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TWILIGHT OF A GREAT CIVILIZATION

PART ONE - THE RISE OF NEO-PAGANISM

1. THE BARBARIANS ARE COMING

We live in the twilight of a great civilization, amid the deepening decline of modern culture. Those strange beast-empires of the books of Daniel and Revelation seem already to be stalking and sprawling over the surface of the earth. Only the experimental success of modern science hides from us the dread terminal illness of our increasingly technological civilization.

Because our sights are fixed on outer space and man on the moon, we cannot see the judgment that hangs low over our own planet. We applaud modern man’s capability but forget that nations are threatening each other with atomic destruction, that gunsmoke darkens our inner cities, and that our near-neighbors walk in terror by day and sleep in fear by night. We sit glued to television sets, unmindful that ancient pagan rulers staged Colosseum circuses to switch the minds of the restless ones from the realities of a spiritually-vagrant empire to the illusion that all is basically well.

We are so steeped in the antichrist philosophy - namely, that success consists in embracing not the values of the Sermon on the Mount but an infinity of material things, of sex and status - that we little sense how much of what passes for practical Christianity is really an apostate compromise with the spirit of the age.

Our generation is lost to the truth of God, to the reality of divine revelation, to the content of God’s will, to the power of His redemption, and to the authority of His Word. For this loss it is paying dearly in a swift relapse to paganism. The savages are stirring again; you can hear them rumbling and rustling in the tempo of our times.

1. The barbarians are coming. All our scientific achievement can be misused by those coming barbarians for their cruel and cunning deeds. Hitler and the Nazis have already deployed twentieth-century scientific know-how to cremate people by the hundreds of thousands in those highly efficient gas chambers. Stalin and other totalitarian tyrants long ago learned that captive mass media could enslave myriads of modern men. Red Chinese warlords seem eager to play with atomic fire, although the bombs that fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki are now but mini-versions of our maxi-weapons.

Year by year the probability of a globally-destructive nuclear war increases; the Nobel prizeman George Wald, a leading renowned biologist, speaking at M.I.T., said that a distinguished professor of government at Harvard calculates the accelerating odds for a full-scale nuclear war to be one chance in three by 1990, one chance in two by the year 2000. All our scientific know-how can be deployed for destructive ends.