My faith and my hope is Thy kingdom, come; Thy will, be done on earth as it is in Heaven.

 Image source

In 1787, Alexander Tyler, a Scottish history professor at the  University  of Edinburgh , had this to say about the fall of the Athenian Republic some 2,000 years earlier:

‘A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government.’

‘A democracy will continue to exist up until the time
that voters discover they can vote themselves
generous gifts from the public treasury.’

‘ From that moment on, the majority always vote for the candidates

who promise the most benefits from the public treasury,

with the result that every democracy will finally collapse

due to loose fiscal policy,

which is always followed by a dictatorship.’

The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been two hundred years.

These nations have progressed through this sequence:

 
From bondage to spiritual faith;

from spiritual faith to great courage;

from courage to liberty;

from liberty to abundance;

from abundance to selfishness;

from selfishness to complacency;

from complacency to apathy;

from apathy to dependence;

from dependency back again into bondage.
...................................................................................

My comments....

By my reckoning we are in the  dependency stage and have about five years left ... 

and I also could apply the stages above to the evolution of the Church...albeit on a different time scale. 

Which stage might we be at do ya think ?

And finally a wry definition for thought...

The word 'politics' is derived from the word 'poly', meaning 'many', and the word 'ticks', meaning 'blood sucking parasites'.

 Larry Hardiman