A City Of Refuge

EXCERPT FROM ''CULTURE WATCH."
Subject: APOSTASY and Western Nations.
“Civilizations die from suicide, not murder” Arnold Toynbee
“A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself within. The essential causes of Rome’s decline lay in her people, her morals, her class struggle, her failing trade, her bureaucratic despotism, her stifling taxes, her consuming wars.” Will Durant
“America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.” Abraham Lincoln
Nations seem to go through cycles. In 1857 Lord Macaulay sent a letter to an American friend, speaking about the fact that the average age of the world’s greatest democratic nations has been 200 years. He said that each has been through the following sequence:

From bondage to spiritual faith.
From faith to great courage.
From courage to liberty.
From liberty to abundance.
From abundance to complacency.
From complacency to selfishness.
From selfishness to apathy.
From apathy to dependency.
And from dependency back again into bondage.

A good question to ask is this: where is Australia – or America, or Britain, or France – in this cycle? It seems they all would be pretty near the end of it. How long the West can survive is a moot point. It is hard to believe that the moral and spiritual freefall can go on for much longer.