First Chapter - The Natural Striving of Our Age or the Foundation of the Holy Kingdom

Summary

You will wear Joy's splendid garment,

See the liar's brood destroyed.

schiller

If the holy tradition is not a deceiver – if world history is and will be not a liar but the never-contradicting eternal truth, revealed in time as a logical conclusion – then we live at present in a period analogous to that of the deluge of water or the flood of the peoples. This analogy is important; it shows us the character of our era, its world-historical significance, with a certainty which one could not have reached through the previous points of view of historical research. As we find ourselves only called to proclaim the will of God in so far as our knowledge of Him determines our duties, so we shall seek to shed light only on what relates to our proximate future; but so as not to offer a truncated picture of world history, we shall mention the rest and leave its fulfilment to its own time.

What is most important for us is the striving to create new states, which we have also discovered in the two first periods after the rejuvenation; accordingly, even had we not found it amply established in the present, it would have followed from the comparison with the two known main periods. But in order to describe this striving more closely, we have to compare also something else.