Evils there are in plenty, gigantic and formidable, but they are being exposed, investigated, challenged and attacked with new vigor and hope.

Clouds there are in plenty, vast and threatening, but the light is breaking through, and is illumining the path of progress and revealing the obstacles and pitfalls that obstruct the onward way.
In the eighteenth century it was different.

Then the spiritual and moral gloom that enshrouded the world was relieved by hardly a ray of light.

It was like the darkest hour before the dawn, when the few lamps and candles that remain alight do little more than make the darkness visible.

Carlyle in his Frederick the Great writes of the eighteenth century thus:-- A century which has no history and can have little or none.