g with them the sunshine and the rain, till the flower
withers, never having known the real purpose for which it lived,
thinking the garden was made for it, not it for the garden. The coral
insect dreams in its small soul, which is possibly its small stomach,
of home and food. So it works and strives deep down in the dark waters,
never knowing of the continents it is fashioning.

But the question still remains: for what purpose is it all? Science
explains it to us. By ages of strife and effort we improve the race;
from ether, through the monkey, man is born. So, through the labour
of the coming ages, he will free himself still further from the brute.
Through sorrow and through struggle, by the sweat of brain and brow, he
will lift himself towards the angels. He will come into his kingdom.

But why the building? Why the passing of the countless ages? Why should
he not have been born the god he is to be, imbued at birth with all the
capabilities his ancestors have died acquiring? Why the Pict and Hun
that _I_ may be? Why _I_, that a descendant of my own, to whom I shall
seem a savage, shall come after me? Why, if the universe be ordered by a
Creator to whom all things are possible, the protoplasmic cell? Why not
the man that is to be? Shall all the generations be so much human waste
that he may live? Am I but another layer of the soil preparing for him?

Or, if our future be in other spheres, then why the need of this planet?
Are we labouring at some Work too vast for us to perceive? Are our
passions and desires mere whips and traces by the help of which we are
driven? Any theory seems more hopeful than the thought that all our
eager, fretful lives are but the turning of a useless prison crank.
Looking back the little distance that our dim eyes can penetrate the
past, what do we find? Civilizations, built up with infinite care,
swept aside and lost. Beliefs for which men lived and died, proved to be
mockeries. Greek Art crushed to the dust by Gothic bludgeons. Dreams of
fraternity, drowned in blood by a Napoleon. What is left to us, but the
hope that the work itself, not the result, is the real monument? Maybe,
we are as children, asking, "Of what use are these lessons? What good
will they ever be to us?" But there comes a day when the lad understands
why he learnt grammar and geography, when even dates have a meaning for
him. But this is not until he has left school, and gone out into the
wider world. So, perhaps, when