The Life and Work of Rudolf Steiner
1905
Upon one who is called to the spiritual guidance of mankind, the destiny of the world bears heavily. Not to destroy the law is he sent, but to fulfill it. He is pledged to the primal law of evolution—spiritual continuity. He is linked to millennia of the past, let the future call as it will. Upon his shoulders presses the responsibility for what has already come to be, as well as that which is to come. No new chapter will he write, if he has not thrust his roots deeper than others into earlier times and sensed their meaning in good and evil across the ages. He must have looked into the faces of those Spiritual Powers who, behind outer appearance, lead forward or hold in check the world process. For him, the beginning of a new century denotes retrospection and meditation in alert consciousness, in order to be able to fathom the world's plan, its laws of growth and its contradictions, before setting out to mold the contours of a new century by the means of knowledge, word, and deed.