The Promised Messiah and Mahdi — Page 220
THE PROMISED MESSIAH AND MAHDI only conjecture about the future and may forecast about the possibilities. We quote below the great British historian Arnold. Toynbee from his book, 'The World and the West', in which he has analyzed the impact of Western civilization on other older but living civilizations and cultures in the past five centuries. In the last chapter of this book, he describes great historical resemblance between. Graeco-Roman civilization and Western civilization. He postulates that the end of Western civilization may be similar to the end of. Graeco-Roman history. . He writes: "In peering into the future we are fumbling in the dark, and we must be on our guard against imagining that we can map out the hidden road ahead. All the same it would be foolish not to make the most of any glimmer of light that hovers before our eyes; and the light reflected upon our future by the mirror of past Graeco-Roman history is at any rate the most illuminating gleam that is visible to us. . . . . . . . . "This, then, was the last chapter in the history of the world's encounter with the Greeks and Romans. After the Greeks and Romans had conquered the world by force of arms, the world took its conquerors captive by converting them to new religions which addressed their message to all human souls without discriminating between rulers and subjects or between Greeks, Orientals, and barbarians. Is something like this historic denouement of the GraecoRoman story going to be written into the unfinished history of the world's encounter with the West? We cannot say, since we cannot foretell the future. We can only see that something which has actually happened once, in another episode of history, must at least be one of the possibilities that lie ahead of us. " (The World and the West, pp91-99). During the mid fifties when I was a student, I attended a lecture by Arnold Toynbee the historian which he delivered at. Punjab University, Lahore, Pakistan. His topic was "future trends of mankind. He offered two main points about the future. The first was that mankind will overcome and eliminate the danger of a nuclear war. The nuclear weapons will not be used because of mutual fear of 220