we
can make our ideal of action--is one which cannot rightly be conceived
otherwise than in its essence a victory over evil, and that it may be
evil, it must come and be done in the dark. For the spirit in
progressing deposits what, being abandoned by it, corrupts into venomous
evil, but except in meeting and combating that, it cannot progress. And
it can only combat it by getting to know it, for in darkness and
ignorance it can make no secure advance.

It has been profoundly said that to know all is to forgive all. Let us
rather say that in coming to know its own past, the Spirit which is in
Man can without undoing it--that it cannot--make it contributory to its
own wealth of being, can, as I have said, utilize it for its own
purposes, which are summed up in the knowing of itself. There is and can
be nothing in its deeds which it cannot know, and so digest and
assimilate and absorb into its own substance.

In this interpretation of the meaning--the veiled but not hidden meaning
of what has taken place and is taking place in the world--or rather in
us and enacted by us, I seem to myself not to be expressing any private
imagination or supposition which may or may not be so, but a certainty
that it must be so. Either it is so or 'the pillared firmament is
rottenness and earth's base built on stubble'. And this means that
everywhere and always, but most specially and centrally and potently in
man's spirit, there is Progress, in spite of checks and hindrances which
come from within it, a constant if chequered advance in true worth or
value. And that knowledge I build on grounded and reasoned hope that it
will and must continue--how, I do not know, but can only surmise and
conjecture and imagine.

To the question, What, then, ought we to do? I can only reply first and
foremost, Labour to retain this truth, fostering and developing it,
verifying it as we have been doing in all the varied departments of
human experience, exercising our imaginations while at the same time
sobering and controlling them by the light that comes from it. If we are
true to it and do not through slackness forget and lose it, we shall
find arising spontaneously out of the depths of our self worthy and
feasible ideals of action, the pursuit of which will not betray us or
leave us without an ever-growing assurance that in bending and directing
all our powers to their realization we are the agents of that Progress
which is the source of all being and