, it is like some hapless wild thing caught by
rising floods on a height of land which they must soon submerge, and
running incessantly hither and thither as the water more narrowly hems
it in.

Undoubtedly the mutability of age in its ideals has been increased of
late by the restriction of human hope to the years which remain, few and
brief to the longest earthly life, by the sciences which provisionally
darken counsel. When these shall have penetrated to a point where they
can discern the light, they will "pour the day" on the dim orbs of age
and illumine the future with new hope. Then doubting age can enter into
the rest now forbidden it and take its repose between illimitable
horizons in the long, long thoughts of eternal youth. We speak here in
behalf of the sceptic, the agnostic few. For the many who have not lost
their hope because they have never lost their faith, doubtless all the
trouble of change which disquiets our friend will seem something
temperamental merely, and not something essential or inseparable from
human nature. Their thoughts have remained long, their ideals steadfast,
because they have not lost the most precious jewel of their youth--the
star of trust and hope which

"Flames in the forehead of the morning sky."

These are the most enviable of their kind, and there are signs that
their turn may be coming once more in the primacy to which their numbers
have always entitled them. Only the other day we were reading a paper by
a man of that science which deals with life on strictly physical lines,
and drawing from it an immense consolation because it reaffirmed that
the soul has not only its old excuse for being in the unthinkability of
an automatic universe and the necessity of an intentional first cause,
but with Evolution, in the regard of some scientists, tottering on its
throne, and Natural Selection entering the twilight into which the elder
pagan deities have vanished, is newly warranted in claiming existence as
that indestructible life-property or organizing power which
characterizes kind through kind from everlasting to everlasting. In this
consolation we seemed well on our way back to the encounter of a human
spirit such as used to be rapt to heaven or cast into hell for very
disproportionate merits or demerits; but we were supported for the
meeting by the probability that in the fortunate event the spirit would
be found issuing from all the clouds of superstition, and when it was
re