dinner--a great social philosophy--for the race!

The really impractical man is not he who reaches out to the intellectual
and ideal aspects of life; it is he who lives as if this life were all.
There are women who make pets of their clothes, as men make pets of
horse or dog. They have just time enough in life to dress themselves up.
Looking back over their years, they can only say, I have had clothes! In
the same number of years, with no greater advantages or opportunities,
other women have become the queenly women of the race. Some women are
girt with centuries, instead of gold or gems. Whenever they appear, the
event becomes historic; what they do adds new lustre to life.

We are all prodigals. We throw away time and strength, and years, and
gold, and then weep that we are ignorant, and embeggared at the last.
Who shall teach us wisdom, and in what manner may we be wise?

What say the sages of the vast possibilities of the race? With one voice
they say: Be brave! Do not cower, shrink, or whine. Throw out upon the
world a free fearlessness of thought and word and deed. Courage,
freedom, heroism, faith, exactness, honor, justice, and mercy--these
traits have been handed down as the traditional learning of the heart
of man.

Another ideal of the race is Law. We have given up a
chaos-philosophy--the haphazard continuity of events--a cometary orbit,
for the world. There are fixed relations everywhere existent: the
succession of cycles is orderly and prearranged.

Another ideal is Progress. We are moving, not toward the bottom, but
toward the top of possibility. We reject annihilation, because then
there is nothing left. And there must always be something
left--progress--a bigger something, a better something. Should
annihilation be the truth of things, and all the race mortal, then some
day there would be a Last Man. And after the Last Man, what? He would
die, and then all that any of the other stars could view of the vast
panorama of our earthly generations would be an unburied corpse, with
not even a vulture hovering to pick it to freshness in the air!

A Last Man? No. Instead, the seers have shown us a great multitude in a
heavenly country, praising God, and singing forth His Name forever.
Immortality broods over the great thought of the race. All great minds
look upward to it: it is the final consummation of our dreams.

Another ideal is social adjustment, and social service. We must do
something for some one,