free choice, the elements of darkness, ignorance, evil and
destruction are available for him to choose, and there are times when
these seem the best alternatives.

At the end of the 18th century one of the greatest minds of all time was
destroyed by one stroke of a guillotine blade. The judge who presided at
the trial of the great French chemist Lavoisier is reported to have
said, "The Republic has no need of men of science."

Choices like this have often been made by the society of man. A turnoff
to darkness has been deliberately taken, superstition has been embraced
while knowledge has been destroyed.

When times are placid we assume such choices could result only from some
great insanity; that the men who made them had themselves known more
pleasant days. The truth is that there are extremes of circumstance
which could force almost any man to abandon that which he has always
held to be right and good, and only the very giants could stand up and
prove themselves unmoved.

Such giants may seem, in ordinary life, rather obscure. Illustrating
this are the people in this story: a somewhat pompous little mayor; a
professor of chemistry in a small-town college in the mountain west; a
minister of the gospel, who would be lost with a big-city congregation;
a sheriff who doesn't care what happens to him personally as long as he
sticks to the kind of rightness that has always worked; and a
high-school boy who learns what it means to do a man's work.

Such people are important, the most important people alive today. They
are the ones whose hands hold all that our culture has achieved when
catastrophe overtakes us.

The illusion of security is a vicious one. With physical comforts around
us, the abyss that is just beyond our walls is forgotten: the abyss of
outer space, beyond the paper-thin atmosphere shielding us; of the fires
in the earth beneath; of the hurricane winds beyond the horizon; of the
evil and insanity in the minds of many men.

The caveman dared not forget these abysses, nor the frontiersman, nor
the scientist who fought the witch hunters to bring forth a new truth of
Nature. But when we believe we are secure we do forget them.

In catastrophe, the most recent achievements of the race are the first
to go. When war comes, or mobs attack, or hurricanes strike, our science
and our arts are abandoned first. Necessity of survival seems to insist
that we cannot fool with things of the mind and of the soul when