Page:The Wreck of a World - Grove - 1890.djvu/63

Rh His fellow-men, I prayed long and earnestly to the Father of us all that I might be granted wisdom and strength to guide these poor folks through the strange perils which had fallen like a judgment upon a careless age. They ate, they drank, they married and gave in marriage, they boasted a power and civilization such as the world had never seen, a modern psalmist might have said, 'Ye are gods' (as many of their writers practically did say), their prosperity seemed beyond the reach of all calamity—when suddenly, as a bolt from the blue, a new and horrible danger, wrought by the hand of man himself, had come to threaten the whole race with extinction. Will it even yet eventuate in such an issue?