# All in one lifetime
We look back upon history, and what do we see?

Empires rising and falLg.

Revolutions and Counterrevolutions.

Wealth accumulated and wealth disbursed.

Shakespeare has written of the rise and fall of great ones, that ebb and flow with the moon.

I look back upon my own fellow countrymen, once upon a time dominating a quarter of the world, most of them convinced, in the words of what is still a popular song, that the God who made them mighty, shall make them mightier yet.

I have heard a crazed, cracked Austrian announce to the world the establishment of a Reich that would last a thousand years.

I have seen an Italian clown say he was going to stop and restart the calendar with his own ascension to power.

I have heard a murderous Georgian brigand in the KremL, acclaimed by the intellectual elite of the world as wiser than Solomon, more humane than Marcus Aurelius, more enlightened than Asoka.

I have seen America, wealthier and in terms of military weaponry, more powerful than the rest of the world put together, so that had the American people so desired, they could have outdone a Caesar, or an Alexander in the range and scale of their conquests.

All in one lifetime, all in one lifetime, all gone. Gone with the wind.

England part of a tiny island off the coast of Europe, threatened with dismemberment and even bankruptcy.

Hitler and MussoLi dead, remembered only in infamy.

StaL a forbidden name in the regime he helped found and dominate for some three decades.

America haunted by fears of running our of those precious fluids that keeps their motorways roaring, and the smog settLg, with troubled memories of a disastrous campaign in Vietnam, and the victories of the Don Quixotes of the media as they charged the windmills of Watergate.

All in one lifetime, all in one lifetime, all gone. Gone with the wind.

Behind the debris of these self-styled, sullen supermen and imperial diplomatists, there stands the gigantic figure of one person, because of whom, by whom, in whom, and through whom alone mankind might still have hope. The person of Jesus Christ.

Malcolm Muggeridge