THE HEART OF THE PROBLEM
Nathaniel Hawthorne has a strange tale called “Earth’s Holocaust.” The story is about a time when the inhabitants of the earth overburdened with an accumulation of worn-out trumpery, determined to rid themselves of it by general bonfire. All night long a stranger with cynical smile and haughty air stood watching them bring things that they considered evil, pornographic books, implements of war, liquor, tobacco, drugs, what not. All were tossed into the fire. Late in the night, the strange approached and said, “There is one thing these wiseacres have forgotten to throw into the fire and without which all the rest of the conflagration is just nothing at all, yes though they burn the earth itself to cinders” “And what might that be?” someone asked. The answer: The human heart itself.
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