, and man would not be the progressive animal he is if he
long remained in love with his own productions.

What his future will be is too engrossing a subject, and one too deeply
shrouded in mystery, not to be constantly pictured anew. No wonder that
the consideration at that country toward which mankind is ever being
hastened should prove as absorbing to fancy as contemplated earthly
journeys proverbially are. Few people but have laid out skeleton tours
through its ideal regions, and perhaps, as in the mapping beforehand of
merely mundane travels, one element of attraction has always consisted
in the possible revision of one's routes.

Besides, there is a fascination about the foreign merely because it is
such. Distance lends enchantment to the views of others, and never
more so than when those views are religious visions. An enthusiast has
certainly a greater chance of being taken for a god among a people who
do not know him intimately as a man. So with his doctrines. The imported
is apt to seem more important than the home-made; as the far-off
bewitches more easily than the near. But just as castles in the air do
not commonly become the property of their builders, so mansions in the
skies almost as frequently have failed of direct inheritance. Rather
strikingly has this proved the case with what are to-day the two most
powerful religions of the world,--Buddhism and Christianity. Neither is
now the belief of its founder's people. What was Aryan-born has become
Turanian-bred, and what was Semitic by conception is at present Aryan by
adoption. The possibilities of another's hereafter look so much rosier
than the limitations of one's own present!

Few pastimes are more delightful than tossing pebbles into some still,
dark pool, and watching the ripples that rise responsive, as they run in
ever widening circles to the shore. Most of us have felt its fascination
second only to that of the dotted spiral of the skipping-stone, a
fascination not outgrown with years. There is something singularly
attractive in the subtle force that for a moment sways each particle
only to pass on to the next, a motion mysterious in its immateriality.
Some such pleasure must be theirs who have thrown their thoughts into
the hearts of men, and seen them spread in waves of feeling, whose
sphere time widens through the world. For like the mobile water is the
mind of man,--quick to catch emotions, quick to transmit them. Of all
waves of feeling,