t us nourish ourselves from other meat; strengthen our souls with
cheering thoughts. What is truest for man is what best fortifies him.

* * * * *

If mankind lives by confidence, it lives also by hope--that form of
confidence which turns toward the future. All life is a result and an
aspiration, all that exists supposes an origin and tends toward an end.
Life is progression: progression is aspiration. The progress of the
future is an infinitude of hope. Hope is at the root of things, and must
be reflected in the heart of man. No hope, no life. The same power which
brought us into being, urges us to go up higher. What is the meaning of
this persistent instinct which pushes us on? The true meaning is that
something is to result from life, that out of it is being wrought a good
greater than itself, toward which it slowly moves, and that this painful
sower called man, needs, like every sower, to count on the morrow. The
history of humanity is the history of indomitable hope; otherwise
everything would have been over long ago. To press forward under his
burdens, to guide himself in the night, to retrieve his falls and his
failures, to escape despair even in death, man has need of hoping
always, and sometimes against all hope. Here is the cordial that
sustains him. Had we only logic, we should have long ago drawn the
conclusion: Death has everywhere the last word!--and we should be dead
of the idea. But we have hope, and that is why we live and believe in
life.

Suso, the great monk and mystic, one of the simplest and best men that
ever lived, had a touching custom: whenever he encountered a woman, were
she the poorest and oldest, he stepped respectfully aside, though his
bare feet must tread among thorns or in the gutter. "I do that," he
said, "to render homage to our Holy Lady, the Virgin Mary." Let us offer
to hope a like reverence. If we meet it in the shape of a blade of wheat
piercing the furrow; a bird brooding on its nest; a poor wounded beast,
recovering itself, rising and continuing its way; a peasant ploughing
and sowing a field that has been ravaged by flood or hail; a nation
slowly repairing its losses and healing its wounds--under whatever guise
of humanity or suffering it appears to us, let us salute it! When we
encounter it in legends, in untutored songs, in simple creeds, let us
still salute it! for it is always the same, indestructible, the immortal
daughter of God.

We do not da