What is the meaning of this epoch of doomsday that the world has seen in the wars and revolutions of the twentieth century? What kind of horror was it that we saw during the Second World War's campaigns of conquest, concentration camps with their torture and gas chambers, starvation and other processes of culminating horror and racial persecution inflicted on defenceless people, children as well as adults, old as well as young? Was not this entire epoch of doomsday a total ignoring of all cosmic, Christian ideals? Was it not a practising of a culminating breach of the same divine ideals? It was a world of culminating "anti-Christianity" that here in the twentieth century was revealed in the flesh for the people of the earth. It was a demonstration in matter, flesh and blood of what happens in a world of highly intelligent people who do not use their gifts to fulfil the Christian ideals as they were preached directly by the world redeemer but, on the contrary, use their gifts to create an extreme breach of precisely these highest cosmic ideals of life. Without the observance of these ideals no being whatsoever can come to experience the absolute real life which is the same as the eternal peace and the ensuing happiness and bliss.
      Why could Christian world ideals not have prevented Man from getting into this anti-Christianity, this state of doomsday or hell? They could not, and it is also evident that it has never been their purpose to prevent this, the epoch of doomsday or anti-Christianity of our century.
      It is true that Christian ideals were given to Man almost two thousand years ago, but just as the physical or material world cannot possibly be made fertile by sunshine alone, so the mental or spiritual continent of mankind can just as little be made fertile and living by mental or spiritual sunshine alone; sunshine on its own turns continents into deserts. Just as the physical soil must be provided with nutrients and water in order, together with the warmth and light of the sun, to produce a fertile plant, animal or human life, so too must the mental or spiritual soil of mankind be equipped with water and nutrients together with mental or spiritual sunshine, that is the highest wisdom or cosmic science, in order to be able to unfold the totally perfect growth and vigour that constitute cosmic consciousness and turn its source into the perfect "human being in God's image after his likeness".
      The mentality of Man cannot be changed by guidance alone. In order for guidance to have any meaning for a being's behaviour, that being must have previously had a certain amount of experience in the area in question; and it is those questions that can arise in such a field of experience that the being can have answered through guidance. As regards being able to accept the world redeemer's high ideals of neighbourly love, mankind did not have the area of experiences that could make it totally susceptible to these ideals. And it is this area mankind is experiencing through its sufferings, which have reached a culmination in the form of the epoch of doomsday. All the sufferings mankind has already gone through, and the sufferings still remaining for it to experience, will give birth in mankind to the faculty of humaneness, which will make the ideals of Christ or the highest cosmic analyses of life of immediate importance.