The Personal Relevance of Truth

Quakers are not often noted for their preachers, but let me introduce Thomas S. Brown! Here is language that tumbles and rolls through the power of suffering when “we squirm ceaselessly in the presence of Emptiness, Meaninglessness, Nothingness.” Here is swashbuckling language which with a jab of the dagger and the thrust of a verbal cutlass tears through the crude thinking of the day and leaves us with “suffering without meaning or purpose is Hell.”

Thomas Brown is not one to defer judgment; it is time to speak Truth as he sees it, and to declare other approaches as “nonsense and immoral.” And Truth is what he is preaching with a fundamental mixture of Aristotelian ontology and Christian enthusiasm. “Truth and Reality are one, and there can be no life, no existence without Truth.”

A short pamphlet, but one which is thumpingly packed with insight turned to exhortation explains what that Truth is. “This is the Truth that challenges and destroys the relativism, the cynicism, the materialism that now strangles our country. This is the Truth that gives unity instead of faction; that gives integrity instead of duplicity; that gives creativity instead of destruction; that gives purity instead of debauchery; that gives joyous courage instead of fear; that gives commitment instead of security. This is the Truth that gives Life to me and to you.”