well as they do
theirs. It is the fresh, unspoiled confidence of the natural man, who
finds the world a world of action and joy, and time all too short for
the fulness of life which it demands. When Agassiz died, "the best
friend that ever student had," the students of Harvard "laid a wreath of
laurel on his bier, and their manly voices sang a requiem, for he had
been a student all his life long, and when he died he was younger than
any of them."

Optimism in life is a good working hypothesis, if by optimism we mean
the open-eyed faith that force exerted is never lost. Much that calls
itself faith is only the blindness of self-satisfaction.

What if there are so many of us in the ranks of humanity? What if the
individual be lost in the mass as a pebble cast into the Seven Seas?
Would you choose a world so small as to leave room for only you and your
satellites? Would you ask for problems of life so tame that even you
could grasp them? Would you choose a fibreless Universe to be "remoulded
nearer to the heart's desire," in place of the wild, tough, virile,
man-making environment from which the Attraction of Gravitation lets
none of us escape?

It is not that "I come like water and like wind I go." I am here today,
and the moment and the place are real, and my will is itself one of the
fates that make and unmake all things. "Every meanest day is the
conflux of two eternities," and in this center of all time and space for
the moment it is I that stand. Great is Eternity, but it is made up of
time. Could we blot out one day in the midst of time, Eternity could be
no more. The feebleness of man has its place within the infinite
Omnipotence.

It is a question not of hope or despair, but of truth, not of optimism
nor of Pessimism, but of wisdom. Wisdom is knowing what to do next;
virtue is doing it. Religion is the heart impulse that turns toward the
best and highest course of action. "It was my duty to have loved the
highest. What does that demand? What have I to do next? Not in infinity,
where we can do nothing, but here, today, the greatest day that ever
was, for it alone is mine!

What matter is it that time does not end with us? Neither with us does
history begin. An Emperor of China once decreed that nothing should be
before him, that all history should begin with him. But he could go no
farther than his own decree. Who are you that would be Emperor of China?

"The eternal Saki from that bowl hath poured
Mil