, armed with a higher assurance than philosophy can
work out, that and right and peace shall reign triumphant; and personal
hope, inasmuch as, however dark the prospect for earth's races may be,
the individual has a future, whose joy is his strength.

9. And this habitual reference of the government of earth to its
Supreme Ruler, is not more necessary to the hope, that sustains
endurance, than to the patience which bides the time, in opposition to
the indecent, passionate haste, which defeats its own end. "He that
believeth shall not make haste." There is much fruitless haste to
bring the world to rights, for want of a lively belief in a sovereign
controlling Power; whose wisdom, whose goodness, whose resources, whose
interest, to bring the world to order and happiness, infinitely
transcend ours. Thus is missed the conclusion, if He can endure to see
the stream of evil flow on age after age; then discretion would set
some bounds to our zeal, to see all evil rectified. And the clearer
this conclusion is the result of faith, the surer the bounds will be
just such, as to save from losing all by a headlong precipitancy.

In short, that habit of mind equally ready to accept the right and the
true, whether it come with a suspicious air of novelty and singularity,
or whether as old and vulgar it be scouted for being behind the age--
that habit which neither yields to discouragements, nor favors the
fool-hardy haste, which calculates neither time nor its own strength;
which discriminates, when to "contend earnestly," and when to "let them
alone," the dogged adherents to falsehood and wrong, to the teachings
of time and circumstances, their conscience and their God, till every
plant which he hath not planted be rooted up by these mightier
energies--the habit, realizing all the good of the radical, in proving
all things, and all the glory of the conservative, in holding fast what
is good;--this habit, so favorable to human progress, but involving so
rare a combination of seemingly opposite qualities, as scarcely to be
accounted for on all apparent influences, has been well described, as a
"life hid with Christ in God." And truly has it been remarked, in view
of the general result of ordinary tendencies and influences in forming
one-sided characters, that _becoming as a little child_, expresses no
less fittingly the conditions of entering the kingdom of nature, and
thinking with the wise, than of entering the kingdom of heav