Most distant periods in one bless’d design:
That is the mighty hinge, on which have turn’d
All revolutions, whether we regard 1020
The natural, civil, or religious, world;
The former two but servants to the third:
To that their duty done, they both expire,
Their mass new-cast, forgot their deeds renown’d;
And angels ask, “Where once they shone so fair?”
To lift us from this abject, to sublime;
This flux, to permanent; this dark, to day;