Nowadays all you hear is that the West is dead, American is dying, all is lost. That may be very true, but it is too early to tell. Most of us would grant that our current course leads to death; the conclusion that death is inevitable, however, depends on us following out this course to the bitter end. That is possible, but by no means certain. In the days of Anno Domini, it is no longer a safe assumption that the path to death once entered upon must be pursued to the end. In this respect the civilizations of antiquity are an incomplete pattern.

"At the very moment when some [nations] seemed plunged in unfathomable abysses of disgrace and disaster, they have suddenly emerged. They have begun a new course and opened a new reckoning; and even in the depths of their calamity, and on the very ruins of their country, have laid the foundations of a towering and durable greatness. All this has happened without any apparent previous change in the general circumstances which had brought on their distress. The death of a man at a critical juncture, his disgust, his retreat, his disgrace, have brought innumerable calamities on a whole nation. A common soldier, a child, a girl at the door of an inn, have changed the face of fortune, and almost of Nature." - Edmund Burke, from Letters on a Regicide Peace.

"...The prophet is mindful that in their desperate straits God suddenly and wonderfully and beyond all hope succors the poor and almost lost; those wandering through the desert he protects from wild beasts and at last guides them back to the way; to the needy and hungry he supplies food; the prisoners he frees from loathsome dungeons and iron bands; the shipwrecked he leads back to port unharmed; the half dead he cures of disease; he burns the earth with eat and dryness, or makes it fertile with the secret watering of grace; he raises up the humblest from the crowd, or casts down the lofty from the high level fo their dignity." - Calvin, Institutes, I.V.8.