e plaintive
notes of the mystic pipes of Pan. He beheld the flaunting banners and
flashing steel of victorious hosts and heard the wild, weird chants of
wandering, barbaric hordes that conquered and destroyed. The flash and
roar of artillery of recent times but intensified the gloom that brooded
over the world. The struggle was unending. Men still remained the
victims and slaves of passion and desire. Their sighs and curses and
groans and cries of hatred and despair increased with the years; the
smoke of their torment blackened the face of the sun.

The waves of human harmony and discord swept over him like the sounds of
mighty rushing winds and waters, and he beheld the race to-day, as in
the past, in the plains and on the high tops, prostrate and erect with
hands outstretched toward the heavens, crying for release. And yet
through it and beneath it and above it all, he heard a ringing note of
triumph that swelled onward and upward until the vision shone clear, and
the true import of their lives stood revealed. They had overcome the
world; broken the fiery chains of desire.

The heavens of the old world rolled together like a scroll, and the sun
and the moon and the stars and the earth fell into the burning sea of
man's worldliness, but out of the chaos that followed, the earth emerged
once more, green and beautiful, and grain waved upon its face, and the
voice of the Angel rang clear, crying aloud and mightily:

"Babylon the Great is fallen, is fallen! Babylon, the woman mounted upon
the scarlet beast and arrayed in purple and scarlet color and decked
with gold and precious stones and pearls, and having a golden cup in her
hand full of abominations.... Babylon upon whose forehead is written,
'Mystery, Babylon the Great, the Mother of Harlots and Abominations of
the Earth.' Babylon drunk with wine and the blood of those who stood for
the truth. Babylon, of whose wine and delights all men have drunk and
with whom all the nations of the Earth have committed fornication.
Babylon whose sins have reached unto heaven; who hath glorified herself
and lived deliciously and who said in her heart: 'I sit a queen, and am
no widow, and shall know no sorrow; my joy shall continue forever!'

"Her plagues shall come in one day, death and mourning and famine, and
she shall be utterly burned with fire. And the kings and the rulers of
earth, and the great men, and the rich men, and the mighty men, and the
chief Captains, and the bonds