[Applause] [Music] friends i receive many inquiries as to why toward the end of the program i keep looking like this and some wanted to know if i was staring at an idiot card an idiot card is a large card that is sometimes held up on which if a person forgets his name and address it's written no it's because there's a clock here and i have to finish at the end of 24 and a half minutes and so i watch very closely until the second hand gets toward the appointed minute in order that i may conclude
you see i i don't have notes nothing is written out and there are no idiot cards and so i have to time myself as i go along otherwise i would be like someone in my profession who was delivering a funeral oration over one of the beloved members of his congregation waxing long and eloquent sexton came out pulled his robe said it's getting late now getting late better stop and he said always as i'm talking on a very vital subject very vital the resurrection sex and said i know but we gotta get our man over there
in time for it well this telecast is on guilt a little girl had been to church and she heard a sermon on the separation of the sheep and the goats and when her mother put her to bed that night the little child began to cry and she said mommy i'm afraid that i'm a goat and the mother said no you're not bishop sheen's angel told me that you were a little angel and if you died you would go straight to heaven so the little child was very satisfied went to sleep the next night the mother
came in again the child was crying and and she said to her mother i am still thinking about the sheep and the goats mummy the mummy said i told you you're not you're not a goat you're a an angel and a little child said all right mother i know but i'm afraid that maybe you might be a goat so we'll talk about some of those goats the word guilt today you know is not very popular one isn't supposed to use it because nobody today is guilty we're just sick uh you have guilt only in an
age where there's reason did you know that as long as people think they believe in conscience and because they believe in conscience they will have a sense of guilt but now reason is not very popular if you put your head between your hands to think out something people ask if you have a headache and even all of the fruits of our 2000 years of christianity today are being bypassed there's almost a contempt today for philosophy and theology and why well simply because it's reasonable and it appeals to the mind it makes you think so when
you think you think of a goal or a purpose and how you may miss that goal or purpose or how you may attain it and with that comes a sense of peace on the one hand guilt on the other but today we we have no sense of guilt or reason reason is in disrepute what's taking the place of it emotion feeling sentiment when you have emotion you have no guilt first of all let me show you how much emotion plays a part in our modern world take for example advertisements do you hardly ever do you
ever see an advertisement in which there is a reason given why you should buy something as a matter of fact the more products are alike the less there is an appeal to reason automobiles detergents cigarettes and liquor because no reason is given they will appeal for example in cigarette advertisements to well you smoke a certain brand of cigarette gives you the feeling of being on a horse in the wild west or alongside of a waterfall detergents whoa this washing machine 10 feet high automobiles ballet dancers hardly ever do you find find a reason so much
so that 300 men who smoke three different brands of cigarettes were blindfolded and they were given three of these cigarettes to smoke only two percent could tell their own brand two percent out of 300. and this was because they had never been given a reason or was there actually a reasonable distinction between them take for example the subject of of news how much emotionalism creeps into news we like to hear about people being killed about wrecks murders assaults rapes you know the best news is the breaking of the ten commandments maybe in a few years
it'll be news to keep them but presently it's news to break them so that you will hear for example an announcement like this 102 people were killed in the greatest air disaster in history more details about this terrible accident after a word about dora the adorable adorable ointment and not only news and not only advertisements but the appeal to music i suppose there is nothing that would ever convince a reasonable man as little as singing a song suppose a salesman went in to sell a product and began singing or suppose the wife came up and
started singing to her husband your wife wants a mink coat your wife wants a mink coke husband would laugh at you but today simply because reason amounts to naught almost all commercials are sung so that the drip drip drip drip on our heads and on our subconsciousness makes us react like animals to a trainer now i'm not passing on the rightness or wrongness of these things i'm merely speaking about the mood of our times that's all simply because guilt now has passed away with reason what follows guilt has gone down real guilt into the subconscious
mind not faced it's hidden so what do we are faced with up here we are faced up here with manifestations of guilt that are never recognized as such so let me tell you something that is happening to the modern mind in terms of a tube of toothpaste now i will i will not describe the two the tube of toothpaste or whether it's the brand that gives you 32 percent fewer cavities or 48 fewer cavities but a toothpaste has a normal fixture at the top where under pressure the paste will come out so too the human
mind when it's under the pressure of guilt has a normal outlet namely admitting it and seeking pardon that's like taking the cap off the toothpaste but now suppose you deny this normal outlet and you keep the cap on and then you begin to use pressure on this tube what happens you don't know where in heaven's name the toothpaste is going to come out so now with the with guilt submerged in the subconscious mind and we get under pressures because of guilt we don't know where it's going to come out one way it may come out
is in neuroses i think one of the classical examples of neuroses was given to us by shakespeare incidentally in his great tragedy macbeth you have a perfect example of neuroses in lady macbeth and psychosis in macbeth himself when did shakespeare die now 16 16 you know when i was in college i had to learn the dates of all these english authors i still remember them shakespeare 1564-1616 i think look it up to see well shakespeare in macbeth here over 400 years ago showed the effect of repressed guilt so lady lady macbeth who has a neurosis
of washing her hands and the maid servant says she washes her hands every quarter of an hour she sees blood on her hands why because she's murdered the king duncan there's no blood there she sees spots and she asks if all the waters of the seven seas not enough to wash this blood incarnating from my hands now there should have been in lady macbeth a very conscious washing away of guilt admitting it and seeking party there was none cap was kept on the tube how did it come out in washing her hands instead of washing
her soul that's one of the extraordinary manifestations of hidden guilt because we put it down in a kind of an emotional area another manifestation it is dreams now not all dreams but the greatest psychiatrist whoever taught about dreams was carl young carl young said that in his psychiatric experience he examined about 25 000 dreams and his theory is very interesting his theory is that a dream is very often a revelation of our spiritual state our spiritual state in other words our conscious mind is making compensation i rather the unconscious mind in the dream is making
compensation for what we consciously repressed and denied take for example the woman who had a dream about a tree she was looking out of her window and she saw suddenly worms coming and attacking the tree and the leaves began to wither the trunk rotted and it all fell and young told her well this is nothing but the experience of your own life it was the way that she was living and this was symbolically a representation of her true spiritual and moral state now another manifestation also is looking for a scapegoat this is very common in
other words someone to blame today it's it's a great indoor sport to blame religion churches ministers priests and rabbis and so forth are not adequately caring for the needs of people which indeed could be true in some instances but there's a search for someone else to blame and it will almost always be found that people who are discontent on the inside will always begin to blame somebody or something on the outside so we say oh yes it he grew up there were no playgrounds around around where he lived that's why he's a thief today or
he was raised on grade b milk there weren't any dance halls scapegoats gave never the self oh no that's hidden because we live now in an irrational emotional era now i could go on enumerating many more escapes through the tube under the pressure of the subconscious mind anyone who is skilled in the knowledge of human nature is not led very much astray by these escapes let me give you one or two experiences that i had not very long ago a young woman wrote to me a college student she was a sophomore in college she said
i've given up my faith i no longer believe in god and i am now an atheist and so forth well it was curious first of all that she should have written to me she lived in another city i wrote to her and asked her to call on me she was not a particularly intelligent young woman and i said how did you happen to lose your faith in other words i was asking her what is the scapegoat what's the excuse she said the my studies in comparative religion i followed a class and i found out all
religions are alike well sure all the all the paintings in the gallery have the same color but that doesn't mean that they were painted with the same artist but at any rate that was the reason she gave i knew of course that was not the real reason but i played along with it for a minute and she was in my library and i said now directly in back of you is a section of books on comparative religion i have about 400 different titles on that subject now you pick out any one of those books that
you know and we will discuss it now glance them over but she didn't know any of them which didn't a bit surprise me i said um my good girl come into confession she says how can i go to confession i don't even believe in god i said listen you're not having any difficulty with the creed you have difficulties with the commandments i said why don't you face up to it you've been immoral in order to escape your sense of guilt you wrote to me about being an atheist isn't that right she said yes that's right
well she went to confession she was all right i think as i've said before we do not pay very much attention to what people say but we pay attention to why they say it why another case a woman told me about a brother of hers who had not worked for three years his weight had gone down to about a hundred pounds he had been under psychiatric treatment for almost uh a year and was no better would i see him the poor fellow came to see me he was rather pitiable in his condition and i asked
him to tell me about himself just talk for a half hour and he talked generally for about a half hour he said he didn't know the reason why he was this way and suddenly i turned on him and i said how much did you steal he said i didn't steal anything i said you did how much he said i didn't steal anything you're calling me a thief i said yes you are a thief how much did you steal he said three thousand dollars he says how did you know well i said you were telling me
about i asked you all the queer things you do did namely where the toothpaste came out and i noticed that among other things he said that whenever he would uh put money in the collection box in church he would always wipe it off first so i suspected that he had dirty money and that's why i asked the question i could have been wrong but i just happened to hit it right and after that he cleared up he went to work and began admitted to the employer that he had stolen the money and the employer took
him back and he gave back part of his salary and now he's perfectly normal and healthy so that today people are not really free from guilt it's just down in another part of their being and this as a matter of fact has another another effect it is often said that today people are irreligious well in a certain sense maybe they are but that is not altogether true religion has moved out of the conscious rational church-going organizational religion down into the subconsciousness that's where religion is that's where the dramatists work on it and that's where religion
will have to begin to work on it in other words these people were suffering from these submerged feelings of guilt they have misery yes misery they do not call it guilt that is not important fact is they're frustrated they're distressed they're in agony they're pressed and they often fall into result into despair you know the answer there are two things in this world that never never should be separated misery and mercy you have misery without mercy you've got despair if you've got mercy without misery you have presumption our modern despair is not so bad after
all can be the condition of a real resurrection real happiness and a real peace why as a matter of fact if we had never sinned if we were never guilty wouldn't we never could call our lord savior sin isn't the worst thing in the world the worst thing in the world is denying that we are sinners bye sinners bishop sheen will return in a moment fulton j sheen is indeed a man for all seasons he walked a paced beat allowing us to glimpse his nature and ponder its worth and to enjoy its presence bishop sheen
authored over 90 books he broadcast countless radio and television programs and ministered in many parts of the world to people of every belief as he said many times it is not a unity of religion we plead for but a unity of religious people we may not be able to meet in the same pew but we can meet on our knees in order that i may not feel guilty of ingratitude thank you for listening and bye now and god love you oh [Music] you
