WE CANNOT CHANGE THE SPIRIT OF THE WORLD. IT IS THE SPIRIT OF THE WORLD ALONE THAT CHANGES THE WORLD: AND US.
Adherents to so many of our world’s faiths see part of their duty as being the proselytising of their faith. Such was the underlying motivation underpinning all the great missionary drives. To teach the faith, to proclaim the faith, to bring new adherents into the faith, was seen as a fundamental duty by so many. Certainly, it was believed by such missionaries that those they hoped to convert would languish spiritually, and indeed would be deprived of eternal salvation unless they were brought into the faith. Certainly, also, it was the case that huge numbers of ‘non-believers’ were drawn into faiths such as Christianity and Islam by both prodigious efforts on the part of missionaries, and also of course by the prodigious wielding of a prodigious number of swords. In our present times, many adherents of the world’s faiths believe that their particular religions need to rediscover their missionary, even messianic, zeal. However, a point that needs to be understood, is that the earlier waves of missionary activity, although visibly wielded by the missionaries or the bearers of swords, were merely reflecting the hidden, even occult, divine energies of the time. Our present time may well be responding to such divine but hidden energies in new ways.