test military General on the Union side of the Civil war
should have been the son of a country tanner, and as a boy, not
over-shrewd in the matter of bargains, adds to the glory of his later
life. The simplicity of his childhood gives new luster to the power
with which he led the forces of a nation to victory, and then went to
a battle no less noble in his long fight for honor while suffering
from disease and approaching death. Why then should we feel that such
beginnings in the lower world are too humble for man? Why do we think
his present superiority diminished by his lowly origin? Why can we not
see that precisely the reverse is true? The more humble the level from
which he sprang the more gloriously creditable is his present
position. Instead of being ashamed of having risen from the brute, it
should be the glory of man that he has so sprung. His chief
superiority lies in the fact that while they have remained where they
are, he has so completely outdistanced them as to have placed a gap
between himself and them that seems almost impassable. Furthermore,
if man with his present glory of intellect and of moral impulse, has
sprung from a creature whose superiority to the ape lay chiefly in its
potentialities, then it does not yet appear what he shall be. We can
judge the future only by the past. Through the long ages the
development has been very slow. Through the last hundred thousand
years the development of man has been wonderfully rapid, compared with
what went before, though it seems slow enough when we look at it from
the standpoint of our historical and traditional reports. But with
this added impulse, this rapid improvement that has come with the
development of mind instead of muscle, of tooth and of claw, we have
every promise of an evolution that shall far surpass anything that has
yet come. To-day our leaders are way beyond the average of the mass.
Who shall doubt that in a not too distant to-morrow, the masses shall
be where the leaders of to-day now are. We shall not then have reached
a dead level of superiority. Our leaders will have moved on as rapidly
as have the masses, and will be as far ahead of them then as they are
now. It shall be their work to apprehend new virtues, and to work them
out in their lives. The masses, seeing the beauty of the lives of the
leaders, recognizing in those lives the revelation of the divine power
which they have apprehended, will hunger to learn of them and to lead
lives