, and soar the very empyrean of thought and action, and they
fear and crouch and kneel; and in their quaking fears and driveling
doubts seem like puny things crawling on the ground; they are saints and
sinners; sometimes emissaries of light and love, and yet again
harbingers of ill, and sometimes the very Nemesis of hate; but in the
composite elements of their human thinking, throbbing energies of heart
and mind, they are as but a single soul, governed by one law, imbued
with one spirit, hearkening to one voice, touched by the one sympathy,
inspired by one hope, and in trend of aspiration, love and ideal,
impelled by the onward flux of one great life-struggle and purpose.

What, then, are you and I but sentient units in one great evolving
process of life-activity and thought; and yet so circumvolved in that
process that the impulse, which we irradiate from the point of our
single particular seat of energy and feeling, thrills through the vast
spheres of human purpose and endeavor, and raises the standard of truth
or forwards the advance of enlightened order like each rhythmic melody
is gathered in the mightier confluence of chime and strain to swell the
torrent of a mighty symphony.

The work we have to do is not outside, but deep down in the teeming flow
of struggling human souls. Think of them as your other self, and your
own souls will interpret the meaning of their complaints, the quality of
their striving, and the measure of their justice.

You will then behold the race of men as I have beheld them once when my
single soul seemed with sympathy winged and I sat with the lowly outcast
and felt his outrage and his shame; I brooded with him over all his
wrongs; I felt within my breast the poison shaft of hate, and clinched
like him my fist, scowled, and vengeance swore on them who drove my
despair and misery to crime by scoff and rancor and unforgiving hate.

I stood amidst a motley throng and felt my brain bereft of noble
thought; I lived in a squalid home and despised the pity which the
disdainful cast upon my lot; laughed at ribald jests and quaffed the
liquid flame, and the dark-hued nectar which concealed the serpent
beneath its foam; I held my head aloft to seem with pride imbued; I
gibed at fortune's whim and grinned a soulless sneer at my fate to
conceal a deep despair.

I roamed with the savage Indians across the arid plains, stood with them
in lonely worship of the great _Unknown_, and dropped like him a