pic and
heroic. The attitudes and actions of imaginative young persons are
exalted every moment by the invisible presence of lovers, poets,
inspired and inspiring companions. Such as they are we also shall be;
when we walk among them and with them, we shall wash our hands of all
injustice, meanness, and pretension. Women are as tired as men of our
silly civilization, its compliments, restraints, and compromises. They
feel the burden of routine as heavily, and keep their elasticity under
it as long as we. What they cannot hope to do, a great-hearted man,
some lover of theirs, shall do for them; and they will sustain him with
appreciation, anticipating the tardy justice of mankind. Every generous
girl shares with her sex that new development of feminine consciousness,
which the vulgar have named, in derision, a movement for woman's rights.
She will seek to be more truly woman, to assert her special power and
privilege, to approach from her own side the common ideal, offering a
pure soprano to match the manly bass.

We all look for a future, not only better than our won past, but better
than any past. Humanity is our inheritance, but not historical humanity.
Man seems to be broken and scattered all abroad. The great lives are
only eminent examples of a single virtue, and by admiration of every
hero we have been crippled on some one side. If he is free, he is also
coarse; if delicate, he is overlaid by the gross world; saints are timid
and feverish, afraid of being spattered in the first puddle; heroes are
profane. We must melt up all the old metal to make a new man and carry
forward the common consciousness. Every failure was part of the final
success. We go over a causeway in which every timber is some soldier
fallen in this enterprise. Who doubts the result doubts God. We say,
regretfully "If I could only continue at my best!" and we ach with the
little ebb, between wave and wave, of an advancing tide. But this tide
is Omnipotence. It rises surely, if it were only an inch in a thousand
years. The changes in society are like the geologic upheaval and sinking
of continents; yet man is morally as far removed from the savage as he
is physically superior to the saurian. We do not see the corn grow or
the world revolve; yet if motion be given as the primal essence, we must
look for inconceivable results. Wisdom will take care of wisdom, and
extend. Consider the growth of intellect in the history of your own
parish for twenty y