SAINT PAUL'S PROGRAMME

Describing the passage from Faith to Knowledge, Saint Paul wrote:

When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child,

I reasoned like a child; when I became a man,

I did away with childish things." (I.Corinthians. 13.11)

In this awakening in which Faith and Hope become Knowledge, which he describes in Corinthians, Saint Paul said that Faith and Hope were the highest category of concept accessible to the men of his times. Saint Paul's famous formula: 'Faith, Hope and Love', summarised a programme which, over the centuries, should have blossomed into certain Knowledge. In this context, 'children' are those who have access to Faith and Hope, but not to Knowledge. Children eat milk, not meat. They cannot be given knowledge that can only be understood by adults. But children inevitably reach adulthood, and should then be given adult food.

  It is quite clear that Saint Paul alludes in this text to the absolute necessity for man to pass - slowly but surely - from simple Faith to real knowledge. But modern men, unable to accomplish Saint Paul's programme of evolution, are like adults fed only on milk ... stunted in moral growth, and unable to cope with the demands of modern life. This paradoxical time of distress and danger, where the possibility of fulfilling mankind's wildest hopes runs side by side with the spectre of an atomic war that would wreck the whole planet, makes it high time that Saint Paul's program was completed. This is why the members of Praxis Research Institute are convinced that no effort - however small - can be put off any longer.