ems which
requires the highest wisdom for its solution. It is easy to become
entirely absorbed in one's age, or it is easy to detach one's self
from it, and study it in a cold and critical temper; but to get its
warmth and vitality and escape its narrowing and limiting influence is
so difficult that comparatively few men succeed in striking the
balance between two divergent tendencies.

A man gets power and knowledge from his time in the degree in which he
suffers it to enlarge and vitalise him; he loses power and knowledge
in the degree in which he suffers it to limit his vision and confine
his interests. The Time Spirit is the greatest of our teachers so long
as it is the interpreter of the Eternal Spirit; it is the most
fallible and misleading of teachers when it attempts to speak for
itself. The visible and material things by which we are surrounded are
of immense helpfulness so long as they symbolise invisible and
spiritual things; they become stones of stumbling and rocks of offence
when they are detached from the spiritual order and set apart in an
order of their own. The age in which we live affords a concrete
illustration of the vital processes in society and means of contact
with that society, but it is comprehensible and educative in the exact
degree in which we understand its relation to other times. The
impression which the day makes upon us needs to be tested by the
impression which we receive from the year; the judgment of a decade
must be corrected by the judgment of the century. The present hour is
subtly illusive; it fills the whole stage, to the exclusion of the
past and the present; it appears to stand alone, detached from all
that went before or is to follow; it seems to be the historic moment,
the one reality amid fleeting shadows. As a matter of fact, it is a
logical product of the past, bound to it by ties so elusive that we
cannot trace them, and so numerous and tenacious that we cannot sever
them; it is but a fragment of a whole immeasurably greater than
itself; its character is so completely determined by the past that the
most radical changes we can make in it are essentially superficial;
for it is the future, not the present, which is in our hands. To get
even a glimpse of the character and meaning of our own time, we must,
therefore, see it in relation to all time; to master it in any sense
we must set it in its true historical relations. That which to the
uneducated mind seems portentous