When the realization comes, it will not come with shouting and tumult, but will come quietly and beautifully as the sun makes its triumphant progress through the heavens, gradually conquering the night until at last the earth is flooded with glorious warmth and light and all the formless shapes that loved darkness rather than light silently steal away and are forgotten. John Lewis Griffiths Note: Although the above selection was part of an address delivered in London in 1911, its truth is more apparent today than ever before. Things Which Cannot Be Shaken There are season in life when everything seems to be shaking. Old landmarks are crumbling. Venerable foundations are upheaved in a night, and are scattered abroad as dust. Guiding buoys snap their moorings, and go drifting down the channel. Institutions which promised to outlast the hills collapse like a stricken tent. Assumptions in which everybody trusted burst like air-balloons. Everything seems to lose its base, and trembles in uncertainty and confusion. Such seasons are known in our personal life. One day our circumstances appear to share the unshaken solidity of the planet, and our security is complete. And then some undreamed-of antagonism assaults our life. We speak of it as a bolt from the blue! Perhaps it is some stunning disaster in business. Or perhaps death has leaped into our quiet meadows. Or perhaps some presumptuous sin has suddenly revealed its foul face in the life of one of our children. And we are "all at sea!" Our little, neat hypotheses crumple like withered leaves. Our accustomed roads are all broken up, our conventional ways of thinking and feeling, and the sure sequences on which we have depended vanish in a night. It is experiences like these which make the soul cry out with the psalmist, in bewilderment and fear,--"My foot slippeth!" His customary foothold had given way. The ground was shaking beneath him. The foundations trembled. And such seasons are known in the life of nations. An easy-going traditionalism can be overturned in a single blast. Conventional standards, which seemed to have the fixedness of the stars are blown to the winds. Political and economic safeguards go down like wooden fences before an angry sea. The customary foundations of society are shaken. We must surely have had such experiences as these during the past weeks and months. What was unthinkable has become a commonplace. The impossible has happened. Our working assumptions are in ruins. Common securities have vanished. And on every side men and women are whispering the question,--Where are we? We are all staggered! And everywhere men and women, in their own way, are whispering the confession of the psalmist,--"My foot slippeth!"