final triumph of the divine and eternal revelation in the light of a new manifestation of truth, and almost as a new religion; far greater was the aberration of those who formed the conception of, and hoped to attain to, an ever-advancing science altogether without God, or at least one which, proceeding side by side with Him, should never come into vital contact with Him! But men can not thus pass along by the side of Omnipotence, without coming into contact with him; and every effort to rise into the higher regions of truth, which is begun and intended to remain wholly without God, will, sooner or later, be directed against Him. And every branch of knowledge, and more especially the highest, if it be without God, is but a false light of the mind [_geist_], which will only too soon beguile it into the olden darkness of the soul. And so it came to pass then. For under this smooth surface of a seeming moral mildness, the lurking poison suddenly broke out, as it were, by a fearful conspiracy of the times, spreading its contagion far and wide, and corrupting every thing that came within its reach--even as it had been predicted of it in the second book of the future.[44] For even out of the struggle of good against evil, the latter suddenly arose again in a new and unexpected shape, coming forth, as it were, out of the sea, and the moral world was transformed into a sea of blood. And so, indeed, in these prophetic pages, it is predicted of the enigmas of the last days. Now, throughout this great catastrophe of the world, so far as it can be regarded as a peculiar and especial, but historical warning from God, and a revelation of the divine will, we may trace, among the better disposed, the same gradation of illumination, advancing through the ascending series of sense, soul, and spirit, that we have already noticed, on a larger scale, in the course of the history of mankind. The senses of many individuals become, indeed, more and more open, the more clearly they recognized, by its historical characters, the fatal abyss to which the age of the world was drawing nigh. The epoch of the restoration was, moreover, followed by a general revolution in the sentiments, the moral principles, and prevailing pursuits of men. The third step, however, of a right and true knowledge which, from the position of a full scientific enlightenment of the mind or spirit, should penetrate into the profoundest depths of truth, is still wanting, or at any rate exists as yet only in a very imperfect degree. This property is the defective point in the problem of the age, and in all attempts hitherto made to solve it.