of truth in these hideous paradoxes which makes them
rankle, like an unkind construction put upon a questionable action. As
the foam is what wind and tide have made of it, so are we the product of
our circumstances, the resultant of a thousand forces, far indeed from
being self-poised or self-contained, too often false to our best self,
insomuch that probably no man is actually what in the depth of
self-consciousness he feels himself to be, what moreover he should prove
to be, if only the leaden weight of constraining circumstance were
lifted off the spring which it flattens down to earth. Moses himself was
at heart a very different person from the keeper of the sheep of Jethro.
Therefore man says, Pity and make allowance for me: this is not my true
self, but only what by compression, by starvation and stripes and
bribery and error, I have become. Only God says, I AM THAT I AM.

Yet in another sense, and quite as deep a one, man is not the coarse
tissue which past circumstances have woven: he is the seed of the
future, as truly as the fruit of the past. Strange compound that he is
of memory and hope, while half of the present depends on what is over,
the other half is projected into the future; and like a bridge,
sustained on these two banks, life throws its quivering shadow on each
moment that fleets by. It is not attainment, but degradation to live
upon the level of one's mere attainment, no longer uplifted by any
aspiration, fired by any emulation, goaded by any but carnal fears. If
we have been shaped by circumstances, yet we are saved by hope. Do not
judge me, we are all entitled to plead, by anything that I am doing or
have done: He only can appraise a soul a right Who knows what it yearns
to become, what within itself it hates and prays to be delivered from,
what is the earnestness of its self-loathing, what the passion of its
appeal to heaven. As the bloom of next April is the true comment upon
the dry bulb of September, as you do not value the fountain by the pint
of water in its basin, but by its inexhaustible capabilities of
replenishment, so the present and its joyless facts are not the true
man; his possibilities, the fears and hopes that control his destiny and
shall unfold it, these are his real self.

I am not merely what I am: I am very truly that which I long to be. And
thus, man may plead, I am what I move towards and strive after, my
aspiration is myself. But God says, I AM WHAT I AM. The stream hur