erse necessarily or
fatally evolving--or, as we have said, progressing--does it not, while
still evoking the old awe or reverence, do anything but still daunt and
dishearten us? What is our part, we ask, our very own part within all
this? What can we within it do? And the answer, that it is ours, if we
will, to enter into and live in the contemplation of all this no longer
appeals to us. In such a progressive universe we can no longer feel
ourselves 'at home'. In it our active nature would seem to exist only to
be disappointed and rebuffed.

The only progress which we can care for is the progress which we
ourselves bring about, or can believe that we bring about, in ourselves
or our fellows or in the world immediately around us. So long as what is
so named is something devised and executed by a power not our own--not
the same as our own--it may call out from us gratitude and reverence,
but the spectacle of the reality of such Progress cannot exercise the
attractive force nor, so far as it is realized, beget that creative joy
which accompanies even humble acts in which we set an ideal of our own
before ourselves, and see it through our efforts emerge into actual
existence. A practical ideal must be through and through of our own
making. It must be devised by us and set to ourselves for our pursuit,
and its coming to be, or be real, must be our doing. The very idea of it
must be our own, not given or prescribed, still less imposed, and the
process towards it must be our doing too. That there should, on their
view of it, ever be protest and rebellion against its tyrannous demands
appears to me reasonable and right, and those who make it to be guarding
the immediate jewel of man's nature. We should, we might say, if this
were the whole truth about the universe, acknowledge ourselves as its
sons bound to gratitude and obedience because of the fatherly care for
us, but it would be an essential complement to our family loyalty that
we should insist upon and make good our claims to be grown-up sons and
fellow citizens, declining to pronounce it wholly good, if those claims
were denied to us. Now all these conditions seem to make straight
against the possibility of regarding Progress, in the view of it we have
hitherto taken, as an ideal of our action.

In view of this character of the known fact of Progress, so discouraging
and disabling to our active or practical nature, certain suggestions
have been made which are thought to