THIS time the evening of the Old year addresses us with special seriousness. Generally it is a single year, now a century is completed. Again one hundred years, one after the other has come, been lived through and gone.
A single year is quite long, but we feel that we stand above it. For our own life-time lasts generally much longer. “As to the days of our years,” as Moses sang, “they are seventy, and if we are very strong, eighty years.” And therefore our feeling-of-self goes out very far above the life of one single year. A year counts little with us. But when it comes to a century it is different. With a century we feel ourselves small. There are almost no more those, who outlive a full century. And a few who did live so long, in the end carried the impression more of a sunken ruin, than of a man flourishing in the strength of his life.
At the close of this century we feel that smallness the more deeply, because in no century has life been more hurried and intense, than in the one that is now ended. Among the forty centuries that lie back of us, there surely never was one which changed, modified and transposed the fashion of the world upon such a gigantic scale as the nineteenth. If they, who a hundred years ago were men in the strength of their days, were able to rise from their graves, and travel across the five continents of the world, they would scarcely recognize in them the world of their time. In America an entirely new world has arisen, that spreads its wonders from sea to sea, and of the possibility of whose rise then no one thought. Africa, then only known along its coasts, has been discovered as a new part of the world, is travelled across and has joined itself to the intercourse of the world. In Asia, with Japan in the lead, a life has awakened, as of sleeping nations which are about to wake up from a dream of centuries. Australia, then still a group of islands, with all the riddles of curiosity, is now a group of states, ambitious of independence and in more than one respect in advance of age-worn Europe. And in Europe itself, Italy has become united, Germany has appeared as a new world-power, Russia stretching out its broad arms to India and Manchuria. England in extent and worldwide possessions more than doubled.
In addition to this, how greatly the nations have increased in massiveness of numbers. Within our small domain we have more than five millions of people; then not yet the smaller half. And in almost all lands this mass of humanity is ever on the increase. A sea of humanity, as no previous age has known. In London alone there are more souls now, than in earlier times in all England. And for all of them God provided bread, and our God clothed them, and prepared an habitation for them. An always new-creative Almightiness, which causes the human race to fill the earth, and from that earth brings forth food convenient for them.
And among those millions and millions how far different, how far richer a life, than a hundred years ago. How distance has been shortened. Is not the world bound round as with threads of one web, and by rail and steam-boat lines, for all its parts, brought into inter-communication. What radiancy of artificial light has been ignited, what instruments for the manipulation of matter have been invented, what products of skill have been worked as by magic before our eyes.
God, in His common grace, has strengthened and fortified man, especially in this age, before the face of nature. The ability of man of a hundred years ago, with what he is able to do now, scarcely lends itself to comparison.
It is, as though humanity, that in former centuries merely advanced heavily step by step, has suddenly awakened, and is now speeding along with giant strides. Nothing, literally nothing continued as it was. Yea, in the face of it all, in a metaphorical sense one might say: Behold, all things have become new.
Here we stand before a riddle.
At the close of the former century anger against God broke loose among the nations, as the world had never known before. The long threatened open apostacy began. The long prepared movement went out from Paris. There was to be a stop put to the Christian religion. Man should henceforth be great, and the majesty of the Lord no more remembered. Hatred against God spake from the spirits which then arose, and the, “we will have no more God”, was preached as it were from the housetops.
And a century, that so began, God has blessed, enriched, crowned, as none of its predecessors. He has marked it as a century above all others, and has given it a name as no century before obtained.
And what is more: in that century which began with opposition against God and open scorn of His Christ, that selfsame God has captured thousands and thousands of hearts for that Christ and made them kneel in humble faith before the Son of His love, as has not been known since the days of the Reformation. The apostacy has gone on, but over against it a new Christian life has awakened, as the most devout and best, in the age that went before, dared not dream it. Where in that preceding century do you find poets like a Bilderdyk and a Da Costa, who tuned their song high for the Savior of the world? What were our churches of then, compared with what now our eyes behold? When in the former century was such witness borne for God and His Christ in the court rooms of the land, as was the privilege of our century to overhear? What are the few pennies then collected for the Kingdom of heaven, compared with the millions and millions which in this century have willingly and generously been offered for the cause of the Lord? Does not what Christian love then did, disappear as in the shadow, viewed with what now Christian compassion and Christian zeal for missions brought about? How asleep in former centuries all Christian science was, and how awake it now is to render the press also serviceable to Christ.