hispered.

18

THE BLEAKEST HOUR

It is a thankless job to raise a voice in the din of things as they are,
a voice saying things are wrong. One may do this for years without
penetrating the din, so long as he does not become specific. Or one may
become a specialist in a certain wrong, gain recognition as a gentle
fanatic on a certain subject, do much good with his passion, find
certain friends and sterling enemies--and either lose or win,
ultimately, according to change in the styles of his time.

Or, with one-pointed desire to change the spirit of things, one may
reach the gloomy eminence from which it is perceived that all things are
wrong, because the present underlying motive of the whole is wrong. He
sees one body of men scrubbing one spot on the carpet, another sewing
earnestly at a certain frayed selvage, another trying to bring out the
dead colour from a patch that wear and weather have irrevocably changed.
He blesses them all, but his soul cries out for a new carpet--at least,
a wholesome and vigorous tubbing of the entire carpet, and a turning
over of the whole afterward.

Unless our life here is a sort of spontaneous ebullition out of the
bosom of nature, without significance to us before and after, we are
moving about our business of house and country and world in a most
stupid, cruel and short-sighted fashion. I realise, and this is the wine
of life, that the hearts of men are tender and lovable, naturally open
and subject by nature to beauty and faith; that the hearts of men,
indeed, yearn for that purity of condition in which truth may be the
only utterance, and the atmosphere of untruth as revolting as bad air to
the nostrils.

But with this realisation appears the facts that the activities in the
world of men have little to do with this purity and heart-giving--but
with an evil covering, the integument of which is the lie born of
self-desire, and the true skin of which is the predatory instinct which
has not remotely to do with an erect spine.

Higher days are coming for the expression of the human spirit. There is
no doubt about that. But still the men who do the most to hurry them
along, find a fight on each ledge of the cliff. Philosophically, it may
be said that wars have brought great benefits to the race; that
materialism has taught us our place here below as no other passion
could; that trade has wrought its incomparable good to the races of
men; that Fear has been the veritable