eve
that the best is yet to be done? The peoples whom we call ancient were
but rude beginners. We are the true ancients, the inheritors of all the
wisdom and all the heroism of the past. We stand in a wider world, and
move forward with more conscious purpose along more open ways. Of the
past we see but the summits, illumined by the rays of genius and glory.
Could we look upon the plains where the multitudes lie in darkness,
wearing the triple chain of servitude, ignorance, and want, we should
understand how fair and beneficent our own age is. Enthusiasm for the
past cannot inspire the best intellectual work. The heart turns to the
past; but the mind looks to the future, and is forever untwisting the
cords which bind us to the things that pleased a childlike fancy. To
grow is to outgrow; and whatever of the past survives, survives, as the
very word implies, because it is still living and applicable here and
now. Let not the young believe that the age of the heroic and godlike is
gone. Good and the means of good are not harder to reconcile to-day than
they were a hundred or a thousand years ago, and they who have a heart
may now, as the best have done in the past, wring even from despair the
courage on which victory loves to smile. If we are weak and inferior the
fault lies in ourselves, not in the age. We are the age; and if we but
will and work, opportunities are offered us to become and to perform
whatever may crown and glorify a human soul. The time for doing best
things, like eternity, is ever present. Let but the man stand forth, and
he will find and do his work.

We are too near our own age to discern its true glory, which shall best
appear from the vantage-ground of another century; but surely we can
feel that it throbs with life, with immortal yearnings, with
ever-growing desire to give to all men higher thoughts and purer loves.
Society, the State, the Church, the individual, are striving with
conscious purpose to make life moral and intelligent. We have become
more humane than men have ever been, and accept more fully the duty and
the task of extending the domain of justice, of goodness, and of truth.
The aim of our civilization is not merely to instruct the ignorant, but
to make ignorance impossible; not merely to feed the hungry, but to do
away with famine; not merely to visit the captive, but to make captivity
the means of his regeneration. Already the chains of the slave have
been broken, and the earth has