On July 25th, Harry Patch, Britain’s last survivor of the Great War, died at age 111.  Having survived the slaughter at Passchendaele where some 850,000 men fell, Private Patch saw the worst of that senseless conflict.  Fighting against him in that same battle was another private; an Austrian named Adolf Hitler.

Imagine all that Harry Patch’s life spanned.  When he was born, Queen Victoria had just celebrated her diamond jubilee.  America was in the midst of the Spanish-American War.  A horse was the primary means of transportation.  William McKinley, a veteran of the American Civil War, was President of the United States. Russia was a monarchy.  The Wright brothers were still some five years away from their flight at Kitty Hawk.  And the idea of a general European war where more than fifty million would perish was unthinkable.

The world has turned over many times since Harry Patch entered it.  The changes since then have been a mixed bag, to say the least.  Technological and medical advances have outpaced anything imagined by the world into which Patch was born; but so have the horrors of genocide, abortion (a genocide itself), war on a scale greater than those of all previous centuries combined, the dissolution of the family, and the decline of the West’s moral conscience.

What will the future hold for children born today whose life expectancy has been greatly expanded by the aforementioned medical advances?  Will the world be a better place, where the gentling influence of the Gospel takes root and flourishes, or will it be one of escalating horror, a Brave New World where man continues his descent from being made in the image of God to that of degraded animal?