e promise
of the gradual supremacy of character over the accidents, happenings,
forces and factors of circumstances. These may be his tests; they need
not be his fate. "The real vital division of the religious part of our
Protestant communities," says Wendell Holmes, "is into Christian
optimists and Christian pessimists." I would rank myself among the
former and say again, that the good in the conditions of our life far
outweighs the ill. And while maintaining this position, I would also,
as the second of the two things to be urged, have us face the question,
Who is responsible for the ill there is?

George Meredith, in a reference to this subject, declares that no man
can _think_, and not think hopefully. Whether or not this be true in
the case of every man who thinks, this can be said--it ought to be
true. Instead of multiplying words to no profit over the old question,
Why all this misery and suffering? let us think for a moment in another
direction, and we shall perchance be encouraged to think hopefully.

It has been said that human wisdom has arrived at no juster and higher
view of the present state, than that it is intended to call forth power
by obstruction; the power of a life that is perfect and entire, by the
responsibility of choice between the things that make or mar it. If
God can rank in us nothing higher than character, and if character on
the man side can be achieved only out of right choice translated in its
kindred action--then it must follow that the power to choose the right
is the power to choose the wrong. Which means in the fewest words,
that sin, and all the ills and suffering that proceed out of its
selfishness, are the issue of this possibility of fatal choosing. If
it be asked: "Why the possibility at all?" I answer that without it men
would cease to be men and become something else; and what that
something else would be need not enter into our speculation. It is
because we can do wrong that we can do right; and if we think about
this, may we not think hopefully?

It is the fashion in our day to write and talk as though heredity, and
the effects of the accumulation of heredity, were somehow sinister
enough to drape the heavens in black, and silence all the songs of the
angels. This law, we are told, can have no moral interpretation
consistent with freedom and responsibility. The more than tendency of
much that is being written and said is to depress the mind with a sense
of the