s a soul
worthy of a speedier ascent, a more productive ministry in the next
sphere. Blessed are they who ever keep that portion of pure, generous
love with which they began life! How blessed those who have deepened
the fountains, and have enough to spare for the thirst of others! Some
such there are; and, feeling that, with all the excuses for failure,
still only the sight of those who triumph, gives a meaning to life or
makes its pangs endurable, we must arise and follow.

Eighteen hundred years of this Christian culture in these European
kingdoms, a great theme never lost sight of, a mighty idea, an
adorable history to which the hearts of men invariably cling, yet are
genuine results rare as grains of gold in the river's sandy bed! Where
is the genuine democracy to which the rights of all men are holy?
where the child-like wisdom learning all through life more and more
of the will of God? where the aversion to falsehood, in all its myriad
disguises of cant, vanity, covetousness, so clear to be read in all
the history of Jesus of Nazareth? Modern Europe is the sequel to that
history, and see this hollow England, with its monstrous wealth and
cruel poverty, its conventional life, and low, practical aims! see
this poor France, so full of talent, so adroit, yet so shallow and
glossy still, which could not escape from a false position with all
its baptism of blood! see that lost Poland, and this Italy bound down
by treacherous hands in all the force of genius! see Russia with its
brutal Czar and innumerable slaves! see Austria and its royalty that
represents nothing, and its people, who, as people, are and have
nothing! If we consider the amount of truth that has really been
spoken out in the world, and the love that has beat in private
hearts,--how genius has decked each spring-time with such splendid
flowers, conveying each one enough of instruction in its life of
harmonious energy, and how continually, unquenchably, the spark of
faith has striven to burst into flame and light up the universe,--the
public failure seems amazing, seems monstrous.

Still Europe toils and struggles with her idea, and, at this moment,
all things bode and declare a new outbreak of the fire, to destroy old
palaces of crime! May it fertilize also many vineyards! Here at this
moment a successor of St. Peter, after the lapse of near two thousand
years, is called "Utopian" by a part of this Europe, because he
strives to get some food to the mout