I see Larry Gould, second into the man, the man who accomplished more than all the other, others that ever went with Admiral Byrd on those expeditions, the cards to Admiral Byrd. Larry Gould said to the men, “Get out of your sleeping bags and move over there a hundred yards. Something tells me this isn’t safe.” And oh, how they did grumble. But the next morning, there was a chasm down the center of the earth where all of us would have been.

If it had been that you wrote that book. Ideas coming in sequence and order. And since then, books have been rolling out from me and I, the last seven years I’ve written a book a year. And only have no, have no time to write them. Except it would be five and seven in the morning. And I’ve now gone nine months a year and I don’t write when I’m on these journeys. I can’t explain it, but I want to tell you that if you just take the fifteen minutes every day, stepping out and expecting to be in the kingdom of heaven. And like I said, we’re all angels. But we suffer from amnesia. I meant it. If you step out of the stage believing that you can start being angels right here and the kingdom enjoy it right here. Don’t have to wait until you go into the other room of the kingdom over there. It’s amazing. For I have discovered God has made one world and He’s arranged the moving picture. And He’s arranged the pictures of all the events in it. And if we let Him turn them, what would we have? Why, do you know if all the money spent in the Second World War had been spent for constructive purposes? There should have been a five-room house built for every family in the world.

Even the hutton tops of South America, Africa. And those millions lying there sleeping in the streets of India. A five-room house for every family in the world. And the hospital in every city of over 25,000 inhabitants subsidized for 10 years. But Stalin said, “Let me turn the moving picture.” And he turned it what? Opposite.

And so did Mussolini. And so did Stalin. And so they protect me. Lord, did Churchill. And so did Roosevelt. A great big ego saying, “I can do this thing. I can do it. I’m the only one that could be re-elected four times. Let me run this thing. I know how to do it. Let me be there if you all come.” Well, the strength of Eisenhower has been that he knew he didn’t know anything unless he had prayer all the way. And before he left, his wife wrote to the Camp Farthest Out, begging us to have all the prayer groups praying for them. And that’s why the… And I want to say that if we just let the Lord turn the moving picture, what is the opposite of love? Why, it’s hate, isn’t it? What’s the opposite of peace? The Lord’s reign is the thing of peace. Turn it just the opposite way, it’s war. Oh, it’s as simple as that. Instead of leading with the left, just do the reverse and shake hands. And so I began doing things just the opposite. And here I was a coach of a track team. And I went out there and had my boys, a bunch of sissies, you’ll say. They didn’t swear or do anything until… And even when the other teams couldn’t find the right kind of referee, they would say, “Well, rest the part, we know you’re honest.

Would you be willing to referee this game unless your boys were going to participate?” Well, they knew, and my boys knew that in case of doubt, I’d give it to the other side. And the other side is a head and a half. But I said, “Boys, it’s up to you now to prove your mettle.” And they went in and won. And after we began to win everything, after all, they didn’t think we were a sissy. They didn’t think it was a sissy. And I got into my writing class until the president even called me in and said, “The Bible department is getting restless. They say that they’re supposed to have a monopoly of the Bible, the religion. And they say, you’ve put more religion into your writing class.” And I said, “Than they are.” And I said, “Well, we’ve gotten more stories and poems than the National Student Anthology than any college in America.” And so doing just the opposite, I found, was one of the ways to live in the kingdom of heaven. Always forgive your enemy. Do always give the other… I began to give away my money.

And the more I gave it away, the more it came rolling in. And so I just found that living in the kingdom, pray it in the morning, and then step out on it. Riding down here, I stopped at the place where I was born. Some friends driving me had brought a special rock because that tenement house where I was born had been taken down as a vacant lot. So he planted that birthstone. I believe in marking your birth places rather than your death places. These gravestones, I’m through with them. But I was in my… the hospital where my three children were born was burned down. So I took my three children, we put some nice birthstone where they were born. And they rather embarrassed them when they… their friends found they were born in a vacant lot up there.

But I told of an incident. And when I was in that, I call it the brick row there. And I was four years of age, my mother was telling a story. And I was in heaven. The right ideas at the right time. With the person you wanted to be with, and you wanted to be with her. And Mrs. Beaner came in. And she lived at the end of this block. And no one liked Mrs. Beaner, especially the little boys. Her name fitted her as perfectly as if Dickens had given it to her. When she came to leave, mother felt she hadn’t been very cordial. So she wanted to make amends. And she said, “Well, do you have to hurry away? Why don’t you stay a little longer?” “Well, if you insist.” Then I discovered that hell is to be with the person you don’t want to be with. And she doesn’t want to be with you.

For years… I was born there, you know, 70 years ago. 73 years ago. And they always wanted to tear down. The last 50 years they wanted to tear down that. But Mrs. Beaner refused. And we found Mrs. Beaner’s end of the thing still sticks up like a sore thumb. And the new building is there. But they didn’t overlap. But they can lock where I was born. So we have that gravestone. And someday, when I get to be famous, maybe they’ll take a picture of that birthstone of those. And at any rate…

When I went to college, I saw a beautiful girl. I mean, very charming girl. I mean, there’s a chapel. And I’d come partly to college to get an education, partly to pick out just the right mate. I had studied phrenology. So I could tell people’s character by the bumps on their head. You know, I can tell the character of every Irishman’s wife by the bumps on his head.

Well, here’s the young lady. She’s blonde. And I was brunette. I said, now that… The chief thing was she had a sweet quality that I could fall in love with. She had long fingers. That meant she’d be good at details. And she had stayed that off my hands. I had short fingers. I didn’t care for details. I used to hurry there. And I’m just kind of talking because there’s other things I was looking at besides the fingers and the… and… Well… But I didn’t get courage enough to introduce myself. But I joined a literary society of the boys, which later decided to give a party to the girls’ sister society. They had a unique way of dividing, of pairing off. I recommend it to you young men and women. They put a list of all the girls’ names on the board, blackboard. And then we drew numbers. The one that drew number one could scratch out his choice. I maneuvered to get number one. I crossed out the name of Louise Miles. Oh, how that name just sounds like poetry. I found where she lived. The next evening I walked around the block five times and then I did a deed that deserves to rank the day exploit of Horatio at the bridge, Charlotte Corday, and the charge of the light brigade.

I went up and I rang the bell. She let me in person, took me to the parlor. I twisted my hat and got out what I came for. And she just stared at me. She’d never seen me before. She finally accepted. She’s the only way to get the party. I wanted to go with her. She didn’t seem very anxious to go with me. That wasn’t exactly heaven. That wasn’t exactly hell. That was just purgatory.

But after I’d graduated, been taken a year at Harvard and cycled through Europe, I came to that same house. She had graduated. It is now a beautiful summer. We walked across the beautiful campus under the elms and there we made a great discovery, midsummer night, 24th of June, that I wanted to be with her and she wanted to be with me, and that was heaven, and we’ve been in heaven ever since. After 30 years of happy married life, she actually stepped through the temptation that separates us from heaven, from this earth. And, but because we’ve been living in heaven, the shock was not so great. And on these journeys, I can always feel almost closer to her than if she was back home, darning stockings or something. And I really need help. I’ll just say, “Louise, you’re a little nearer the throne than I am. You just talk to the Lord about this and just open up the windows of heaven and let the power of the Spirit flow through.” Yes, it’s been wonderful.

Well, heaven. But then, when I wanted to be with someone, Mr. here I wanted to be with, Ben Johnson, here I was and I got there. Dr. Carver wanted to see me. I went to see him and he, “Oh, my beloved friend. You came the wrong day, Saturday, noon here. I, all afternoon, Saturday and all day Sunday. My infant health paralysis system stopped. And I catch you, and all day Sunday, can’t you wait till Monday?” I said, “No, I’ll just speak in the Saturday tomorrow. But I’m going to lunch with my friend here, and we’ll come back after lunch.” And I said to him, “I know it’s going to rain. They always come,” he said, “unless it rains. If it rains, I come, let they come. Why, it doesn’t look like it.” I said, “I know it’s going to rain.” Now there’s some time, I’m, fatty. It’s always, I know things, but I started the day in the heaven. I always, I knew that he always would go out and talk to dear Mr. Creator before breakfast, at four o’clock. And when the Creator, and they have a meet together, there’s always, it works out.

And it rained so hard, we could hardly get out of a car. The only ones came, there were four or five people that were arranged to come for a little meeting with us. They came. There’s someone out here that knows, that knows some of those folks. Put your hand up, who is it?

Yes, you, yes, you’re told about this woman, that family brought them, they brought this woman from Florida. And they arrived. And we sat there in his little work, in his, God’s little workshop. And he, I went in alone and we prayed. And after that he said his discoveries, his inventions came twice as fast ever since I prayed with him in that. And it began there, the deepest spiritual friendship, I think, in the world, from that time forth. A black man from the south, a white man from the north. He was born a slave. My father fought to free the slaves. And here we were. He was a scientist, I was a teacher of literature, but we both had a God. A common God, that we all, we knew, could answer prayer. Neither of us were priests or preachers. But I want to say there is a fellowship and a friendship that I’ll never forget. And I put it into a little booklet. The story of that conversation. 300,000 copies of that have gone out. And every week or month I get letters from people from all over the world whose lives have been changed by reading about Dr. George Washington Carver. The next day, Sunday, all his infantile paralysis victims came and it was all right.

And so those things went perfectly. On these journeys across the continent, I found I had become a sort of an unconscious imitator of a white-haired man whom I have described in two of my books, who walked through the train one day and asked if he could sit beside me. He said, “On every trip I make across the continent, I tell my story to one person. The Lord tells me whom I’m to tell it to. And will you be willing to let me tell it to you?” “I shall be glad to.” That was in 1909 on the journey, my journey home to get married. And since then, I have made similar experiences. And it so happened that about 25 years ago, I was on the train of boats going from Boston to Portland, Maine. And I said, “I haven’t told my story to anyone.” I went down to the seats in the dining salon. And there are three, there are four people at each table. Two of the men were strangely silent, but the other one was just strangely talkative. And he said, “Have you ever been on the Maine coast before?” “No.” “Don’t you think it’s beautiful?” “I do.” “Where are you going?” “I’m going to Monhegan Island.” “What are you going to do there?” “I’m going to be the guest of a writer.”

“Have you ever written anything yourself?” “Yes.” “What did you write?” “The Soul’s Sincere Desire.” “You know what impressed me most in that book was the golf illustration.” And he warbled on and on and told me more about the book than I knew myself. And later on, when I was watching the sun go down and stars come out upon the upper deck, I saw this young man hurrying around, looking about hither and thither, and finally said, “Oh, there you are. Would you mind talking with me?” I said, “I’ll be glad to.” He said, “I didn’t mention your name because I couldn’t think of it as Glenn Clark or Glenn Frank.” I had been, spoke at the University of Wisconsin once, and Glenn Frank said, “When I was editor of the Century Magazine, I got 17 letters telling me that The Soul’s Sincere Desire was the best book I’d ever written.” I was always self-complimented to be mixed up with the famous Glenn Frank. But he said, “I’m a chaplain at the Amherst College. I have to speak to the men once a week and I don’t know how to hold their attention. Can you help me?” “Oh, I ought to,” I said. “I have coached athletes for 20 years. I suppose you think your first duty is to make them good.”

“Well, certainly, I’m a minister.” “That isn’t your first duty.” “Well, what do you mean?” “Well, your first duty is to make yourself good.” “Oh, yes,” he said, “I know what you mean.” “But you can’t make yourself good until, you can’t make them good. Your next job is to make them happy. But you can’t make them permanently happy until you give them the basis of goodness on which you base your life.” He said, “That’s exciting. Go on.” And then he said, I said, “What’s your name?” He said, “I’m, I mean, Kinsolving. I don’t have a card.” I said, “I won’t need a card, because I remember that name, because half the problems I have to solve are between kinsals.” Oh, I’ve never seen Kinsolving since. He did take me to the bell of the coat and he looked me in the eye and he said, “Now I know why I’m here on the boat. I went down to the old North Station to buy a ticket on the train and an unseen hand pushed me through the station down to the wharf. And I’ve been wondering why I’m on this boat. Now I know. If you’re ever near Amherst, let me know. I want you to speak to my boys.” Two years went by and I was on another ship in the Maine coast.

In preparation for the rousing of attention to the Camp Farthest Out, I talked to fifty ministers and others in the morning and then we had lunch together. And then I spoke to them in the afternoon. And at lunch opposite me sat a man who said, “I’m chaplain of Dartmouth.” “Oh, you know young Kinsolving of Amherst then?” “Oh yes,” he said, “but he’s not there anymore. He’s in the Trinity Church, Boston.” An old lady said, “That’s Phillips Brooks’ old church.” “Wonderful,” I said. “I consider Phillips Brooks the greatest minister that ever lived. So he’s an assistant pastor in that famous church.” “Oh, not assistant pastor, he’s a head pastor.” “What?” I said, “How that church must have degenerated. That’s such a young man like that.” “No,” she said, “it’s grown since he’s been there.” And the chaplain said, “He’s especially developed the power of drawing young people. The Wellesley girls call the bus that takes them to church on Sunday the Kinsolving Special. The editor of the Atlantic says it’s become a byword in Boston. They never had anyone that could draw young people like young Kinsolving can.” That’s exactly what I prayed with him, that he’d have that gift. And the old lady said, “Yes, he even draws them from the Old South Church across the way.”

And the chaplain said, “Don’t talk so loud. The pastor of the Old South Church is down the next table.” “Don’t I know it? He’s my son-in-law.” I’ve often felt I could just write a story of my journeys. And it’d be more interesting than any book, any novel I’d write. But I did put into this book, on the wings of prayer, the way God opened up things. One man in all Japan I wanted to meet, and I didn’t know where I could meet him. It was Captain Fuchida, who led the attack of the great air squadron upon Pearl Harbor. I had heard he’d become a Christian since the war. And when I was in Osaka, at a businessman’s luncheon, a prominent businessman, where Roland and I were to address them, a young man, a handsome man, sat down opposite me, and Marshall whispered, “This man up here tells me that that is Captain Fuchida, sitting right opposite you.” I said, “How did you happen to become a Christian?”

And out of all the world, that he’d come walking in, sit down right opposite me. The one man I wanted to see above all others. This has happened all over, as I shall tell a little about when I talk, as I’m wanting to be broadcast the world’s prayer. But this is so startling that it took my breath away. And he said, “After that war, my conscience smote me when I saw that I was the one that really had been an instrument for starting that whole war between us, two nations. And I began to ask the returning soldiers who had been captured by the Filipinos and the Americans how they’d been treated. And they said, ‘Much better than we treated them.’ And, but especially those coming from the Philippines said, ‘There’s a young woman over there. There was just an angel. Positively, she was just out of this world and doing everything she could to make us happy.’ And we finally asked her why. She said, ‘My father and mother were missionaries. And they were beheaded by you, your Japanese soldiers.’

“They had been captured and taken as spies. And when they found they were to be executed, they asked to be left alone for a half an hour with their Bibles before they were beheaded. And she said, ‘I know if they were to be alone for their Bibles, they were praying for their executioners. So I have decided to give my life now to save the souls of those who killed my parents.’” Well, I said, “Fuchida, we couldn’t understand that in our religion. Anyone that had done that to our parents would be blood enemies for life. There’s something that happened that I couldn’t understand. And I wasn’t, wouldn’t wait until I could find, get a copy of a Bible.” You see what she did was just the reverse of what they do in this world. You’re in heaven when you do the reverse.

An eye for an eye. I know. He was a member of Jesus. A very body and blood, as it were. Forgive your enemies. And he said, “When I found there was a God of love. And when I went through that book of Luke and I saw Jesus hanging on the cross. And saying, ‘Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do.’” He said, the tears just rolled down my cheek. And I went to the Christians and I said, “I’ve got to be baptized as a Christian. And I’m going to give my life now to winning the Japanese to Christ.” And I said, “Would you mind coming to United States someday when I call you? And we can throw together all over the nation and you give your wonderful talk on ‘No More Pearl Harbor.’ Now, you might talk on ‘No More World War.’” He said he would. I’m not bringing him this year. I’m waiting until the wings of prayer gets… We’re going to send it to all the senators and congressmen. We’re going to wait until we get this thing built up. And then when he does come, I won’t… I shall expect to go to cities where there’ll be 8,000 people filling the hall in every city we go. And we’re just going to sweep through this, bring this message, but we aren’t ready until we’ve got thousands and thousands of folks trained in the Camps Farthest Out and little prayer groups everywhere.

Then when the right time comes, we can do those things. And why do I know it? Because the Lord arranged to have Fuchida come in and sit right opposite me. He arranged to have him ask the question of why did this wonderful woman forgive her anyway. And when I rose to speak, I said, “I’ve come all the way and I want to meet that man.” And when Roland Brown got to speak, he said, “I was present at the official baptism of that Rosemary.” That’s the name of the girl that was such an angel in the Philippines. She was a Baptist. I was one of those that officially said the complete baptism of Rosemary. And so the whole thing fits together more fascinating than any novel you can write. I took a novel that I’d written to the Harpers and the story of my life, A Man’s Reach. They said the story of your life is so far more interesting than any novel you ever can make up. The moment you start living in the kingdom of heaven, expecting to be with the person you want to be with, and that they don’t want to be with you, expecting that the ideas will come in sequence and order, the right ones to bring happiness and comfort and joy to others.

And that you won’t need to worry about your supply. It won’t come in, it won’t get bread enough for the whole year, because you don’t like to eat moldy bread anyway. You pray that Lord’s Prayer that I learned how to pray with. “Give us this day our nice, bright daily bread.”

And so I don’t anticipate a million dollars to finance all… or a billion dollars for the next 20 years, but I do expect, just as we need them, the money to be coming in. Now it’s going to cost $10,000 to send Roland Brown and Reverend Graves around the world. And they’re opening everywhere. They’re just going to have the greatest meetings in the… It’s just going to open all of Egypt and of all of Denmark, where the whole thing is going to cost $10,000.

And I’d like to have another team going up. We’re trying for one in South America. And then we’re going to have another. And I see the time I can be spending three teams abroad. That’s how it costs $25,000. But the $10,000 came and how did it come? Didn’t ask anybody. But you know, I don’t need to spend any money for myself. And these honorariums that come from these camps, whenever I speak, I just put it in the foundation part of the Stout, and there it is. And the money is already raised for him. But not for the journey next year. And Jacob Dawson and his wife, just trying to come back from South America. They’ve told me they’ve never been to the Camps Farthest Out. They’ve been there since, but they said, the missionaries in South America are just… that’s this missionaries just begging for you to come down and open up the Camps Farthest Out to the South America. You know what we’re going to do someday? We’re going to send Bernie Warfield on a team down through the Asia and all around to that area. You know, lead the singing and get some of the speeches. And that’ll do a bigger knockout blow to the Communists and say that we don’t treat the dark races right.

And I want to say they’re partly right. But just to see a man like Bernie Warfield going along on a team like that was just silenced. Oh, we’ve got the folks. We’ve got the leaders. And all we need is the money. And I’m not worrying about that because in the kingdom of heaven, when we need it’s going to come. And when it comes in a big way, the 30,000 CFOers, every one of them will send in $10 a year. And there’s just $300,000. And with $300,000, we could make point of Nia, run it, have $100,000 for the food meals for the starving Indians, and $25,000 for scholarships for all the ministers who want to come to the camp. And that’s what I want still for that. And all the young divinity students are, for the war we can reach the ministers. They’re the ones that’s going to save this nation, and not the generals, not West Point, but the theological seminaries. And they need a little boost. They need them, after they’ve been there, to come to a camp or something, learn how to pray. And then there’s no telling what the churches will do. Well, I’ve got to… let’s close this. I’m surprised I can cover as much ground as I have in less than an hour.

Because this is the talk my wife used to… about ideas. I was such a poor speaker that I didn’t intend to make any speeches, but then… I belonged to a Presbyterian college, and when the Presbyterian minister got sick, they’d have flown in for a substitute. And the president said, “We don’t have enough substitutes, you’ve got to write a letter, a speech, a sermon, Mr. Clark.” So I wrote one. “A Cup of Cold Water,” the driest sermon ever preached, and ever asked me to come back. But after a while, I thought I couldn’t even give it the first time, half the time, because just before I was getting ready to go to one and catch the train, my wife had come down sick. I figured after a while, that was a coincidence, happened too often. And I just heard a little scheme to keep me from going away, so I had the doctor examine her very carefully, and he said, “Yes, she is sick. But if anyone ever heard you give that sermon, they’d know it would be enough to make anybody sick, just to think about it.” So I roped it up in a mummy case. I’m glad I didn’t destroy it, because it’s a lot of those things that will… when I become famous some day, they will take it out and say, “There is a kind of a sermon that never should be preached.”

I put it a carefully way, and I went out and I said, “Now, Lord, You’ve got to do the talking through me.” And my wife had come and hear me give this talk a hundred times. It’s always different, pulled out by the needs of the people out there. Yes, my mother took me to a dentist, not a boy. He’s very good, and all of her fillings put in remain there to this day. But it took me to hear a minister on Sunday who didn’t like boys, and the sermons came rolling out as fast as it rolled them in. Now, the difference between those two was that the minister didn’t give a snap of his finger for the needs of my little boy’s heart, and the… but the dentist let the flow of his gold be governed by the cavities of my little boy’s teeth. So I came here tonight. A lot of people have heard me talk, give this talk. So I said, “Lord, what will I do? Louise, you can help me more when I’m in that fixture, and after the new ones, I want them to know how to live in the kingdom.” And He said, “All right, tell them about that, and then jump them. Put in some of these new things.”

I have found, when I come here, I ask the Lord not to give a famous speech, a marvelous oration, but that He would have the needs in your heart pull out of me just the things that you needed. And I found that’s the best recipe for to give a good talk there is. Because the form and the needs in your heart carve out beautiful frames of some kind, molds. You know, if I could find a mold that Michelangelo had made for some great angel, and nobody knew it was his mold, I discovered it. And I could put Pastor Ferris in there, and I could bring out more of those, I could put my name on that. I could be the most… I could be the most famous thing. Well, you know, that book, The Soul’s Sincere Desire, is so wonderful. I mean, people said it was so wonderful. I want to say this. I don’t deserve credit for it. A boy with a great need said, “How do you pray?” And I poured this into his heart. I tried to fill it in. And his need was so beautiful that it came out in beautiful forms. You come with some beautiful cravings to learn more about God. And it just… I can pour it into your heart, and the speech is a good speech.

And I don’t have to plan it, or organize it, or anything else. But you have to take that 15 minutes every day to get in tune. Well, I… First year, I got the flu. I was sick in bed for a week. I heard a man ring the doorbell. I… And a little six-shoed boy opened it, and a voice down there said, “Well, the little man, there’s Glenn Clark in here?” “Yes, sir.” “Dr. Glenn Clark, who wrote this old and said…” “Yes, sir.” “Well, I’ve got a little room in his in my left knee. I wonder if he’ll pray for me.” “Oh, sure. Dad would be glad to pray for you. He’s sick in bed. You go up and he’ll pray for you.”

After a while, I said, “This would be ridiculous, Father, if it wasn’t so, so, funny. That’s what’s the big idea.” And just as plainly as if He’d come into the room, He said, “Don’t you realize that after you’ve been in bed for a week, you, three times as spiritual as before because you’ve had 24 hours a day to turn to Me?” And I said, “Well, I catch the hint. You mean I should take more time every day to tune in?” He said, “Sure.” So I quit taking the morning paper. Didn’t take it again for 12 years. I took a whole hour the first year to getting into Him. After that, it only took me 15 minutes. Sometimes I wake in the kingdom in the morning and I don’t even have to go into it. But if I got out, woke up, I’d have a bed on the wrong side. In the morning, I’d phone my business. If I was a businessman, I won’t come down until 11 o’clock. I get back in bed. And if I still got out on the wrong side, I said, “I won’t be down until 3 o’clock.” Remember how Peter fished all night on the wrong side and didn’t catch anything? I just as well quit their fishing, quit everything else.

Why, if all our businessmen before 1929 had gone to bed and stayed in bed until they could get out on the right side, we wouldn’t have had a crash in 1929. If President Roosevelt had had a spiritual trust, as well as a brain trust, I asked him to have a spiritual trust and I got it to some hands that got it right to him. His wife wrote me a nice letter. He refused the absurdity of having a prayer trust. If he’d had a prayer trust, he could have kept us out of the… He could have prevented this Second World War. And I have absolute proof that nobody’s ever denied it. He could have saved the lives of 300,000 of our boys, as well as 50 million other folks. I consider that practical. So it’s a spiritual trust. Very practical. It would have saved us the cost of 300 billion dollars. I say 300 billion dollars is rather practical. Oh, I want to just say the most practical thing in the world is just that little tuning in. And so when you tune in, that’s what happens. Then you can do what you feel led to do. One year I wanted to write some more. After I wrote The Soul’s Sincere Desire, I was so anxious to write, that I found it so hard to find time or to write.

And on Thursdays, I didn’t have any classes until noon. Until 11 o’clock. So if I stayed away from chapel, the 10 o’clock chapel that morning, I would have that time. But one morning I woke up, stepped into the kingdom, and every bone in my body said, “Go to chapel.” Every nerve said, “Don’t sit down at that typewriter. You can’t stand it.” I didn’t know whether I was running away from my work or not, but I felt God was telling me. I walked into the chapel in time to hear the dean announcing that a car with four of our students in it had gone over a cliff the night before. It had turned turtle four times, and little Margaret would not live through the day. As I walked out, I asked the professor if that was a little freshman girl that I knew, and he said yes. That year the students had asked if they could come down to my house once a week and let me talk to them on the kingdom of heaven. I said if you’ll come down a quarter after Tuesday night and leave promptly a quarter of… a quarter after seven, a Tuesday night, and leave promptly a quarter of eight, so it won’t interfere with my activities or studies nor yours, it’ll be alright.

They came, a dozen or so at first, and finally grew until I was sixty or seventy, filling the floor, festooning the window seat and the stairway. And I’d talk as I’m talking here this morning, and then I’d end with a prayer, and they’d walk in silence back to their dormitories. The football team came, a very mediocre team they claimed, but it was the first year they ever won this championship. They said they were always in the right place to receive forward passes. They made the right decisions. Everything worked just in the right way. It was almost like magic. And the athletics of Macalester have been on a spiritual level ever since. My wife said, “There’s a little freshman girl named Margaret that has a wistful look. I wish she would talk to her.” One day I went into a classroom of a… Professor Ward to talk with him, and the students were gathering, and he wasn’t there. Margaret was standing by his desk waiting for him, and I went up and talked with her and found she was the only daughter of a widowed mother. I said, “I’d like to have a talk with you.” And she said, “Oh, I want to. I’m coming soon.” And now she wasn’t coming. I saw a boy hurry to catch the streetcar, and I said, “George, are you going down to the hospital?”

He said, “Yes.” “Is it on the main streetcar line?” “Oh, no,” he said. “It’s a long walk after you get down there.” I said, “Wait a minute. I have a little touring car that I have the battery put in storage for the winter. I just had it put back yesterday. You wait, and I’ll drive down.” When we reached the hospital, we found eight members of the faculty and the president and his wife standing in the hall waiting for the girl to die. George took me to the room, took me in, where the prostrate, unconscious little figure was lying. He introduced me to the mother who’d come down during the night, put his arm around her and took her out and shut the door, and they left me alone. The door opened. Two physicians came in. They closed the door. They began to examine her hands and her feet, irritating, the palms and the soles of the feet. I said, “Do you think she’ll live?” “No.” She picked up. She had no blood pressure, no breathing, no heartbeat. “You want to see if she’ll be paralyzed for life if she does live.” They paid no attention to me. Besides the bed was a table with a vase of flowers upon it. And I thought to myself, if that vase should go crashing to the floor, it would break into a thousand fragments.

If they took a moving picture of that and then turned it just the opposite direction, you’d see the fragments drawn up into a hole. Isn’t that what Jesus came to do? I came to make them whole. And I got a great revelation right there. That God has arranged this world, one world. And He has meant for it to be filled with peace and love. And if we let Him turn the moving picture, it would be. And so if we could just let the Lord turn the moving pictures, you’ll find always you step into heaven. And I said, “Now I’m going to see the Lord turning that moving picture. I’m going to put my faith in Jesus and life and not in gravity and death.” I had stayed there longer than I thought. I went out. George had gone. I got in my car, reached my office, took my hat down, hurried down to my classroom. The last class of the year, I especially wanted to meet with him that day. I saw by the clock I was fifteen minutes late. And no class had ever been known to wait after the first ten minutes at Macalester College. My heart sank, but I had some books in there I had to get, so I walked into the room.

It wasn’t until I was in the very center of that room that I discovered that every boy and every girl was in his place. The silence is not a silence of emptiness, but a silence of prayer. One of the boys softly closed the door and one of the girls whispered, “They told us where you went.” I went up behind my desk and I said, “I’m not in the mood to talk about the little secondary laws of grammar and rhetoric today. I want to tell you folks, I think that little girl is going to be with us next year. Unless, if you want to become a writer, you must depend upon the great primary laws. Open one ear to the voice of God and put your other ear down to the heartbeats of humanity. Abraham Lincoln couldn’t have come to Macalester College because he didn’t go to an accredited high school. He never even went to a first grade. And yet, when he went, he wrote that Gettysburg Address better than anything that you’ve ever done in these classes. And when he went to Gettysburg, jotting down these notes, he said, ‘I can’t hallow. I can’t dedicate this ground.’ The boys who fought and some of them died here. Their parents coming in the buckboards and wagons to hear him give the address.

“He put his ear down to their heartbeats and he let them pull that out of him. He listened to the voice of God and let God speak it through him. If any of you could write anything as good as that, I’d give you credit for the whole year’s work.” They told me, some of them, that they learned more in that half hour than they had in half a year. A year went by and a little girl in a white dress came into my office and I said, “What brought you here?” She said, “Today is the anniversary of the day they thought I was dead. I came to thank you.” I said, “Don’t thank me. Down on the corner of 7th and Wabasha, in the late afternoon with the heavy traffic hour, there stands a policeman. He stops the traffic east and west. He lets the traffic north and south go through. Then he stops the other traffic and lets this through in perfect sequence and order. Well, that man hasn’t had a sixth grade education. Supposing I push him aside and say, ‘Let me show you how a man with a college degree can handle this.’ Or I’d have no power. And they’d just laugh at me or they’d run me in. What does that man have that I don’t have?

“Simply this. He wears over his heart an insignia that shows that he’s an instrument of a government greater than himself.” And if you and I can go back from this camp, back to our homes and our work, carrying deep in our heart an insignia that shows that we’re just an instrument of a government greater than ourselves. The time will come when we can stop the wrong ideas and our friends, alcoholism. Stop it. Let freedom and release come through. Stop the illness here and let health come through. Why, if there’s enough of us, we can… If you have faith enough, we can stop war. We can make a new world.

And now I hear the Gabriel sounding his trumpet to proclaim that we can do that. So let us pray. Heavenly Father, we thank Thee for this wonderful Lord’s Prayer. We’re asking that You may let Thy kingdom come and Thy will be done in our lives on this earth, here in our homes as it is in heaven. For Thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever and ever. Amen.