"Come and Follow Me . . ."

And, behold, one came and said unto Him, Good Master, what good thing shall I do, that I may have eternal life? . . . Jesus said unto him, If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come and follow me. But when the young man heard that saying, he went away sorrowful: for he had great possessions.

--Matthew 19: 16, 21, 22

One chilly October day in 1905, another young man with great possessions dropped half a dozen letters into a Paris post box. Though Albert Schweitzer was only 30, he had already achieved far more than most men do in a lifetime. He was recognized as one of Europe's leading organists; his biography of Bach had been hailed as "a new revelation." As a Doctor of Philosophy, he was known for his work on Kant. As a theologian, he had been appointed principal of Strasbourg's Theological College of St. Thomas.

But the letters he mailed that day denied all these achievements: they announced to his family and a few friends that he was going to Africa, to spend the rest of his life as a medical missionary.

Dr. Albert Schweitzer, now 72, is still fighting death and ignorance in the jungle. So many highbrows (familiar with his scholarly books and his recordings of organ music) have referred to him as the greatest man in the world that he is sometimes known as "the great man's great man." His audience has never been large; but now, at the end of his life, it may at last be dramatically expanding. Two Schweitzer biographies have already appeared this fall: a slick, popular book called Prophet in the Wilderness, by Hermann Hagedorn (Macmillan; $3), and a scholarly book by George Seaver, Albert Schweitzer, the Man and His Mind (Harper; $3.75). Published last fortnight was a third book: Albert Schweitzer, an Anthology, edited by Charles R. Joy (Beacon Press & Harper; $3.75).

Overcoat & Broth. In the little Alsatian village of Guensbach, where he grew up, Albert Schweitzer's schoolmates looked on him as "a sprig of the gentry" because he was the parson's son. To be set apart from the other boys was an agony to him; he suffered many a whipping rather than wear an overcoat, the badge of a "gentleman." Once, after he had won a wrestling match, his opponent said: "Yes, if I got broth to eat twice a week as you do, I should be as strong as you are." From then on, Albert's broth tasted flat. And as he grew up to find that he was favored among men in more than broth and overcoats, Schweitzer was haunted by the feeling that he must somehow redress the balance.

"It is an uncomfortable doctrine which the true ethic whispers into my ear," he once wrote. "You are happy, it says; therefore you are called upon to give much. Whatever more than others you have received in health, natural gifts, working capacity, success, a beautiful childhood, harmonious family circumstances, you must not accept as being a matter of course. You must pay a price for them. You must show more than an average devotion to life."

Lying in bed on a fine spring morning when he was 21, Schweitzer resolved to devote his life to science and music until he was 30, and then to give himself to the service of humanity "as man to my fellow men." The most remarkable thing about this remarkable resolution was that he kept it.

The Secret. For the next nine years Schweitzer followed three simultaneous careers--theology, philosophy and music. Often he worked all day and night, pausing only to eat, and still finding time for an active social life. But he kept the secret of his vow. When he finally announced his intention to spend the rest of his life among the Africans, most of his friends were shocked and angry. Why had he not consulted them? If he wanted to serve mankind, why not in Europe, where his special abilities could do far more good than in a jungle? Schweitzer was saddened by their opposition.

The next six years as a medical student at Strasbourg, where he had been a professor, were strenuous years, a "continuous struggle with fatigue." In addition to a full medical course, he was preaching nearly every Sunday, supporting himself with organ recitals throughout Europe, and working on two major theological volumes, The Quest of the Historical Jesus and Paul and His Interpreters. When that struggle was over, he married Helene Bresslau, daughter of a Strasbourg University colleague, who had prepared herself for the role of Frau Doktor Schweitzer by becoming a trained nurse. On Good Friday of 1913 they set out together for the tiny settlement at Lambarene in French Equatorial Africa, where Schweitzer had been assigned by the mission to which he volunteered.

Dr. Schweitzer's first surgery at Lambarene was a windowless henhouse with a broken roof, his first treatment room an open courtyard. Patients came in hordes, paddled up or down the river from as far as 200 miles away. In nine months he had treated nearly 2,000 cases--chiefly malaria, leprosy, sleeping sickness, dysentery, tropical ulcers, elephantiasis, hernia, pneumonia and heart disease.

Since then, Dr. Schweitzer has struggled there against plague and pestilence, against native ignorance and indifference, against one of the worst climates in the world. Medicine is only part of his work. On Sundays he preaches the gospel, explaining the Messiah as "the King of our hearts, who was sent by God." Almost every day of the week he has served as architect, carpenter, judge, or work-gang foreman. Once, when a native clerk refused to help haul some logs, explaining that he was an intellectual, log-toting Dr. Schweitzer called out cheerfully: "You're lucky! I wanted to be an intellectual, too, but I didn't succeed."

Today Lambarene's hospital can take care of 420 patients. And over & over occur variations of a scene that Dr. Schweitzer described in a book about Lambarene:

"The operation is finished, and in the hardly lighted dormitory I watch for the man's awaking. Scarcely has he recovered consciousness when he stares about him and ejaculates again & again, 'I've no more pain! I've no more pain!' His hand feels for mine and will not let it go. Then I begin to tell him and the others in the room that it is the Lord Jesus who has told the doctor and his wife to come to the Ogowe, and that white people in Europe give them money to live here and cure the sick Negroes. The African sun is shining through the coffee bushes into the dark shed; but we, black and white, sit side by side and feel that we know by experience the meaning of the words, 'And all ye are brethren.'

The Spiritual Jesus. The Lord Jesus who told Schweitzer to come to the Ogowe was not the orthodox Christ that he had been taught about in Strasbourg. A determined rationalist, who insists that all religious truth must "stand to reason," Schweitzer came to the conclusion that the Jesus of history was not a God but a man of his time with a limited mind and understanding. Schweitzer's chief point: Jesus, like many Jews of his time, believed that God was momentarily about to end the physical world and inaugurate his Kingdom. In this expectation, reasoned Schweitzer, Christ sent out his disciples to announce the coming Kingdom, and preached an unworldly "interim ethic" designed to prepare man for an imminent end of the world.

Schweitzer recognizes another Jesus who transcends time altogether: ". . . The truth is, it is not Jesus as historically known, but Jesus as spiritually arisen within men, who is significant for our time and can help it. Not the historical Jesus, but the spirit which goes forth from Him and in the spirits of men strives for new influence and rule, is that which overcomes the world."

To Rationalist Schweitzer the phrase "Reverence for Life" seems "the ethic of Jesus brought to philosophical expression, extended into cosmical form, and conceived of as intellectually necessary."

Who He Is. Schweitzer lives his ethic of Reverence for Life with a Franciscan absolutism. Rather than cut down trees that must be removed, he has often gone to considerable pains to get them transplanted.

"That man is truly ethical," he has written, "who shatters no ice crystal as it sparkles in the sun, tears no leaf from a tree, cuts no flower. . . . The farmer who has mown down a thousand flowers in his meadow to feed his cows must be careful on his way home not to strike off in heedless pastime the head of a single flower by the roadside, for he thereby commits a wrong against life without being under the pressure of necessity."

Albert Schweitzer, the young man who surrendered his great possessions, began a new life with an act of negation. From that time on, he could be wholly positive toward the world around him--whether he called it Reverence for Life or the knowledge and love of God in his fellow creatures. With these words he concludes one of his books:

". . . To those who obey Him, whether they be wise or simple, He will reveal Himself in the toils, the conflicts, the sufferings which they shall pass through in His fellowship, and, as an ineffable mystery, they shall learn in their own experience Who He is."

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