hearts and souls to be able to pub lish forth news and views, but they could not. We do have that freedom, with nothing to stop us but the limits we have allowed to be put upon us. The result is that our freedom is no more effective than their bondage. The only difference is: They can not. We do not. Either way, the devil has it his way. We have failed to be strategic, and because we have failed to be so, the nation is suffering terrible damage and moral downcasting. We saw not so very long ago how one woman — expressing in her being the historic enmtiy of Satan against the Word of God — marched all the way up to the Su preme Court to complain that the reading of the Bible in the public schools violated her rights as an atheist. She won a decree by which the Bible was thrown out of schools all across the nation. One swipe of the law and they were out. That one woman touched the lever of power in the American le gal process, and did away with morning Bible reading in the pub lic schools. Some months later I was seated at my desk in the newsroom when an editor handed me a short piece of wire copy. It was from upstate New York, reporting that a school principal there had refused to per mit the printing of two verses of the Bible in the high school year book. "Look into it," the editor told me. I sensed a story of some impor tance and went after it by tele phone. I learned that some high school students had gone out to get ads for their yearbook. One of Page 54
them had pushed the front door bell of a certain man and asked him if he would like to take a small ad. He thought about it a minute and said, "Well, yes I would." The man was a former drunkard who had been converted to the Lord Jesus Christ and had gone sober, and he wanted to glorify the Lord in that little ad. He told the stu dent he would like to take an ad and put two Bible verses in it. The student said fine. The man wrote the verses out and paid for the ad. When the student took the ad back to school the principal said, "No, you can't print those Bible verses in the yearbook." He thought it might violate the Supreme Court ruling. I talked by telephone to the man, to the student who sold the ad, to the school principal and to the pastor of a Bible-preaching church who had taken the issue up pub licly. The people there pointed out that the yearbook had accepted ads from two saloons and a dance hall. Only the Bible was banned. They said, "We believe that our rights as Christians are violated by such a ban." They said they had hired a lawyer and were going to take the matter to court. It seemed that this was a case in which a school principal had gone too far, a case that offered the very good possibility of getting a modi fying ruling asserting the right of a citizen to quote anything reason able that he wanted in an ad. Such a ruling would have communicated a certain balance to weak or timid school authorities who had gone to extremes in shying away from the Bible. I waited some time and then called upstate to ask the progress
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