It was fitting that such an achievement should be celebrated with an exposition of the arts, the resources, the productions, and the inventions of the civilised world. It was the vivid drama of international achievement. There were more than eighty thousand single exhibits, and groups of related exhibits, representing every phase of the highest efforts of man in contemporary progress. Industries and economics, inventions and discoveries, arts and sciences, education and ethics, met under the striking architectural beauty and in a scenic setting never before equalled in any land. Against a background of the blue Pacific lying under a glowing western sky, with a splendour of decoration hardly paralleled, the scene was one worthy to be forever perpetuated in the world's history. It struck the note of a new life. The contrast between this illustration of the development of the arts of peace--the vision of the spirit that united East and West in the common cause of all that ennobles and exalts--and those awful scenes of carnage that were raging in central Europe on the other side of {229} the globe, was a contrast that might well employ the genius of Thucydides to depict, with a pen lighted from the living coal on the altar. Yet, such is the leading of divinely-guided destiny, each was doing its work in the regeneration of the world. The seemingly irreparable calamity of the war was sweeping away old conditions that the new life of spiritualisation should enter in; it was the preparing the way of the Lord and making His paths straight. Faith constantly discerned the triumphant exhortation: "Lift up your heads, O ye gates; and be ye lift up, ye everlasting doors; and the King of Glory shall come in!"