hopes, impulses, aims, aspirations, at any time current in the world, which it may be impossible to seize and accurately define, but which constitute a most real and effective power, being the moral, or immoral, atmosphere which at every moment of our lives we inhale, again inevitably to exhale.” Bengel defines aiōn (αἰων) as “the subtle, informing spirit of the kosmos (κοσμος) or world of men who are living alienated and apart from God.” The Germans have a word for it—zeit geist, “the spirit of