this also has its heavenly omens;--amid the bustling trivialities
and loud empty noises, its silent monitions, which if we cannot
read and obey, it will not be well with us! No;--nor is there
any sin more fearfully avenged on men and Nations than that same,
which indeed includes and presupposes all manner of sins: the
sin which our old pious fathers called "judicial
blindness;"--which we, with our light habits, may still call
misinterpretation of the Time that now is; disloyalty to its real
meanings and monitions, stupid disregard of these, stupid
adherence active or passive to the counterfeits and mere current
semblances of these. This is true of all times and days.

But in the days that are now passing over us, even fools are
arrested to ask the meaning of them; few of the generations of
men have seen more impressive days. Days of endless calamity,
disruption, dislocation, confusion worse confounded: if they are
not days of endless hope too, then they are days of utter
despair. For it is not a small hope that will suffice, the ruin
being clearly, either in action or in prospect, universal. There
must be a new world, if there is to be any world at all! That
human things in our Europe can ever return to the old sorry
routine, and proceed with any steadiness or continuance there;
this small hope is not now a tenable one. These days of
universal death must be days of universal new-birth, if the ruin
is not to be total and final! It is a Time to make the dullest
man consider; and ask himself, Whence _he_ came? Whither he is
bound?--A veritable "New Era," to the foolish as well as to the wise.


Not long ago, the world saw, with thoughtless joy which might