s, we believe in realities; possessing what is vain and empty, we
trust to the future to bring what is full and complete.

All noble literature and life has its origin in regions where the mind
sees but darkly; where faith is more potent than knowledge; where hope
is larger than possession, and love mightier than sensation. The soul is
dwarfed whenever it clings to what is palpable and plain, fixed and
bounded. Its home is in worlds which cannot be measured and weighed. It
has infinite hopes, and longings, and fears; lives in the conflux of
immensities; bathes on shores where waves of boundless yearning break.
Borne on the wings of time, it still feels that only what is eternal is
real,--that what death can destroy is even now but a shadow. To it all
outward things are formal, and what is less than God is hardly aught. In
this mysterious, super-sensible world all true ideals originate, and such
ideals are to human life as rain and sunshine to the corn by which it is
nourished.

What hope for the future is there, then, when the young have no
enthusiasm, no heavenly illusions, no divine aspirations, no faith that
man may become godlike, more than poets have ever imagined, or
philosophers dreamed?--when money, and what money buys, is the highest
they know, and therefore the highest they are able to love?--when even
the ambitious among them set out with the deliberate purpose of becoming
the beggars of men's votes; of winning an office the chief worth of
which, in their eyes, lies in its emoluments?--when even the glorious
and far-sounding voice of fame for them means only the gabble and cackle
of notoriety?

The only example which I can call to mind of an historic people whose
ideals are altogether material and mechanical, is that of China. Are we,
then, destined to become a sort of Chinese Empire, with three hundred
millions of human beings, and not a divine man or woman?

Is what Carlyle says is hitherto our sole achievement--the bringing into
existence of an almost incredible number of bores--is this to be the
final outcome of our national life? Is the commonest man the only type
which in a democratic society will in the end survive? Does universal
equality mean universal inferiority? Are republican institutions fatal
to noble personality? Are the people as little friendly to men of moral
and intellectual superiority as they are to men of great wealth! Is
their dislike of the millionaires but a symptom of their avers