英語勵志美文精華 52 A Shining Day Will Come 光明的日子終會到來
A Shining Day Will Come
by Saul K Padover
A candid statement of faith becomes, for me, a concentrated spiritual autobiography. My fundamental beliefs are the products of three converging influences that have been silently at work within my personality: history, America, and Jefferson.
As a student of history, I have been impressed again and again by man’s potentialities for good and evil. I spent my childhood in Vienna. The atmosphere of the dying Austrian Empire made me sensitive to comparative politics and history. Gradually the conviction grew in me that man everywhere, regardless of race or region or climate, is his own worst enemy or best friend. By and large, human beings themselves create their own heavens or hells. They do so because, of all the creatures on Earth, they alone have the intelligence and imagination to change their environment.
My first American home was Detroit. This great middle-western metropolis, the very essence of 20th century American industrialism, stimulated my imagination. From the inspiring history of America, I have learned what good will, intelligence, and creative application can accomplish. It is one of my beliefs that the opportunities of social and human well being in America are still inexhaustible.
And this brings me to Thomas Jefferson. His influence on my spiritual and intellectual life has been continuous and pervasive. I think I know by now every word he has ever written. I feel inside me the very rhythm of his thought. His life and personality have been, to me, sources of spiritual strength and inspiration. Jefferson never failed me in any crisis.
What I learned from him, in brief, has been an abiding faith in human potentialities. I would call this the “religion of democratic humanism.” Following Jefferson’s optimistic faith, despite examples of horrors and bloodshed in recent times, I believe that man can and should be kind and just to his fellows; that man can and should strive for constant spiritual and social improvement and to keep the avenues of opportunity always open for himself and his fellow men. To state it negatively, I believe with all my heart that cruelty, injustice, and intolerance are social crimes that should be punished as severely as physical ones.
It is a cardinal article of faith with me that there is no limit to what men in society can achieve. In this context, I believe that the good, just, and happy life cannot be accomplished in any society where power, political or economic, is monopolized in the hands of a single person or single group. I hold, with Jefferson, that only inside a democratic society, even if it is imperfect, can human beings make a successful effort to attain happiness.
And finally, I believe that all these human goals are attainable by men of all races and creeds; and that, if we use our social intelligence and the ample tools of science, a day will come when there is no bloodshed, hatred, and diseases, and no slums and no poverty, and no destructive fears of the unknown.
