must assume, judging from how much the matter has advanced in eighteen hundred years, that this will happen in several times eighteen hundred years—and so it is impossible and useless to think now of the impossible abolition of power, and all we should think of is that the power should be vested in the best of hands.”
Thus retort the defenders of the existing order. And this reflection would be quite correct if the transition of men from one concept of life to another took place only by force of the one process where every man learns individually and one after another by experience the vanity of power, and by an inner way reaches the Christian truths.
This process takes place without cessation, and by this way men one after another pass over to the side of Christianity.
But men pass over to the side of Christianity not by this inner path alone; there is also an external method, with which the gradualness of this transition is destroyed.
The transition of men from one structure of life to another does not always take place in the manner in which the sand is poured out from an hourglass—one kernel of sand after another, from the first to the last—but rather like water pouring into a vessel that is immerged in the water, when it at first admits the water evenly and slowly at one side, and then, from the weight of the water already taken in, suddenly dips down fast and almost all at once receives all the water which it can hold.
The same occurs with societies of men at the transition from one concept, and so from one structure of life, to another. It is only at first that one after another slowly and gradually receives the new truth by an inner way and follows it through life; but after a certain diffusion it is no longer received in an internal manner, nor gradually, but all at once, almost involuntarily.