Great Awakening

“ The Tower of London and Hyde Park, the allée of Mortemart and Chantilly, the quays of Paris, the Avenue de l'Observatoire which leads to the Luxembourg Garden as a river to the sea, the woods of Ville d'Avray, other corners of the great city and its suburbs, all these comprised the domain reserved for Anne. Dauphiné, although it had been her home, did not belong to her. Accustomed to understand the relation of landscape to human life, to give a soul to surroundings, he unconsciously felt the influence of his native country. ”

“ The day does not slowly gather in the East, changing by imperceptible degrees from the depth of gloom to the fulness of light, but springs as it were with a single effort into brilliant splendour—an image of the great Creator’s power when He created the earth and skies—not toiling through long ages of successive processes and formations, as some would have us believe, but starting at one bound from shapeless chaos into life and harmony. ”

“ Revolutions many and startling are to be recorded: some, like that in the epoch of the Great Wall, which stamped the impress of unity upon the entire people; others, like the Manchu conquest of 1644, by which, in whole or in part, they were brought under the sway of a foreign dynasty. Finally, contemporary history will be treated at some length, as its importance demands; and the transformation now going on in the Empire will be faithfully depicted in its relations to Western influences in the fields of religion, commerce and arms. ”

“ Thus, the sun, moon and stars and heavenly bodies denote kings, queens, rulers, and persons in great power; their increase of splendor denotes increase of prosperity; their darkening, setting, or falling denotes a reverse of fortune, or the entire ceasing of that power or kingdom to which they refer. Great earthquakes and the shaking of heaven and earth denote the commotion and overthrow of kingdoms ”

“ Lightnings, voices, thunderings, an earthquake, and great hail. The great blessing of the reformation was attended with very awful providences; and by terrible things in righteousness God would answer those prayers that were presented in his holy temple, now opened. All the great revolutions of the world are concerted in heaven, and are the answers of the prayers of the saints. ”

“ It went on from victory to victory, until it grew and blossomed into the present religious, intellectual and civil freedom that the nations of Europe and America enjoy. This great movement led by brave men was the dawn before the coming of a greater day. You have seen the dawn break over our eastern mountains. You know how the blackness gradually turns to grey, and how the grey brightens before the approaching sun, until the whole heavens become golden; and you know how still richer becomes that light when the sun in its fulness is seen above the mountain tops. ”

“ Little by little Albert had left her free and had withdrawn from society. But now the sacredness of social life was impressed on her by the Molay-Norrois, and Mme. Derize begged her to avoid solitude.
"I am confident," she said, "that the future will brighten for you. But you must arrange a normal existence for yourself. It is not always a good thing to live with one's memories."
"But how about you?"
"Oh! I am quite old and the past suffices for me. Marie Louise and Philippe will have friends whose parents you will know. You have given me great happiness in renouncing your separation." ”

“ Appalled by the signs of social decadence the more patriotic of China's statesmen were not slow to perceive that all attempts at reform in education, army, and laws must prove abortive if opium were allowed to sap the vigour of the nation. "You can't carve a piece of rotten wood," says Confucius. Every scheme for national renovation must have for its basis a sound and energetic people. It was this depraved taste that first made a market for the drug; if that taste can be eradicated the trade and the vice must disappear together, with or without the concurrence of Great Britain. ”

“ Beyond the eastern extremity of the Great Wall, bounded on the west by Mongolia, on the north by the Amur, on the east by the Russian seaboard, and on the south by Korea and the Gulf of Pechili, lies the home of the Manchus—the race now dominant in the Chinese Empire. China claims it, just as Great Britain claimed Normandy, because her conquerors came from that region; and now that two of her neighbours have exhausted themselves in fighting for it, she will take good care that neither of them shall filch the jewel from her crown. ”

“ Then, as some warrior king, himself roused from sleep and girded with flashing steel, bids the clarion sound through the grey twilight to summon the prostrate ranks that lie round his tent, so the sign of God's awaking and the first act of His conquering might is this trumpet call—'The night is far spent, the day is at hand, let us put off the works of darkness,'—the night gear that was fit for slumber—'and put on the armour of light,' the mail of purity that gleams and glitters even in the dim dawn. God's awaking is our awaking. He puts on strength by making us strong ”

“ Revolutions are translated therein by the phenomena of great storms; the deep breathing of nations moves heaven itself. Success proceeds coincidently with electric currents, and the hues of the living light reflect the motions of thunder. ”

“ Chinese influence in Tibet is nearly nil. For China to assert authority by interference and to make herself responsible for Tibet's shortcomings would be a questionable policy, against which two wars ought to be a sufficient warning. She was involved with France by her interference in Tongking and with Japan by interference in Korea. Too much intermeddling in Tibet might easily embroil her with Great Britain.
In one sense the Buddhist pope may justly claim to be the highest of earthly potentates. No other sits on a throne at an equal elevation above the level of the sea. ”

“ The sky that now bends over it so bright and beautiful may yet be clouded—the thunder of another revolution may be heard, and the lightnings of a mighty power may shake it to its center. These changes if they come, will hurry it along a burning track to its destined elevation. The promised redemption of our race, we trust is near at hand. It may be when the sun that now rides in light above us, shall look down on others who are soon to fill our places—while the temples of our worship are unshaken in their strength—when the stone that marks the place of our deposit, shall not yet have crumbled. ”

“ SERVE THE KINGDOM When the darkness of ignorance and heedlessness concerning the realm of eternity and bereavement from the True One had encircled the universe, then the resplendent Luminary dawned and the brilliant Light illumined the horizon of the East. Hence, the Sun of Reality shone forth, scattering the sparkling lights of the Kingdom to the East and to the West. Those who had seeing eyes found the Most Great Glad-Tidings, began to cry the call, “O blessed are we! ”

“ The universal Soul of the World, motive power of Heaven and of the Spheres, it was held, exercises its creative energy chiefly through the medium of the Sun, during his revolution along the signs of the Zodiac, with which signs unite the paranatellons that modify their influence, and concur in furnishing the symbolic attributes of the Great Luminary that regulates Nature and is the depository of her greatest powers. ”

“ We are torches who can not shine in themselves, but who, when connected with the great central Source of Power, the Blessed Trinity in its three glorious manifestations, can show forth the light of the world. ”

“ The morning when the day breaks and the shadows flee away. Then that which has been shall be again and peace on earth as well as glory to God in the highest will follow.
How and when will that long-promised morning come? Not through man's efforts. Not even through the preaching of the Gospel or the activities of the church. Not through a progressive civilization or through great reforms. Many expect in our days a better time for this earth as the result of the great struggle of nations. One of the slogans has been; "We fight to make the earth a decent place to live in;" ”

“ The young man was engaged to be married to the young lady, and they sometimes called upon Margaret, driving over of afternoons in a buggy. Edna was a little miss, just merging into her teens; and the realization that she herself was nothing, nothing, nothing to the engaged young man was a bitter affliction to her. But he, too, went the way of dreams.
She was a grown young woman when she was overtaken by what she supposed to be the climax of her fate. It was when the face and figure of a great tragedian began to haunt her imagination and stir her senses. ”

“ Mighty indeed were the forces, heralds of a spiritual upheaval, which, since the fifteenth century, had streamed through the Western world in closer or more distant connection with the great revival of the study of classical antiquity. ”

“ This is followed in the 18th verse, with voices, and thunders, and lightnings, which, I take, to relate to the cries and pleadings against popery and absolute power throughout Europe, and especially in France, before the late Revolution; and the thunderings and lightnings to be the struggles and battles with fire-arms, bringing about and accomplishing that great earthquake or revolution, which in many circumstances, excels all other shakings or commotions that have been since mankind were upon earth. ”

“ In this ceaseless rush of shadows and shades, that, like the fantastic forms of clouds cast darkly upon the waters on a windy day, fly past us to fall headlong below the hard edge of an implacable horizon, we must turn to the national spirit, which, superior in its force and continuity to good and evil fortune, can alone give us the feeling of an enduring existence and of an invincible power against the fates. ”

“ In other words, I look for a mighty revival of religion, which will set the churches on their old foundation, and endow them with power to subdue the world. This war seems to me God's second great demonstration of man's inability to save himself, and his need of divine power to save him. ”

“ Perhaps their being placed here before the throne, in the midst of thunder and lightning, may be designed to represent the idea that—amidst all the scenes of magnificence and grandeur; all the storms, agitations, and tempests on the earth; all the political changes; all the convulsions of empire under the providence of God; and all the commotions in the soul of man, produced by the thunders of the law—the Spirit of God beams calmly and serenely, shedding a steady influence over all, like lamps burning in the very midst of lightnings, and thunderings, and voices. ”

“ And lend a thunder-voice to the land’s lightning will.
Descend, then, Spirit of the Eternal King!
To Thee, to Him, to His avenging Son,
The Triune of God, in boundless trust we cling;
His help once ours, our nationhood is won.
We watch the time
Till that sublime
Event shall thrill the free of every clime.
Speed, mighty Spirit! speed its march,
And thus complete for earth mankind’s triumphal arch. ”

“ To this in part we owe the dimness of vision which overtook us as we went whirling together towards the great catastrophe. It is only in the glare of a world-conflagration that we begin to perceive, in something like their true proportions, the great forces and events which have been shaping our destinies. ”

“ One continual perception of stability, or changeless revolution, weighed upon their hearts—their life depended on no casual alternation of cold and heat—of drought and shower; their gift-Gods were the risen River and the eternal Sun, and the types of these were forever consecrated in the lotus decoration of the temple and the wedge of the enduring Pyramid. ”

“ And are we indeed so near that time when the elements of all things shall be dissolved by fervent heat; when the heavens shall be shrivelled up like a scroll, and the earth and all it contains be burned up? Is the fifth empire, the kingdom of the stone and the kingdom of the mountain, so near its termination? Are all vision and prophecy about to be sealed up, and the whole earth to be illuminated with the bright beams of the Sun of righteousness? ”

“ Kingdom and empire rode upon the shoulders of young men, and their voices of enthusiasm and hope have sounded through many a black-breasted midnight and trumpeted the dawn through skies of thickest darkness. ”

“ Dark clouds may conceal, but cannot destroy it. Tempests may toss the sea—earthquakes convulse the globe—and storm-bolts shake the sky—it stands as firm as Heaven. Within its meek and twinkling rays, are Faith, Hope and Freedom—cherishing the one, indulging the other, and endeavoring to gain the last for our slavery smitten countrymen. ”

“ But the empire! In that crisis,—in that narrow pass in time! It is not excellent gentlemen that can do such near-thaumaturgic business; but only disciples; for the proposition is, as I understand it, to link this world with the God-world, and hold fast through thunders and cataclysm, so that what shall come through,—what shall be when the thunder is stilled and the cataclysm over,— shall flow on and up onto a new order of cycles, higher, nearer the Spirit. ”

“ There is no sadder symptom of a generation than such general blindness to the spiritual lightning, with faith only in the heap of barren dead fuel. It is the last consummation of unbelief. In all epochs of the world's history, we shall find the Great Man to have been the indispensable saviour of his epoch;—the lightning, without which the fuel never would have burnt. The History of the World, I said already, was the Biography of Great Men. ”

“ Yet the nations, weary of centuries of error, centuries of wrong, centuries of toil and tears and martyrdom, were waiting, even as he was waiting before commencing his work, for the light which every moment grew brighter in its scarlet beauty against the eastern horizon—the light which was to guide humanity to its destiny of better days. ”

“ Indeed there are signs that the recent Great War and the following Events mark the lowest point of descent and the beginning of the human soul’s return to sanity and ascent towards the heavenly Kingdom. ”