pleasures
we enjoy at first fade; we settle down by comfortable firesides; we
pile the tables with beloved books; friends go and come; we acquire
habits; we find out our real tastes. We learn the measure of our
powers. And yet, however simple and clear our routine becomes, we are
warned every now and then by sharp lessons that it is all on
sufferance, that we have no continuing city; and we begin to see, some
later, some earlier, that we must find something to hold on to,
something eternal and everlasting in which we can rest. There must be
some anchor of the soul. And then I think that many of us take refuge
in a mere stoical patience; we drink our glass when it is filled, and
if it stands empty we try not to complain.

Now I am turning out, so to speak, the very lining of my mind to you.
The anchor cannot be a material one, for there is no security there; it
cannot be purely intellectual, for that is a shifting thing too. The
well of the spirit is emptied, gradually and tenderly; we must find out
what the spring is that can fill it up. Some would say that one's faith
could supply the need, and I agree in so far as I believe that it must
be a species of faith, in a life where our whole being and ending is
such an impenetrable mystery. But it must be a deeper faith even than
the faith of a dogmatic creed; for that is shifting, too, every day,
and the simplest creed holds some admixture of human temperament and
human error.

To me there are but two things that seem to point to hope. The first is
the strongest and deepest of human things, the power of love--not, I
think, the more vehement and selfish forms of love, the desire of youth
for beauty, the consuming love of the mother for the infant--for these
have some physical admixture in them. But the tranquil and purer
manifestations of the spirit, the love of a father for a son, of a
friend for a friend; that love which can light up a face upon the edge
of the dark river, and can smile in the very throes of pain. That seems
to me the only thing which holds out a tender defiance against change
and suffering and death.

And then there is the faith in the vast creative mind that bade us be;
mysterious and strange as are its manifestations, harsh and indifferent
as they sometimes seem, yet at worst they seem to betoken a loving
purpose thwarted by some swift cross-current, like a mighty river
contending with little obstacles. Why the obstacles should be there,
and how th