The signs of the times are those that indicate an approaching great upheaval and change in human destinies. This planet we call ours is in some respects like ourselves: it was born; it has had its infancy, its youth, its full prime; and now its age has set in, and with age the first beginnings of decay. Absorbed once more into the Creative Circle IT MUST BE; and when again thrown forth among its companion-stars, our race will no more inhabit it. We shall have had our day--our little chance--we shall have lost or won.
Christ said, "This generation shall not pass away till all My words be fulfilled," the word "generation" thus used meaning simply the human race. We put a very narrow limit to the significance of the Saviour's utterance when we imagine that the generation He alluded to implied merely the people living in His own day. In the depths of His Divine wisdom He was acquainted with all the secrets of the Past and Future; He had no doubt seen this very world peopled by widely different beings to ourselves, and knew that what we call the human race is only a passing tribe permitted for a time to sojourn here. What a strangely presumptuous idea is that which pervades the minds of the majority of persons--namely, that Mankind, as we know it, must be the highest form of creation, simply because it is the highest form WE can see!
How absurd it is to be so controlled by our limited vision, when we cannot even perceive the minute wonders that a butterfly beholds, or pierce the sunlit air with anything like the facility possessed by the undazzled eyes of an upward-soaring bird! Nay, we cannot examine the wing of a common house-fly without the aid of a microscope--to observe the facial expression of our own actors on the stage we look through opera-glasses--to form any idea of the wonders of the stars we construct telescopes to assist our feeble and easily deluded sight; and yet--yet we continue to parcel out the infinite gradations of creative Force and Beauty entirely to suit our own private opinions, and conclude that WE are the final triumph of the Divine Artist's Supreme Intelligence! Alas! in very truth we are a sorry spectacle both to our soberly thinking selves and the Higher Powers, invited, as it were, to spend our life's brief day in one of God's gardens as His friends and guests, who certainly are not expected to abuse their Host's hospitality, and, ignoring Him, call themselves the owners and masters of the ground!