ts because it has been brought forth, and
which now remains and can never be brought forth again after it has
been brought forth once. And this, that is permanent, must beget
itself amid the mutations of the perishing, and continue amid those
mutations, and be borne along unhurt upon the waves of time.

As yet our race wrings with difficulty its sustenance and its
continuance from reluctant Nature. As yet the larger portion of
mankind are bowed down their whole life long by hard labor, to procure
sustenance for themselves and the few who think for them. Immortal
spirits are compelled to fix all their thinking and scheming, and
all their efforts, on the soil which bears them nourishment. It often
comes to pass as yet, that when the laborer has ended, and promises
himself, for his pains, the continuance of his own existence and of
those pains, then hostile elements destroy in a moment what he had
been slowly and carefully preparing for years, and delivers up the
industrious painstaking man, without any fault of his own, to
hunger and misery. It often comes to pass as yet, that inundations,
storm-winds, volcanoes, desolate whole countries, and mingle works
which bear the impress of a rational mind, as well as their authors,
with the wild chaos of death and destruction. Diseases still hurry men
into a premature grave, men in the bloom of their powers, and children
whose existence passes away without fruit or result. The pestilence
still stalks through blooming states, leaves the few who escape
it bereaved and alone, deprived of the accustomed aid of their
companions, and does all in its power to give back to the wilderness
the land which the industry of man had already conquered for its own.

So it is, but so it cannot surely have been intended always to remain.
No work which bears the impress of reason, and which was undertaken
for the purpose of extending the dominion of reason, can be utterly
lost in the progress of the times. The sacrifices which the irregular
violence of Nature draws from reason must at least weary, satisfy, and
reconcile that violence. The force which has caused injury by acting
without rule cannot be intended to do so in that way any longer, it
cannot be destined to renew itself; it must be used up, from this time
forth and forever, by that one outbreak. All those outbreaks of
rude force, before which human power vanishes into nothing--those
desolating hurricanes, earthquakes, volcanoes, can be noth