Cradles The Shaped The World
An example Charles Swindoll uses is the year 1809. The international scene was tumultuous and turbulent that year. Napoleon Bonaparte was sweeping through Austria on his quest to rule the world, and blood was flowing freely. Nobody cared much about babies being born in those days. But the world was overlooking some incredibly significant births.
For example, William Gladstone was born that year. He was destined to become one of England’s finest statesmen-reformers and four-time prime minister. That same year, Alfred, Lord Tennyson was born to an obscure minister and his wife. The child would one day greatly affect the literary world in a clear and noticeable manner. German-Jewish composer Felix Mendelssohn was born in February that year.
On the American continent, Oliver Wendell Holmes was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Not far away in Boston, Edgar Allan Poe began his eventful, albeit tragic, life. It was also in that same year that a physician named Darwin and his wife named their child Charles Robert. And that same year produced the cries of a newborn infant in a rugged log cabin in Hardin County, Kentucky. The baby’s name? Abraham Lincoln.
If there had
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