limits to the
nobleness of person or mind which the human creature may attain if we
wisely attend to the laws of its birth and training." Wordsworth asks
whether Nature throws any bars across the hope that what one is millions
may be. Take it, then, that nothing more is conceivable in the way of
mathematics than a Newton, or of drama than an AEschylus or a
Shakespeare, or of sacrifice than a Christ. These, then, are types of
what will be. They demonstrate what human nature is capable of. What one
is, why may not millions be? Here is an ideal to work for. Here is
something real to worship, to dedicate a life to. It is not merely that
we can make smoother the paths of future generations--which George
Meredith declared to be the great purpose and duty of our lives--but
that, as Ruskin suggests in the foregoing quotation, we may raise the
inherent quality of those future generations, so that they can make
their own ways smooth and straight and high. It is our business, I
repeat, to conceive of parenthood as the most responsible and sacred
thing in life. True, it now follows, according to physiological law,
upon the satisfaction of certain tendencies of our nature, which in
themselves may be gratified, and even worthily gratified, without
reference to anything but the present; yet these tendencies, commonly
reviled and regarded with contempt--at least overt contempt--exist, like
most of our attributes, for the life of the world to come. And that in
which they may result, the bringing of new human life into the world, is
the most tremendous, as it is the most mysterious, of our possibilities.

The laws of life are such that at any given moment the entire future is
absolutely at the mercy of the present. The laws of life, indeed; one
might have said the law of universal causation. But so it is. There is
no conceivable limit to our responsibility. We act for the moment, we
act for self; but there will be no end to the consequences. When the
stuff of which our bodies are made has passed through a thousand cycles,
the consequences of our brief moments will still be felt. This
dependence of the future upon the present in the world of life is an
almost unrealizable thing. Life could not have persisted upon such
conditions had not Nature from the first, and increasingly up to our own
day (for it is the human infant that is the most helpless, and the
longest helpless), had not Nature, I say, persistently constructed the
individual,