Early:  Our valiant forbears took the Holy Scriptures in hand and by obedience to our Lord, brought a civilization on the brink of disaster into an extended period of moral renewal, resistance to Islam, and widespread salvation of pagans who were captive of the devil.

Middle:  Bright lights shone in the midst of a period of decline and apostasy.  The consistency of Christian establishmentarianism, though adjusted, remained a firm foothold for God’s men battling the world, the flesh, and the devil.

Recent: Rising with the tide of a fresh outpouring of the Holy Spirit we are driven along by the wisdom of God’s Word in the hands of God’s servants.  However, as history’s cyclical patterns have shown many times, the latter group of voices we hear in this period are contending with a new decline and apostasy bringing us into the twentieth century where the calls of such lights as William Jennings Bryant were ignored, as so many of God’s heralds from Noah, to Jeremiah, to Leo III had been before. My friends, we are likely somewhere on the downside of the cyclical pattern which has haunted God’s people for millennia.  The Lord is a gracious God, full of compassion and loving-kindness.  If we cry to Him, if we put away our idols, if we cease the sophistry created to separate the Faith from certain spheres (among other pet doctrines of men) we will yet again see the hand of the Lord.  It has happened innumerable times, and because it is the promise of God, it is sure.