Sclavonic versus Teutonic.
The battle of Pultowa was the first decisive victory of the Sclavonic race over the Germanic. Arnold, in his Lectures on Modern History, says that the last chapter of the history of Europe will narrate the achievements leading to Muscovite ascendency and the glories of world-dominant Panslavism.
Do nations and races attain only to a certain degree of excellence and then deteriorate? And is that the plan fatefully fixed for the planet Earth? Mycenæ, Troy, Philæ, Babylon, Athens make answer in the affirmative.
A poem, Christ in the Universe, by Alice Meynell comes to mind. In a few master touches the writer describes God’s way of revealing Himself to us mortals:
“With the ambiguous earth
His dealings have been told us; these abide:
The signal to a maid, the human birth,
The lesson, and the Young Man crucified.”
But do the other planets of our solar system, do the stars, those countless suns controlling countless planets—know aught of God’s way of dealing with our Earth? Or can we even in loftiest flight of thought conceive “in what guise He walked the Pleiades, the Lyre, the Bear?”
Then the good glad confidence of the soul in touch with God, in tune with the Infinite, in Te Deum ecstasy of exultation, overflows in the concluding lines:
“Oh, be prepared, my soul;
To read the unconceivable, to scan
The million forms of God those stars unroll
When in our turn we show to them—a Man.”
They are indeed blessed in whom dwells this abiding confidence, and for whom at times at least, there is overflow in Te Deum exaltation. The slaughter-fields of history and rivers rolling red; the answerless Whys wailing from out the past forlorn as Pharaoh-ghosts in search of non-existent mummies; the chaos of it all, from Memphis to modern Cairo; the damnable wrongs, the demon cruelties, the awful sufferings, the hellish horrors—all sound sonoral in orchestral harmony when faith and hope and good glad confidence play dominant and the soul is exultant in God.