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Christ and Baha'u'llah
by George Townshend
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chapter 9 | start page | single page | chapter 11 |  |
Chapter 10
THE DAWN-SONG OF THE KINGDOM
ABOUT the
beginning of the eighteenth century a new influence swept across Europe affecting the minds of all men. It
showed itself in a spirit of confidence and enterprise, the sense of a new
power. Hitherto men had tended to look back to the past and to old
civilizations for the Golden Age, for their ideals and their models. Scholars,
historians, religionists had looked back at Greece and Rome and Palestine, but
now they looked rather at the present and at the future, seeking to make the
world better, richer, fuller and to do this on their own initiative.
This was the age when the industrial Revolution arose,
changing the face of the world and the lives of men. Idealists dreamed of
reform, seeking it not only in national terms but in universal. In all phases
of life new hopes were born and sought fulfillment. As the century wore on
indications of the origin and the meaning of this general impulse began to
appear.
The Jews had, since the first and second centuries,
territorially and politically ceased to be a nation, yet no people held more
grimly to the sense of nationhood than they. Expelled from the Holy Land after
the capture of Jerusalem in A.D. 70, under Titus, and again with more rigour about sixty years later under Hadrian,
they were dispersed among nearly all the nations of the earth and
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they suffered every form of humiliation and misery for well-nigh sixteen
centuries. But now in the eighteenht century for the first time a national life
began to assert itself among them. It was the time for the Jewish Renaissance.
In Europe and America nation after nation began to restore to them by slow
degrees rights which for long centuries had been denied them. In 1723 Louis XV gave
the Jews permission to hold real estate in France. In the same year England
acknowledged them as English subjects. In 1738 Charles VI of Denmark opened all
trades to the Jews. In 1750 Frederick II granted toleration to the Jews in his
dominion. Joseph II of Austria in 1780 opened the schools and Universities of
the Empire to the Jews, allowing them to follow any trade or establish
manufacturing. In the year 1788 Louis XVI of France appointed a royal
commission "to remodel on principles of justice all laws concerning the
Jews." And so the tale goes on.
The United States of America was the first nation to
embody in its laws the principle that Gentiles and Jews were equal in rights
and privileges before the law (A.D. 1776). The same process of gradual
concession was continued through the nineteenth century, the year 1844 being a
time of special importance, since in it the Turkish Government pledged to the
Jews protection from persecution throughout the Ottoman Dominion, including of
course the Holy Land, though it was not until 1867 that the Sublime Porte gave
them the right to own real estate in the land of their fathers.
What could all this mean but the approach of the second
coming of Christ?
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Contemporary with this eighteenth century emancipation of
the Jews there swept quietly into the minds of European men the impulsion of a
new spiritual force, an impulsion the beginnings of which can hardly be traced
but which gradually brought into men's minds a new spirit of hope and enterprise
and happiness and creative vigor and which by steady gradations at the turn of
the century and during the early years of the nineteenth century took the
definite shape of the dawning on earth of a New Age, of the divinely-aided
appearance of a new and better world, and in Christian circles of the return of
Christ and the descent of the Kingdom of God from heaven.
The poet Wordsworth gives an excellent contemporary
account of the new creative joy that mysteriously was wafted upon the world at
that time, and of the confidence that possessed the hearts of men.
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"Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, |
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Did now find, helpers to their heart's desire, |
But at the end of the eighteenth century and during the first decades of the nineteenth the intuitions of spiritual men spoke in clearer language. A burst of lyrical greetings welcomed the approaching coming of the Kingdom.
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"The Night is ended and the Morning nears: "These things shall be: a loftier race 1. See also Wordsworth's "Excursion." |
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"The Day of the Lord is at hand, at hand: |
The poets' enthusiasm crossed the Atlantic. It touched Whittier. It moved Julia Ward Howe to write, in 1861, the Battle Hymn of the Republic:
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"Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the
Lord; He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored; He hath loos’d the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword, His truth is marching on." |
Apart from such verses stand apocalyptic works of Shelley; Lyrics like the Ode to the West Wind, narratives
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such as The Revolt of Islam and especially his great poetical drama Prometheus Unbound, which many critics
regard as the sublimest poem in the English language. Here in the poem the form
of apocalypse does not appear, nor is any Christian imagery employed. The theme
of the drama is verily and indeed that of the actual coming of the Kingdom. The
hero is a godman who, moved by
love and pity for mankind, in their ignorance and error and misery, through
deliberate self- sacrifice and acute suffering for their sake, challenges and
finally destroys the principle of evil, hurling into the abyss the Tyrant from
his throne, thus redeeming permanently the human race. The very universe itself
rejoices to share the universal regeneration of all living things.
Not poets alone but the generality of the people in town
and in country, high and low, learned and unlearned, felt this new transcendent
power stirring creation. The time was one of religious revival, of church
building, of missionary expansion, the central motive being always the belief
in the imminent coming of Christ.[1] For a
full generation and more men and women everywhere dreamed, thought, talked and
discussed this Advent. They met in church and chapel, in street and roadside,
held assemblies and camp meetings that lasted far into the night. In many parts
of England, in Southern Wales, in many parts of the United States from the East
to the Middle West the fervor of the expectation spread. Adventist sects were
started, a few of which remain to the present day, such as the Latter Day
Saints and the Seventh Day Adventists. So strong was the feeling in one shape
or another that the Messianic expectation lasted through the
1. See the author's The Promise of All Ages, chap v.
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whole of the nineteenth century and, reappearing in the apocalyptic sense of
mission which has characterized communism and fascism, has tempted more
dictators than one to regard themselves as Messianic beings.
For two centuries, it may perhaps be said, this new wave
of power affected all the Western world except one section only, the
institutions which claimed to be custodians of religious truth, which claimed
to have a monopoly of keeping watch for Christ according to His command. The
old established, historic churches of Christendom showed themselves
irresponsive and uninterested. The false prophets had done their deadly work
with full success. So misleading had been their interpretations of religious
history that Christ had indeed come and no men had been so utterly ignorant of
His presence as those who had appointed themselves to be His special guardians.
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