“I have read much of Schweitzer, and I am frank to confess to you that when I first encountered him, I encountered him with all of the limitations of my own background and culture and religious experience and sensitiveness. I felt, as I read On the Edge of the Primeval Forest, for instance, that during a long period of Schweitzer’s life in Africa, he was battling with certain spiritual and psychological problems of which he himself was not aware. He had to come from under the burden of a sense of racial superiority and cultural superiority and religious superiority and meet the African as one human spirit encountering another human spirit, and all through the pages of the first edition of On the Edge of the Primeval Forest there seems to me evidence of this inner struggle that the great doctor was passing through.

“Finally the moment of tremendous emancipation came when one day an African came into the compound, bent at right angles, suffering from a case of acute hernia. An operation was indicated, and Dr. Schweitzer says that he performed the operation; and after the operation was over he sat by the bed of this man, as the man worked his way out of the influence of the anesthetic and as he became conscious, the first thing he remembered was that there was no more pain. No more pain. And he reached out to touch the doctor’s hand, and the doctor, as he grasped the hand of this African, felt — said he — that the difference of religion, difference of culture, differences of background, differences of race, all melted away. And on the edge of the primeval forest he met as a man another man. Albert Schweitzer became free.

“Now this other thing that interests me about Dr. Schweitzer is that because of his revolutionary and radical ideas, particularly as touching the significance of the life and the person and the teachings of Jesus, he was regarded in many circles as a heretic, as a religious iconoclast. But he presented himself to the missionary society to go out, after giving Bach concerts for the money to finance it all, he had to go out through a sanction, you see, for one of the ways by which colonial governments are held is that no person is permitted to go out to deal with the minds and the spirits of the colonials unless the official colonial government says ‘yes.’ And that is common sense if imperialism is going to remain in power. It has to do that, and all missionary activities in any of these possessed places are cleared officially by the body in the country and the government that has the destiny of the people in their hands. So you can’t go free-wheeling among these people lest you do things that will be deadly for the guaranteeing and the perpetuation of the established order…. He was a good doctor, apparently, well-disciplined, well-trained, but he had ideas, religious ideas that were bad for Europeans; so what on earth would happen if his ideas were turned loose among simple people in Africa, went the logic? So they said, ‘all right you may go, but you can’t preach.’ We put a ban on your lips. So he served his first section of his experiences in Africa under a ban. He was not to talk religion. He was not to explain anything, and that’s a wonderful thing, you see. Suppose we had a ban like that, and indeed, if the tremendous spiritual revolution in the midst of which the world is placed at this moment, would indicate that the time will come when that will be true; but what would happen if you couldn’t talk about what you believe? You couldn’t teach anybody. The only thing that would be left for you to do would be to demonstrate. Tremendous thing, isn’t it? So that people would have to catch it by contagion as they catch the measles. The righteousness, then, you see, would be under a great urgency to perforate all of the many-sided manifestations of one’s daily life.”