anything around which memory could cling. Well!
well! it is so everywhere. All over the world,
change, improvement, progress are the words.
The venerable minister, for his locks were grey, and
time had ploughed deep furrows down his cheeks, and
draws palpable lines across his brow, was, as my memory
paints him, the personification of earnestness, sincerity
and truth. The text and the drift of the sermon
I have forgotten, save the little fragment that fixed
itself in my memory by the singularity of the figure
by which he illustrated his meaning. He was speaking
of the operation of the Holy Spirit upon the human
heart, and how gently it won men from their sinful
ways. He said, ’It was not boisterous, like
the rush of the tempest; it was not fierce, like the
lightning; it was not loud, like the thunder; but
it was a still sma’ voice, like a wee cricket
in the wa’s.’ I regard the cricket
that chirruped in the wall as an institution.
One of the past to be sure, swept away by the current
of progress, whose course is onward always; over everything,
obliterating everything, hurling the things of today
into history, or burying them in eternal oblivion.
In this country there is nothing fixed, nothing stationary,
and never has been since the first white man swung
his axe against the outside forest tree; since the
first green field was opened up to the sunlight from
the deep shadows of the old forests that had stood
there, grand, solemn, and boundless since this world
was first thrown from the hand of God. There will
be nothing fixed for centuries to come. The tide
of progress will sweep onward in the future as it
has done in the past. Onward is the great watchword
of America, and American institutions; onward and onward,
over the ancient forests; onward, over the log-houses
that stood in the van of civilization; over the great
fire-places; over the cricket in the wall; over the
old house dog that slept in the corner; over the loved
faces that clustered around the blazing hearth in the
days of our childhood; over everything primitive,
everything, my friends, that you and I loved, when
we were little children, and that comes drifting along
down on the current of memory—bright visions
of the returnless past. Ah, well! it is best
that it should be so. It is best that the world
should move on; that there should be no pause, no halting
in the onward march. What are we that the earth
should stand still at our bidding, or pause to contemplate
our tears? Dust to dust is the great law, but
so long as a phoenix rises from the ashes of decay,
what right have we to murmur? Time may desolate
and destroy, but man can build up and beautify.
True, his works perish as he perishes, but new works
and new men are rising forever to fill, and more than
fill, the vacancies and desolations of the past.
Go ahead then, world! Sweep along, Progress!
Mow away, Time! Tear down temple and stronghold;
sweep away the marble palace and log-house! sweep away
infancy and youth, manhood and old age; wipe out old