"The thought of facing the Ice Age unprepared, is unthinkable. The consequence would be unthinkable."

"But that's what we are heading for," said Alejo.

"Our humanity is too deep and too profound that we would fail ourselves by not creating the Ice Age Renaissance," I almost protested. "We will create the needed indoor agriculture that can support a ten billion population."

"I see no movement in this direction," said Alejo.

"The movement starts today," interjected Sylvia

"Let me tell you a story which is true," said Maria-Ilona. "It is also a story for which the ending does not need to be rewritten, which only needs to be extended. The story is not about foreign lands. It begins right here in America. It begins barely a few hundred miles to the North of where we are, in a small town in New Hampshire, in Concord I think.

It happened one day less than a hundred years ago, that a woman lived in that town who was literally at the end of her rope. The woman was partially paralyzed and destitute. Her home life was in shambles to the point that it had become unbearable.

She had decided one day to leave her home and never come back. As she hobbled to the railway station, she met a crowd of people streaming the other way. While the people were passing by in the opposite direction, she reasoned that they must have come for something important. Why else would so many people come? With this thought she turned around and followed them as best as she could.

She came to a wide open homestead at the edge of the town, where she saw the crowd assembled, being addressed by a woman speaking to the people from a balcony. She drew near to listen, but having been slow in coming, she stood far in the back, too far to hear what was being said.

She began to cry for this once more added disappointment to the long train of disappointments that had been the story of her life. She felt that something important was being said that she now missed.

When the people dispersed, she hobbled back into town. It happened on her way back that as she crossed the street towards a vacant lot on the other side that she noticed a team of horses approaching. She stepped aside and watched.

As the horses and the carriage passed by, she saw the same woman riding in the carriage that she had seen speaking from the balcony. She saw the woman looking at her with a warm and radiant expression. However, what she saw in that woman's face was more than just a radiance of emotions. It was a flow of love that defies description.

She said later of that incidence that she had never seen that kind of love in any human face before or since, or had known such love to be possible. She had also discovered that by the time the carriage had driven out of sight that her paralysis had vanished. She was free, healed, and completely whole like any other human being. She returned to her home with joy and found her home-situation healed as well.

"According to the woman's testimony," said Maria-Ilona, "the incidence really happened. But also something else had happened along this line. It happened long before this day, almost four decades earlier. This part is even more profound," added Maria-Ilona.

In another town in this same general era, this time in Massachusetts, a woman had slipped on an icy street and fallen. According to the doctors she had suffered a spinal injury, which they said would become fatal. As her situation worsened, and she seemed near the end of her days, she began to reason about the nature of universal principles. She reasoned that the healing works of Christ Jesus couldn't have been miracles, since miracles don't happen in the real world. So she reasoned that they must have resulted from the operation of universal principles that caused the massive healing work to be possible that Christ Jesus had accomplished so long ago. She reasoned that if this was the case, which it obviously was, then the same principles would be still as valid in her time as they had been eighteen centuries earlier.

The remarkable thing was, that while she reasoned along these lines, she found herself suddenly well. She was healed on the spot, on the very day that her minister had figured would be her last. The minister had seen her in the morning that day, in a hopeless state, and had promised to return after his service to prepare her for her death. When he returned, she was up and about, completely well, and opened the door for him.

She devoted her life from that time on to discovering and exploring the science of the principles and processes that had caused her healing, which she later called, Christian Science.

The woman lived for another forty-four years," said Maria-Ilona. "She wrote a textbook about the science that she created, and set up a college for teaching the discovered principles of scientific mental healing. The process became widely practiced by many people in healing others. The woman also created a church to promote her created healing practice. Historians also tell us that she set a portion of each day aside for the healing of the ills of the world.

"That woman was the woman in the carriage that had been seen by the paralyzed woman who was healed that day in the flow of a deeply embracing love," said Maria-Ilona. "In fact, so great was her love for mankind that she gave up her beloved country home at her homestead outside the small town, at the age of eighty-six, and moved to Boston to launch a newspaper with the mission to "bless all mankind and to injure none." However, more profoundly than this accomplishment was the rarely recognized fact that when the woman died in December 1910, she left behind a world that had been at peace for over forty years for the first time in centuries, corresponding to the period of her healing practice beginning in 1866. All the wars and long standing atrocities had ended at this time, including the American Civil War, and the British Opium Wars against China. Even the religious wars against humanity by the ecclesiastical Inquisition, which had reigned since the 1400s with terror, torture, and burning people to death, had come to an end just prior to this time. The train of atrocities and war did not get restarted until a few years after her death, beginning around the start of World War I. Nor has the train stopped rolling since."

Alejo shook his head in disbelief at the ending of Maria-Ilona's story. "You must be mistaken," he said to her.

I intervened and told him that Maria-Ilona was right about the historic timing. I confirmed that the only major period of peace between 1510 and the present, occurred during the period that Maria-Ilona had mentioned. "From 1510 onward, the world had been subjected to a continuous state of war," I said in defense of Maria-Ilona. "It began with the League of Cambrai aiming to wipe out the Venetian Empire. The Empire retaliated with staging an atrocious religious war that wiped out the Golden Renaissance. The retaliation became a string of wars that culminated into the Thirty Years War that ended only with the dawn of the Second Renaissance built on the Treaty of Westphalia. The founding of the USA came out of this background. But even at this time, while Europe celebrated its new achievement of peace and its profound renaissance, the Spanish Inquisition still ravished the human landscape and darkened the face of civilization, though to a lesser degree, for a few short years. Also the world saw a new series of wars erupting in the shadow of the 1688 invasion of England, by the Dutch Prince William of Orange, who brought the Venetian imperial system to Britain. Out of that erupted the British imperial war to deny America's independence, followed by the imperials' Jacobean terror operations in France, followed in turn by the Napoleonic Wars that wrecked Europe, and a string of smaller attacks on America culminating in the American Civil War. But the entire train of war-madness stopped around 1866. The Civil War had ended the year before. The Opium Wars against China had ended. Even the Spanish Inquisition had been finally abolished a few years earlier. No major wars ravished the world from 1866 on, until World War I erupted in 1914 and brought to an end almost a half a century of peace. At this point all hell broke loose again, and the wars haven't stopped since."

"World War I started a few years after the woman's death," said Maria-Ilona. "History tells us that the train of atrocities against mankind had been halted for the period in which the kind of love for mankind that the woman represented, was put on the table. Peter is right. The train of atrocities was restarted and put onto the fast track. Right after that, beginning with World War I, the war-train was rolling, and it hasn't stopped since. I am not saying with that, that the woman in my story was responsible for that remarkable period of peace. I merely find it remarkable that this historic coincidence exists between the woman's profound love based on scientific principles, and its expression in a period of profound mental healing in many parts of the world, with all that coming together into a remarkable period of peace that interrupted a five hundred-year period of war and inhumanity.

"The coincidence of these three historic occurrences tells me that a principle is involved in all that," said Maria-Ilona, "and that therefore the ending of my story has not yet been written. The story says something to me about the power of Love as an awesome impetus that can shape human history in a profound way. It also tells me that the train of atrocities against mankind can be stopped again, once society dedicates itself to the task of developing a loving that is as wide as the world, because the Principle of Universal Love, which Peter has mentioned, is a timeless principle. Nor do we need another pioneer in the world to demonstrate this principle for us. One demonstration is enough, because we have the capacity to carry the process forward by ourselves. I would say that my story is the answer that the king in Peter's story was looking for, which no one could give him, since the principles hadn't been discerned at the time. I also think that our dancing in the Temple of Unrequited Love has something to do with this process, because it seems to have a healing and enriching effect on our love for one-another. That's what I think is also the ending for the story of our present world that will yet be written," said Maria-Ilona.

(from the novel, Roses at Dawn in an Ice Age World, Chapter 13)

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