Ancient of Days

“ Let us resign all glory and honour and power to the Ancient of Days, prime source of the strength of wavering, weak mankind. Rather let us be thankful that by turning aside from "the clamour of the passing day" to tread the narrow paths of literature, however humble, however obscure our lot may have been, we gained an insight into the nobler destinies of the human soul, and learnt a lesson which might otherwise have been postponed until we were hovering on the threshold of Eternity. ”

“ To consult that Clock one must look straight ahead, towards the Only One who is from the ever-existent past to the everlasting future—the Ancient of Days.”
This thought naturally led to her next and final impression on this memorable day in her spiritual life, alone with the sublime in nature.
“Where is it?” she thought. “Where should I look to find it? the Holy of Holies in this Cathedral,” and again she turned northward.
“That Celestial region!—it is very near it, yet not exactly of it. There! I can see the Choir, and almost hear the angels singing, but I cannot approach nearer—not yet. Oh! ”

“ Thus, by thoughts in which the antiquary dwells on the yet undeveloped designs of the Ancient of Days, does he perceive a new dignity and sacredness in pursuits which not the ignorant only have heretofore deemed puerile and worthless, recognising in them the means of recovering lost links in that chain by which such mighty truths depend. ”

“ Two extensive works, bearing the ominous names of Prophecies, one concerning America, the other Europe, next made their appearance from his pencil and graver. The first contains eighteen and the other seventeen plates, and both are plentifully seasoned with verse, without the incumbrance of rhyme. It is impossible to give a satisfactory description of these works; the frontispiece of the latter, representing the Ancient of Days, in an orb of light, stooping into chaos, to measure out the world, has been admired less for its meaning than for the grandeur of its outline. ”

“ Like some river that runs by the wayside and ever cheers the traveller on the dusty path with its music, and offers its waters to cool his thirsty lips, so, day by day, in the slow iteration of our lingering sorrows, and in the monotonous recurrence of our habitual duties, there is with us the ever-present help of the Ancient of Days, who measures out daily strength for the daily load, and never sends the one without proffering the other. ”

“ In all these things Satan, who, no doubt, would make a very good chronologist, could settle every Epocha, correct every Calendar, and bring all our accounts of time to a general agreement; as well the Grecian Olympiads, the Turkish Heghira, the Chinese fictitious account of the world’s duration, as our blind Julian and Gregorian accounts, which have put the world, to this day, into such confusion, that we neither agree in our holy-days or working days, fasts or feasts, nor keep the same sabbaths in any part of the same globe. ”

“ O consider how quickly your pleasures and gains will end, and spare some of your thoughts from present things, to give them to eternity, that thread spun out for ever and ever;—the very length of the days of the Ancient of days, who hath no beginning of days nor end of time! ”

“ Some are to be spared for a little season. The kingdom of God is to roll forth, and a certain person is to come, accompanied by a great host; the name of this person is the Ancient of Days. And who are they that compose the mighty host? Are they immortal beings? Doubtless most of them will be immortal Saints, but there may be some mortals among them. The being called the Ancient of Days will not be a mortal person, his glory is too great, he has passed through his mortality, and he will have the oversight of this numerous host, at least a hundred million of people. ”

“ At the present day an indispensable factor in our daily occupations is some apparatus for measuring the time. This was not of so much consequence in Greek antiquity, and, in fact, the means for exact division were wanting. They had no exact arrangement of days extending from midnight to midnight, with twenty-four hours of equal length, but instead they distinguished between day-time and night-time, calculating from sunrise to sunset, and naturally the length of these periods differed according to the time of year. ”

“ He is and hath ever been veiled in the ancient eternity of His own exalted and indivisible Essence, and will everlastingly continue to remain concealed in His inaccessible majesty and glory. All that is in heaven and all that is in the earth have come to exist at His bidding, and by His Will all have stepped out of utter nothingness into the realm of being. How can, therefore, the creature which the Word of God hath fashioned comprehend the nature of Him Who is the Ancient of Days?
CXLIX: Should any man, in this Day, arise and,... ”

“ If the still longer units of time—the month and the year—had equally been made to consist of an integral number of days much confusion and misunderstanding might have been avoided, and the annals of ancient times would have presented fewer pitfalls to the historian than is now the case. ”

“ As to eternal punishments, I can only say, that there are many passages in Scripture, and these not metaphorical, which declare that all flesh shall be finally saved; that the word aionios is indeed used sometimes when eternity must be meant, but so is the word 'Ancient of Days,' yet it would be strange reasoning to affirm, that therefore, the word ancient must always mean eternal. ”

“ Yet infinitely short as the term of human life is when compared with time to come, it is not so in relation to time past. An hundred and forty of our own generations carry us back to the Deluge, and nine more of ante-diluvian measure to the Creation,—which to us is the beginning of time; for “time itself is but a novelty, a late and upstart thing in respect of the Ancient of Days.”3 They who remember their grandfather and see their grandchildren, have seen persons belonging to five out of that number; and he who attains the age of threescore has seen two generations pass away. ”

“ Nature mourned the impending loss of her Summer glories, and the advent of the empire of night, the withdrawing of the waters, made fruitful by the Bull in Spring, the cessation of the winds that brought rains to swell the Nile, the shortening of the days, and the despoiling of the earth. Then Taurus, directly opposite the Sun, entered into the cone of shadow which the earth projects, by which the Moon is eclipsed at full, and with which, making night, the Bull rises and descends as if covered with a veil, while he remains above our horizon. ”

“ A. John, Sitte, Brauch und Volksglaube im deutschen Westböhmen (Prague, 1905) , p. 11. The phrase “the Twelve Nights” in the sense of “the Twelve Days and Nights” is doubtless derived from the ancient Aryan custom of counting by nights instead of by days and of regarding the period of the earth's revolution on its axis as beginning with the night rather than with the day. ”

“ It is only by an effort that he can consider the future, it is often quite impossible for him to give any heed at all to the Past. The days of old are so blurred and remote that it seems right to him that any relic from them should, by the maltreatment of Time, be unrecognisable. ”

“ As the sun, arriving at the equinoctial point of Spring, drawing nearer to us, increases the length of the days, that period seems most appropriate for those ceremonies. For, besides that there is a great affinity between the substance of Light and the nature of the Gods, the Sun has that occult force of attraction, by which he draws matter toward himself, by means of his warmth, making plants to shoot and grow, etc.; and why can he not, by the same divine and pure action of his rays, attract and draw to him fortunate souls? ”

“ Periodicity is fundamental to certain departments of mathematics, that is evident; it is perhaps less evident that periodicity is a factor that has gone to the making of ritual, and hence, as we shall see, of art.53 And yet this is manifestly the case. All primitive calendars are ritual calendars, successions of feast-days, a patchwork of days of different quality and character recurring; pattern at least is based on periodicity. But there is another and perhaps more important way in which periodicity affects and in a sense causes ritual. ”

“ Some of the strenuous, exciting, self-expressive dances of to-day are of the soil and some exotic, but, based as they mostly are on very primitive ritual, they stand as singular evidence of this real recurrent need. Art in these latter days goes back as it were on her own steps, recrossing the ritual bridge back to life. ”

“ All the light of ancient history makes but little impression on the night of time. By its aid we can but dimly see the outlines of the fortieth century back; beyond is gloom soon lost in night. But a few short years ago, men did not think it possible to gain further information. ”

“ The gods are there together because man is collectively assembled.
The great procession culminates in a sacrifice and a communal feast, a sacramental feast like that on the flesh of the holy Bull at Magnesia. The Panathenaia was a high festival including rites and ceremonies of diverse dates, an armed dance of immemorial antiquity that may have dated from the days when Athens was subject to Crete, and a recitation ordered by Peisistratos of the poems of Homer. ”

“ Whitehead has pointed out how the “whole life of Nature is dominated by the existence of periodic events.” The rotation of the earth produces successive days; the path of the earth round the sun leads to the yearly recurrence of the seasons; the phases of the moon are recurrent, and though artificial light has made these phases pass almost unnoticed to-day, in climates where the skies are clear, human life was largely influenced by moonlight. ”

“ These people are gathering now, as for ages their race has gathered, to bid farewell to the old year and235 welcome to the new, and to pour their mystic sacrifice to Time—not, indeed, as of old, upon the unconscious earth nor within the stone circle of a rude astronomy, but at least under the open sky, and with something of the ancient wish-rites of the runes. ”

“ As we grope our way backward through the dark labyrinth of the ages, epoch succeeds to epoch, and period to period, each looming more gigantic in its outlines and more shadowy in its features, as it rises, dimly revealed, from the mist and vapour of an older and ever-older past. ”

“ The antiquities of the old world, buried for so many ages in midnight oblivion, had remained through a long course of centuries, the standing enigma of Time. With the help even of some imperfect records from the archives of ancient history, and the aid of what seemed to be a fair line of tradition, the origin and purpose of many of them, and the hidden meaning of their hieroglyphical embellishments, had continued to be an inexplicable mystery quite down to our own times. ”

“ The twilight seems to cloak the extent of the years, and in the gathering darkness the procession of the centuries is hidden. Yesterday and to-day are mingled together, and there is nothing to distinguish to the eye the one age from the other. ”

“ Now, if the Seventh Day on which God rested is a period of many thousand years, are we not fully justified in supposing that the Six Days on which He formed and furnished the Heavens and the Earth were likewise periods of many ages? ”

“ The shores of Time are thickly strown with the remains of extinct animals, which, when living, the eye of man never looked upon, as if from the deep sea of Eternity had heaved up one wave, which washed over and blotted out for ever all that was coëval with her silent and ancient reign, leaving a monument upon the confines of this old and obliterated world, for man in a far and future day to read, on which stands ever engraven the solemn sentence, "Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further!"—beyond this boundary all is Mine! ”

“ We may attempt to pierce the Future by the light which History throws from the Past, but History's record is imperfect; her chronicles are of the rudest and most unreliable character; her most valued memorials serve but to make Past 'darkness visible,' her most ancient registers reach back but a short distance compared with those testimonies which geologists have discovered, and given us veritable 'sermons in stones' about. ”

“ These are, I believe, no mere extraneous or personal experiences, but are rather of the fine weave and fabric of humanity; and the uneasiness I felt in my complacent little soul, I now believe to have been a stirring of old things, of ancient memories under the moon, which linked my little inconsiderable life, as they link all lives, to Egypt, Nilus, Babylon, and the ages that are not. ”

“ DAWN His radiant fingers so adorning Earth that in silent joy she thrills, The ancient day stands every morning Above the flowing eastern hills. This day the new-born world hath taken Within his mantling arms of white, And sent her forth by fear unshaken To walk among the stars in light. Risen with laughter unto leaping, His feet untired, undimmed his eyes, The old, old day comes up from sleeping, Fresh as a flower, for new emprise. ”

“ And yet it is just this discovery that would pour a flood of light upon a landscape hovering in twilight, and several decades of ancient life would become visible to our eyes with as distinct an outline as if they lay in a nearer past. ”

“ In those moments, indeed, we may be said to live for ages;—a single instant, by the multitude of impressions it conveys, seems to anticipate for us a sense of that eternity 'when time shall be no more;' when the fitful dream of human existence, with all its turbulent illusions, shall be dispelled ”

“ The twelve great Deities of the Persians, the six Amshaspands and six Devs, marshalled, the former under the banner of Light, and the latter under that of Darkness, are the twelve Zodiacal Signs or Months; the six supreme signs, or those of Light, or of Spring and Summer, commencing with Aries, and the six inferior, of Darkness, or of Autumn and Winter, commencing with Libra. Limited Time, as contradistinguished from Time without limits, or Eternity, is Time created and measured by the celestial revolutions. ”