“He’s right about most things—including Chelsea Barracks,” Lord Tebbit said of Prince Charles in a recent item published in the Telegraph (June 27).

In that article, Lord Tebbit, a member of Dame Margaret Thatcher’s cabinet during her term as prime minister of Great Britain, made specific reference to the prince’s contributions to the preservation of the British heritage.

Highlighting Prince Charles’s most recent effort to resist the spoiling of the historic Chelsea Barracks area in favor of a complex that would ill fit with its surrounds, Lord Tebbit’s piece made valid reference to the contribution that the prince has made to the ongoing environmental debate. “[H]e has been profoundly right about some of the effects of that over-intensive factory farming which needlessly ripped out the hedgerows and coppices which nurtured the creatures upon which the pollination of crops depend. And that is not to mention his entirely sound views on foxes and shooting.”

Perhaps Prince Charles’s most dramatic achievement is in the preservation of the pre-industrial British agrarian village system that once exemplified to the world a model of balance between cottage industry, urban dwelling and use of the land. It is showcased in both his Home Farm and Poundbury Village projects.

Over two decades ago, the prince decided to establish a mixed farming enterprise founded on the old environmentally compatible organic techniques that had made Great Britain’s pre-industrial agrarian economy a model of efficiency for the rest of the world. The result today is what is probably the most highly successful and profitable model of the best fit of a farming enterprise to its natural, surrounding, God-given environment. It is a credit to the best that the human spirit can achieve with an understanding and careful application of the environmental laws that, when obeyed, lead to the reestablishment of something akin to what God created man to achieve in the Garden of Eden.

When God created man, He placed our original progenitors in a perfectly balanced agrarian setting and commanded them to “dress it and keep it” (Genesis 2:15). In a recent speech, Prince Charles referred to that very example (June 9):

The book of Genesis says that God placed mankind in the garden “to tend it and take care of it,” to serve and conserve it for the sake of future generations. “Adamah” in Hebrew means “the one hewn from the Earth,” so Adam is a child of the Earth. In my own tradition of Christianity, the immanence of God is made explicit by the incarnation of Christ. But let us also not forget that throughout the Christian New Testament, Christ often refers to Himself as “the Son of man” which, in Hebrew, is “Ben Adam.” He, too, is a “son of the Earth” ….

Whether or not Prince Charles had that command of our Creator in mind at the time he envisioned the Home Farm project is a moot point. Either way, the results at Home Farm are a credit to his energetic effort, regardless of critics, to reverse the terrible destruction of the British agrarian tradition. He has in that one project stymied, in one unique place on Earth, “some of the effects of that over-intensive factory farming.”

On the urban side of the equation, Prince Charles has built a model English village, designed to fit naturally, in an eye-pleasing and environmentally balanced way, into the surrounding English countryside—the village of Poundbury. Both the Home Farm and Poundbury Village projects exemplify Prince Charles’s commitment to preserving the very best of British environmental traditions.

In a speech at the Consumer Goods Forum in London on June 23, Prince Charles declared:

Patterns of consumption, the global economy, political stability and environmental sustainability are all integrally linked. … Only by recognizing that there is a direct relationship between the consumer and the environmental problems that now exist can any properly responsible action be taken. Unless that key relationship is recognized and lies at the heart of your thinking, then the many worrying problems we face will only get worse.

That was a theme the prince had earlier the same month emphasized on the Oxford Center’s 25th anniversary. On that occasion he adopted as his theme “healing” of the “widening division … between humanity and nature.”

At that particular forum, Prince Charles touched on something that lay very close to the perpetual theme of our own mentor, Herbert Armstrong. He referred to a “missing element” that “sits outside the parameters of the prevailing secular view,” noting that when we refer to either “an ‘environmental crisis’ or even of a ‘financial crisis,’ I would suggest that this is actually describing the outward consequences of a deep, inner crisis of the soul. It is a crisis in our relationship with—and our perception of—Nature, and it is born of Western culture being dominated for at least 200 years by a mechanistic and reductionist approach to our scientific understanding of the world around us.”

Charles went on to explain:

The empirical view of the world, which measures it and tests it, has become the only view to believe. A purely mechanistic approach to problems has somehow assumed a position of great authority, and this has encouraged the widespread secularization of society that we see today. This is despite the fact that those men of science who founded institutions like the Royal Society were also men of deep faith. It is also despite the fact that a great many of our scientists today profess a faith in God. I am aware of one recent survey that suggests over 70 percent of scientists do so.I must say, I find this rather baffling. If this is so, why is it that their sense of the sacred has so little bearing on the way science is employed to exploit the natural world in so many damaging ways? I assume that it has to do with who pays the fiddler.

Then digging deeper into that which he termed “the missing element” in our dealing with this Earth and the system that society imposes on us, the prince emphasized that this “missing element” is “our spiritual essence, an essence made for the infinite. But with consumerism now such a key element in our economic model, our natural, spiritual desire for the infinite is constantly being reflected towards the finite. Our spiritual perspective has been flattened and made earthbound.” He noted that when the innate human “spiritual desire” becomes “focused only on the earthly, it becomes potentially disastrous. The hunger for yet more and more things creates an alarming vacuum and, as we are now realizing, this does great harm to the Earth and creates a never-ending unhappiness for many, many people.”

We could not agree more.

Herbert Armstrong spoke constantly about the “missing dimension” in the human experience. In the introduction to his eye-opening book The Incredible Human Potential, Mr. Armstrong stated:

It’s positively astounding! It has remained undiscovered by science! No religion has revealed it! Higher education has never taught it! Is it possible the whole world has been deceived—regarding the awesome purpose of human life—about the way to world peace and how it will come? And could it be true that the real gospel message Christ brought from heaven revealed this missing dimension—but was suppressed? This is the eye-opening story of the real gospel message of Jesus Christ—of how this missing dimension was withheld, and the whole world deceived.

It is that deception that has resulted in a condition which humankind suffers from at large. Referring to this malady, Prince Charles observed: “For many in the modern world … the view of God has become so distorted. ‘God’ is seen as being, somehow, outside ‘His’ creation, rather than part of its unfolding …. Being the principle that underlines the cosmos, the cosmos is the result of God knowing it and of it knowing the uncreated God. Notice the emphasis there on ‘un’-created. It is of profound importance. The basis of all existence is in this relationship” (op. cit., June 9).

This brings to mind the inspired scripture, “For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse” (Romans 1:20).

Back in 1982, Herbert Armstrong met with Prince Charles. He gave the prince a very fine gift of Steuben chrystal. He also gave the prince another gift. It was the yearbook of Ambassador College, a unique college Mr. Armstrong established that offered more than an experiment in agrarian and urban reform. That college educated young people in the very way that global reform will be achieved in the wonderful future prophesied to occur very soon. It’s a future that will be offered to all humankind. Ambassador College, under Herbert Armstrong’s administration, taught just what that “missing dimension” is that gnaws at the heart of man, aching to be fulfilled.

It is this same vision that students at Herbert W. Armstrong College are offered today at its Edmond, Oklahoma, campus, where strenuous efforts are being devoted to the application of God’s laws to societal and agrarian reform.

It’s intriguing to think on how these two lives briefly touched. One, a prince of today’s royal family, with a vision for today of how the world could be improved by just obeying the God-given laws of environment that, with the application of the best motives and intent of the human spirit, can produce the success to which Home Farm and Poundbury Village attest. The other with a vision of the World Tomorrow, with an understanding of how the world will change under the Royal Family of tomorrow, applying great global agrarian reform, given an essential change in the nature of man such that he may reach his incredible, full, God-given potential.

Each of these men separately reached the conclusion that there is a missing “element,” a “missing dimension,” in humanity today that blinds mankind to the reality of God and of things on the spiritual plane.

Yes, as Lord Tebbit declared, Prince Charles is right in his desire to protect the great traditions of the British peoples (Jeremiah 6:16). He is right in deducing that there is a “missing element” in man.

Bible prophecy indicates that one more time a man of God will acquaint today’s royal family with the reality of not only their own future, but the destiny of the whole of mankind which is so strongly connected with the very throne of the house of David, from which today’s royal family is descended.