Mankind has now in the twentieth century come into a mental crisis which threatens the complete destruction of culture, since people, by virtue of their excessive physical talents but almost total lack of psychic talents, cannot themselves find means or ways to salvation other than excessive, life-obliterating, culture-destroying means. They therefore make the creation of lethal weapons, and thereby a greater and greater capacity to destroy culture, the highest ideal. They do not understand that they thereby sink further and further into suffering and ruin. War cannot save the world. It is not so much lethal weapons that people need as a change of heart. Without this change it would not be very many years before the earth would be totally unsuitable for human culture and existence. But, thanks to the principle of world-redemption, that principle of love which makes it a condition that parents must protect their offspring until they have come of age also makes it a condition that mankind gets a certain protection until it has spiritually come of age. Through this principle, mankind will be led forward to liberation from this hell and its satanic philosophy of murder, which it itself maintains, just as, in all its previous mental crises in its history, it has been freed. These crises have always repeated themselves in periods when the current moral concepts or the perception of the Godhead has been outlived or become antiquated, because of the beings' intellectual development. The leading cultural concepts could gradually only be felt as naive. The beings became more or less amoral. Faced with this fact, they had no other means than the law of the jungle, "the right of the strongest". Every time the religious basis became insecure this jungle-nature experienced a new renaissance or growth. But when people's need was greatest, help was closest at hand. World-redemption stepped unshakably in. And there was always born a being with precisely the psychic gifts and knowledge that were needed to renew the crisis-stricken people's spiritual basis to such an extent that they could pull themselves out of the grasp of the jungle and be led further into this new increase of culture. The being who was thus born was, of course, a being who was ahead of terrestrial people in the long evolutionary journey in the spiral cycle and had thereby long ago become superior to them in those fields in which they were still less gifted and helpless. It is such beings we know from the history of mankind as "world-redeemers". It is these beings who were originally kings, high priests and prophets. They liberated people from their antiquated dogmas and traditions by giving them new ones more in keeping with the times. For the people of the West, Christ was, in his time, the greatest world-redeemer. Through him there was manifested a spiritual line of direction so great that it can never be outdone. In it, all the generations of the Earth will therefore also be blessed. And it is the completion of this process that is happening through the world-redemption of the twentieth century: with this the mission of world-redemption on Earth will be completed. Through this last great release of this divine principle every terrestrial human being can himself gradually reach initiation, which is the coming of age of spiritual maturity. He has himself become the way, the truth and the life. And there, where he can shine with his own light, all other sources of light are superfluous.