The writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews was very much impressed with this crumbling of old forms and expressions to give place to the new. God spoke, he says, to our fathers in sundered portions and in a variety of manners, but he is speaking to us now by his Son. The things that can be shaken, he writes, are being removed that the things which cannot be shaken may remain. Luther must have felt this shaking process in his day; and when he saw the old forms of religion crumbling, he wrote that great hymn of the Reformation, “A Mighty Fortress is Our God.” He had found something that could not be shaken. He could stand his ground and face the seen and unseen world in faith, because he knew that the hatching was going on, and the new was being born in higher, truer, and more adequate forms as the old was vanishing.
Let us hope that this ancient divine method may still operate in this momentous hour of human history. Never, perhaps, since the fall of Rome, has there been such a world-shaking process affecting every country and all peoples. Immense changes are under way. Nothing will ever be quite the same again. The old is vanishing before our eyes and the new is being born. So much was wrong and outworn, and unjust and inhuman, that the changes must go very far, and they will necessarily involve some breakage. But even now, in this most dynamic period of modern history, that which is to mark permanent progress will come forth, not by a smashing process, but by the hatching of the eggs, by the emergence of the underlying forces of life and the realization of those human hopes and aspirations that have long been held in and suppressed.
There is always the gravest danger from blind rage and sullen wrath. The passionate resentment for the suffering of immemorial wrongs, when once it breaks through the dams of restraint, is an almost irresistible force; but sooner or later the sound, serious sense of the intelligent human race comes into play and brings the world back to order and system. The real gains in these crises are made not by the smashings and the blind iconoclastic blows, but by the wise, clear-sighted fulfillment of the slowly formed ideals which have been the inspiration of many lives before the crisis came. May it be so now! It must not be, it cannot be, that these millions of men shall have unavailingly faced death and mutilation. It was not wreckage and chaos they sought in their brave adventure with death. They went out to build a new world and to destroy, only that a new re-creation might begin. This is the time of incubation and birth, for ripening into reality those mighty hopes that make us men.