at His Revelation has been delivered and recorded
and may be studied by every earnest seeker, that the "Day of the Lord" has
already dawned and the "Sun or Righteousness" arisen._ As yet only a few
on the mountaintops have caught sight of the Glorious Orb, but already its
rays are illumining heaven and earth, and erelong it will rise above the
mountains and shine with full strength on the plains and valleys too,
giving life and guidance to all.

The Changing World

That the world, during the nineteenth and the early part of the twentieth
centuries,(1) has been passing through the death pangs of an old era and
the birth pangs of a new, is evident to all. The old principles of
materialism and self-interest, the old sectarian and patriotic prejudices
and animosities, are perishing, discredited, amidst the ruins they have
wrought, and in all lands we see signs of a new spirit of faith, of
brotherhood, of internationalism, that is bursting the old bonds and
overrunning the old boundaries. Revolutionary changes of unprecedented
magnitude have been occurring in every department of human life. The old
era is not yet dead. It is engaged in a life and death struggle with the
new. Evils there are in plenty, gigantic and formidable, but they are
being exposed, investigated, challenged and attacked with new vigor and
hope. Clouds there are in plenty, vast and threatening, but the light is
breaking through, and is illumining the path of progress and revealing the
obstacles and pitfalls that obstruct the onward way.

In the eighteenth century it was different. Then the spiritual and moral
gloom that enshrouded the world was relieved by hardly a ray of light. It
was like the darkest hour before the dawn, when the few lamps and candles
that remain alight do little more than make the darkness visible. Carlyle
in his Frederick the Great writes of the eighteenth century thus:--

A century which has no history and can have little or none. A
century so opulent in accumulated falsities ... as never century
before was! Which had no longer the consciousness of being false,
so false had it grown; and was so steeped in falsity, and
impregnated with it to the very bone, that--in fact the measure of
the thing was full, and a French Revolution had to end it.... A
very fit termination, as I thankfully feel, for such a century....
For there was need once more of a Divine Revelation to the torpid,
frivol