re man's inner thoughts, taking on outer and material
embodiment.

When thoughts compacted into habits have determined character and
destiny for the individual, they go on and secure their social
progress. When God would order a great upward movement for society, He
drops a great idea into the mind of some leader. Such energies divine
have these thoughts that they create new epochs in history. Through
Luther the thought of liberty in church and state set tyrants
trembling and thrones tottering. Through Cromwell the thought of
personal rights became a weapon powerful enough utterly to destroy
that citadel of iniquity named the divine right of kings. It was a
great moral thought called the "Golden Rule" that shotted the cannon
of the North for victory and spiked the cannon of the South for
defeat. Measureless is the might of a moral idea. It exceeds the force
of earthquakes and the might of tidal waves. The reason why no scholar
or historian can forecast the events and institutions of the next
century is that none can tell what great idea God will drop into the
soul of some man ordained to be its voice and prophet.

Now the omnipotence of thoughts is not without reason. Man is the
child of genius because he is the child of God. Those beautiful words,
"made in His image," tell us that the human mechanism is patterned
after the divine. Reason and memory in man answer to those faculties
in God, as do conscience and the moral sentiments. In creative genius
man alone is a sharer with God. As the Infinite One passing through
space leaves behind those shining footsteps called suns and stars,
glowing and sparkling upon planets innumerable, so man's mind, moving
through life, leaves behind a pathway all shining with books, laws,
liberties and homes. Of all the wonderful things God hath made, man
the wonderer is himself the most wonderful. No casket owned by a king,
filled with gems and sparkling jewels, ever held such treasure as God
hath put into this casket of bones and sinew. The imagination cannot
paint in colors too rich this being, who is a miniature edition of
infinity. It is not fiction, but fact, to say that reason is a loom;
only where Jacquard's mechanism weaves a few yards of silk and satin,
reason weaves conversation, sympathy, songs, poems, eloquence--textures
all immortal. And memory is a gallery; only where the Louvre holds a
few pictures of the past, memory waving her wonder-working wand brings
back all faces, l