ole curve of human existence on this planet describes a parabola of
some twenty millions of years in duration.[239] Of this we have already
exhausted unreckoned centuries in the evolution of pre-historic man, and
perhaps five thousand years in the ages of historic records. How much of
time remains in front? Through that past period of five thousand years
preserved for purblind retrospect in records, what changes of opinion,
what peripeties of empire, may we not observe and ponder! How many
theologies, cosmological conceptions, polities, moralities, dominions,
ways of living and of looking upon life, have followed one upon another!
The space itself is brief; compared with the incalculable longevity of
the globe, it is but a bare 'scape in oblivion.' And, however ephemeral
the persistence of humanity may be in this its earthly dwelling-place,
the conscious past sinks into insignificance before those aeons of the
conscious future, those on-coming and out-rolling waves of further
evolution which bear posterity forward. Has any solid gain of man been
lost on the stream of time to us-ward? We doubt that. Has anything final
and conclusive been arrived at? We doubt that also. The river broadens,
as it bears us on. But the rills from which it gathered, and the ocean
whereto it tends, are now, as ever in the past, inscrutable. It is
therefore futile to suppose, at this short stage upon our journey, while
the infant founts of knowledge are still murmuring to our ears, that any
form of faith or science has been attained as permanent; that any
Pillars of Hercules have been set up against the Atlantic Ocean of
experience and exploration. Think of that curve of possibly twenty
million years, and of the five thousand years remembered by humanity!
How much, how incalculably much longer is the space to be traversed than
that which we have left behind! It seems, therefore, our truest, as it
is our humblest, wisdom to live by faith and love. 'And now abideth
faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is
charity.' Love is the greatest; and against love man has sinned most in
the short but blood-bedabbled annals of his past. Hope is the virtue
from which a faithful human being can best afford to abstain, unless
hope wait as patient handmaid upon faith. Faith is the steadying and
sustaining force, holding fast by which each one of us dares defy
change, and gaze with eyes of curious contemplation on the tide which
brought us, a