Hope.

I conclude that civilizations, like every other human creation, wax and wane. By the nature of the case there can never be a lasting civilization anymore than there can be a lasting spring or lasting happiness in an individual life or a lasting stability in a society. It’s in the nature of man and of all that he constructs to perish, and it must ever be so. The world is full of the debris of past civilizations, and others are known to have existed which have not left any debris behind them but have just disappeared….

In these circumstances why should anyone expect Christendom to go on forever or see in its impending collapse a cosmic catastrophe?  If, then, all the signs point to the decline and impending fall of what we continue to call Western Civilization, to be followed by another Dark Age, this no more represents any finality in human history than other such developments have in the past.

I think of St. Augustine when in A. D. 410 the news was brought to him in Carthage that Rome had been sacked. It was a sore blow, but as he explained to his flock: “All earthly cities are vulnerable. Men build them and men destroy them. At the same time there is the City of God which men did not build and cannot destroy and which is everlasting.

So, amidst the shambles of a fallen Christendom, I feel a renewed confidence in the light of the Christian revelation with which it first began. I should hate you to think that this view that I’ve put before you is a pessimistic view. Strangely enough, I believe it to be the only way to a proper and real hope.

Malcolm Muggeridge, from The End of Christendom