swung at once, with little struggle, into accord with the new onlooking. Death nor life was able to disturb his trust nor part him from his assurance. - The dear and honored presence is withdrawn. We miss henceforth the warm clasp of the hand, the clear, genial glance of the earnest eye, the sunny smile, the cordial tones, the fellowship, the counsel, the helpful suggestions, which these conveyed; we miss the hearty, kindly, gentle, and devoted temper in which he lived among us, which clothed him with the spirit of service, and made his presence a benediction. Shall we not all catch the mantle of his spirit as the prophet ascends? While the impress of his character lingers fresh in our hearts, framed in the setting of his happy and divinely peaceful death, let us hold and fix it there for our spiritual quickening and admonition. For the night cometh. Whether finished or incomplete, we must leave our work at the going down of the sun. Too soon for us the night has come in which the long-worn frame of our friend can work no longer, but has welcome rest. The unbated energy of all these weary years of flickering life, but most brave, persistent effort and endurance, makes the lesson of the night that has fallen one with the deeper impressiveness of the striving and attainment of the day's full hours, of the sweet and hearty loyalty with which he worked the work of Him who appointed to him the day, and has now appointed the night. Night, as we see; but to him the break of the eternal dawn. The lesson of his day and night help us to a faithfulness like his, and brighten for us also the evening shadows! THE GAIN OF HISTORY. WHEREIN consists the gain of history? The question implies a larger one, to which its answer alone will furnish a solution : Does mankind advance? Do the changes of history involve corresponding gains? This question suggests the thoughts to which I will call your attention at this time. The question is vast and vague. It is so vast that I shall be able to touch only two or three leading aspects of it, such as may seem most suited to this occasion. It is vague, because it may appear doubtful where the history of the race begins. Scientific speculation points us back through vistas almost interminable, up through which has pressed the life of which our human life is only the culmination. It would make the history of our life identical with the history of all life upon this globe. I shall not venture upon the tempting fields that are thus thrown open. I shall not ask whether the lowly Ascidian, in whose little sack was contained, as we are told, all the possibilities of earthly life, was or was not better off than we, his remote descendants. The question, whether the dreamless sleep of this lowly life might be considered as in any way preferable to the fully-rounded consciousness of the present, would flow into the larger question, as to whether non-existence is not after all better than existence; for if to sleep is better than to be awake, then not to be is better than to sleep. Neither will I compare civilization with the barbarism from which, as we are told, it sprang. The gulf that separates the two is now so wide that it cannot be easily spanned, even by the help of the imagination. Barbarism contains so much that is foreign to us, so much that is repulsive to us, that we cannot enter into the heart of it. Our thought of it is apt to swing from a sickly romanticism on the one side, to a superficial literalism on the other; and even could we make the comparison fairly it would involve questions larger and more fundamental than I propose to raise to-day. As we avoid complications with scientific theories on the one side, so will we avoid theological complications on the other. I will not take you to the garden of Eden, that we may judge whether the so-called fall of man was really a fall or an elevation. The great mystery of evil we will not attempt to sound. Avoiding then all matters of theory, we will take history as it actually, or, at least, as it openly, begins. We will take it at the moment, at least, when it begins properly to be called history. Such a moment was that when the Chinese, some three thousand centuries before Christ, under the inspiration of their emperor Fo-hi, awoke to the consciousness of the higher life, and found themselves with the rudiments of a science, a philosophy, a literature, and a religion. Such a moment was that in which the ancient Iranians, under the inspiration of Zoroaster, awoke to the consciousness of the great conflict between good and evil; or that in which the ancient Indian raised the songs, sweet and lofty, many of them, which we find embodied in the early Vedas. The true moment for comparison would be, could we reach it, that which our Aryan ancestors occupied at the time of their dispersion. The nature of their civilization we can guess with some approximation to the truth from inherited customs and from the testimony of language. We can, however, get the fullest revelation from the Vedic literature to which I have just referred, the product of the children who stood the nearest to them, and who received from them the fullest inheritance. These ancient Aryans were, as I have said, our ancestors. We can look back and see them, dimly, in their ancient home, that home which we may call ours also. We can catch some faint vision of their civilization, we can hear the distant echoes of their songs. We find them already surrounded with many of the comforts, many of the luxuries of civilization, and not wholly free, though more free than ourselves, from the vices of civilization. The family was there, with its sanctity and its mutual helpfulness. In them the race had begun its life of thought, of faith, of aspiration, its life of questioning and struggle, its moral and its aesthetic life. They were our fathers. We look back upon them over these four thousand years, if we may use so definite a number where all is so vague and uncertain. The space that separates us includes all that we know as to the history of the family of nations to which we belong. It includes the wanderings of our race, their battlings, their triumphs. It includes the beauty of Greece, the stateliness of Rome, the philosophy of Germany, the practicality of England, the liberty of America. It includes the hoary traditions of what we call the old, the science of what we call the new. It is worth while, as we look back to where our fathers stood at the very beginning of this mighty process, to ask ourselves whether, or wherein, we are better or better off than they. In entering upon the discussion before us, it may be well to ask what interest we have in its decision. On which side would the natural faith that all is for the best range itself. We are naturally optimistic, and I think that we are apt to assume that faith in the progress of the race is demanded by any form of optimism. We ask, Can all the experience and struggles of these long ages have been in vain? This faith in the steady advancement of the world is specially strong in the period of youth. So long as the individual is gaining every day in strength and knowledge and mastery of himself and of the world, so long does he feel that humanity is also making constant gains. Perhaps the first feelings that, after all, this may not be so, that the race may be, if not absolutely degenerating, at least stationary, marks the moment when the first impulse of youth has spent itself, when the man has reached the highest point in his ascent, and pauses before taking the downward path. In many cases, however, this faith maintains itself during the whole life; and this is especially the case in the youth of a nation. The nation's advance is felt to typify the movement of the world. The individual catches the spirit of his people and feels possessed of a perpetual youth. The converse of this may be seen in the fact that when the Roman empire seemed sinking into decay, falling through the rottenness of its own corruption, the belief became wide-spread that the world itself was hastening to its end. In the midst of the active, triumphant life of to-day, anything that casts a doubt over the faith that universal progress is the manifest destiny of man seems to build a wall about the horizon which stifles us by its closeness. Whatever truth there may be in this faith, perhaps it assumes too much. The faith of optimism may be presented in another form. If the world is the best possible, should it not be at every stage the best possible? Would not our faith be better satisfied with the belief in a system of compensations, by virtue of which no one age can boast itself over another. I think that we are apt to assume too hastily that the earlier exists for the sake of the later. We are apt to think of childhood and youth as existing for the sake of maturity: might we not as easily look upon maturity as existing for the sake of childhood and youth? Because we like fruit we look upon the flowers of the peach and pear as existing for its sake; but because we like roses and lilies we take it for granted that the seed vessels exist that flowers may be produced. Whatever interests us we take to be the final cause. So we men in our philosophies look upon childhood and youth as merely transitional stages. But why might not a less interested observer look upon children as we do upon the flowers of the woods or the garden? So we look upon the earlier civilization as merely a preparation for the later. Spinoza had a great thought in his mind when he denied the principle of final causes. Every moment and every thing he felt had its end in itself. He could conceive of nothing as existing for the sake of something else. The thought seemed to him to degrade the world. We may not, perhaps, accept this position in its completeness, but I think we may at least affirm that nothing exists merely for something else; that however much each may contribute to that which comes after, each has sufficient excuse for being in itself. This view applied to history would introduce a great repose into the scenes which are pictured there. We should feel that history did not exist merely for its consummation. You hurry through a novel to find that John and Susan were married at the end. But the interest, You read as When you the substance of the story, does not consist in this. much in the marriage column of every newspaper. have reached that the story is finished. The child in the theatre is hurried on in breathless eagerness to the last act of the tragedy which seems to him to cap the climax to the whole. But this is the moment when the old play-goer is apt to leave. The play for him is already over. The histories of philosophy give us in few words the result of this system and of that; the young student studies it, and fancies that he has got the gist of all. As he grows older he learns that the value of each system consists less |