Years and Centuries

Dominion, Volume 28, Issue 81, 29 December 1934, Page 16

Years and Centuries

“Remember the saying of Ralph Waldo Emerson that the lesson of life is to believe what the years and the centuries say as against the hours. How important that is—to believe what the years and the centuries say against the hours I The hours have often said that a social cause was whipped, but the centuries! The hours have often said that Christianity was as good as dead, but the centuries! The hours said that Roman tyranny would last for ever, that religious liberty would never come, that slavery would not be stopped, that the American Republic could not be founded, just as they are saying now that war is inevitable and recurrent depressions will curse the people, but the centuries! ,“I do not mean this as a mere optimistic gospel of inevitable progress. God does not let His children wreck their boats. Whole civilisations can collapse and be beaten like hulks cu the shdres of' history. If we make fools of ourselves that will happen to us. . “Nevertheless, watch all the centuries swinging up a long, slow spiral, coming back to old problems but on a higher level, learning even from severest losses, seeing their bonfires, dampened by appalling loads of barbarism thrown on them, blaze up_> the better, until a thousand years are but as yesterday when it is past.”— Rev. H. E. Fosdick.