This is so obvious that I should apologize for repeating it more than two thousand years after it was recorded (by Herodotus, as I recall), except for the fact that the world has not heeded it. As a distinguished university president said a few nights ago in my hearing, the world needs a “bath in the obvious.” While I should not characterize the perusal of H. G. Wells’s Outline of History as taking this sort of an ablution (so far as some of his conclusions are concerned), I think that he was justified in giving more space to this remark of Crœsus and the incidental circumstances of its relation than he gave to certain whole periods of national or race existence. It is the caption that should be written at the top of our world Enochian pillars.
And I should write below it that utterance of President Fisher, of England’s Board of Education, made in the midst of the war, when the days were darkest:
“Education is the eternal debt which Maturity owes to Youth.”
And beneath that I should put, I think, the lines of Gilbert Murray, whom I saw the same day, taken from the lips of Hecuba:
“God, to Thee
I lift my praise, seeing the silent road
That bringeth justice ere the end be trod
To all that breathes and dies.”
What should be written in detail below these captions, I should let a great international committee recommend—a committee with planetary consciousness which could let each people continue the excellence that has “grown habitual to its being,” and yet include such instruction in the excellence of others as to abate the hatreds that now divide the men of the earth, even as they were divided by their misunderstandings in that early post-Noachian period when Eber, the son of Shelah, named his boy Peleg, “because in his day the earth was divided,” and the children could no longer read the lessons upon Enoch’s pillars.
I travelled the entire length of this line during the war, from the edge of the desert on the farther edge of which Enoch’s pillars stood to the North Sea. From the Mount of Olives I heard and saw the beginnings of the battle of Armageddon—not an allegorical battle, but the literal battle, for when I made my way to Headquarters down on the plain of Sharon, General Allenby, coming out of his map-room, said: “I have just had word that my cavalry are at Armageddon. The battle of Armageddon is on.” And a few nights after I walked through the broken entanglements of wire across that plain, past the Mount, as the dawn came, where our Lord is said by some to have delivered what we call the Sermon on the Mount, on to Nazareth, the little city which a Denver paper referred to familiarly as “Christ’s home town.” And I thought the thousand years of peace referred to in the Book of Revelation had come.