tared upon
him through those grotesque black eyes. At first he spoke slowly.

"Men and women of the new age," he said; "you have arisen to do battle
for the race!... There is no easy victory before us."

He stopped to gather words. He wished passionately for the gift of
moving speech.

"This night is a beginning," he said. "This battle that is coming, this
battle that rushes upon us to-night, is only a beginning. All your lives,
it may be, you must fight. Take no thought though I am beaten, though I
am utterly overthrown. I think I may be overthrown."

He found the thing in his mind too vague for words. He paused
momentarily, and broke into vague exhortations, and then a rush of speech
came upon him. Much that he said was but the humanitarian commonplace of
a vanished age, but the conviction of his voice touched it to vitality.
He stated the case of the old days to the people of the new age, to the
girl at his side.

"I come out of the past to you," he said, "with the memory of an age
that hoped. My age was an age of dreams--of beginnings, an age of noble
hopes; throughout the world we had made an end of slavery; throughout the
world we had spread the desire and anticipation that wars might cease,
that all men and women might live nobly, in freedom and peace.... So we
hoped in the days that are past. And what of those hopes? How is it with
man after two hundred years?

"Great cities, vast powers, a collective greatness beyond our dreams. For
that we did not work, and that has come. But how is it with the little
lives that make up this greater life? How is it with the common lives? As
it has ever been--sorrow and labour, lives cramped and unfulfilled, lives
tempted by power, tempted by wealth, and gone to waste and folly. The old
faiths have faded and changed, the new faith--. Is there a new faith?

"Charity and mercy," he floundered; "beauty and the love of beautiful
things--effort and devotion! Give yourselves as I would give myself--as
Christ gave Himself upon the Cross. It does not matter if you understand.
It does not matter if you seem to fail. You _know_--in the core of your
hearts you _know_. There is no promise, there is no security--nothing to
go upon but Faith. There is no faith but faith--faith which is
courage...."

Things that he had long wished to believe, he found that he believed. He
spoke gustily, in broken incomplete sentences, but with all his heart and
strength, of this new faith within him.