To be near unto God - pagina 589

In our twentieth century, however, the table turns again. There is once more a reveille, but not in the Christian domain. It is far more a reveille of mystic, religious feeling, entirely independent of Christianity, for the most part rejecting the way of truth and seeking ways of its own, and thus of itself falling back into ways which man had discovered in earlier times. Spiritism, theosophy, Buddhism are now the desired articles. A few, though these are exceptions, even turn to the Crescent again. What is not observed, is return on a broad scale to the Man of Sorrows. People want to become religious, but they must be allowed to remain anticlerical. In the eighteenth century the slumbering. In the nineteenth the pouring out of the spirit of deep sleep. In the twentieth century a gradual awakening of religion, but still dozing in false, mystical dreams. The Christ and his Cross are passed by. The Pharisee does not observe such "signs of the times" (see Matthew 16:3). He thinks and continues to think that everything within his narrower circle is good and sound, and everything outside of it evil and unholy. And he does not surmise even from afar the influence which the change in the spirit of the times exerts upon him and upon his circle. The true disciples of Jesus

do not do so. They know better. They feel and understand that in the spiritual domain also the waters of life continually merge into one another. They notice it in themselves and in their famihes and in their associates; they see how the general conditions of spirits work effects on every side. And with every new change they ask them585

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