We cannot too often remind ourselves that the aim of the universe is a personality.  As the terrestrial globe through so many patient aeons climbed toward the production of a human body, that by this all-comprehending, perfect symbol it might enter into final union with Spirit, so do the uses of the world still forever ascend toward man, and seek a continual realization of that ancient wish.  When, therefore, Time shall come to his great audit with Eternity, persons alone will be passed to his credit.  “So many wise and wealthy souls,”—­that is what the sun and his household will have come to.  The use of the world is not found in societies faultlessly mechanized; for societies are themselves but uses and means.  They are the soil in which persons grow; and I no more undervalue them than the husbandman despises his fertile acres because it is not earth, but the wheat that grows from it, which comes to his table.  Society is the culmination of all uses and delights; persons, of all results.  And societies answer their ends when they afford two things:  first, a need for energy of eye and heart, of noble human vigor; and secondly, a generous appreciation of high qualities, when these may appear.  The latter is, indeed, indispensable; and whenever noble manhood ceases to be recognized in a nation, the days of that nation are numbered.  But the need is also necessary.  Society must be a consumer of virtue, if individual souls are to be producers of it.  The law of demand and supply has its applications here also.  New waters must forever flow from the fountain-heads of our true life, if the millwheel of the world is to continue turning; and this not because the supernal powers so greatly cared to get corn ground, but because the Highest would have rivers of His influence forever flowing, and would call them men.  Therefore it is that satirists who paint in high colors the resistances, but have no perception of the law of conversion into opposites, which is the grand trick of Nature,—­these pleasant gentlemen are themselves a part of the folly at which they mock.

As a man among men, so is a nation among nations.  Very freely I acknowledge that any nation, by proposing to itself large and liberal aims, plucks itself innumerable envies and hatreds from without, and confers new power for mischief upon all blindness and savagery that exist within it.  But what does this signify?  Simply that no nation can be free longer than it nobly loves freedom; that none can be great in its national purposes when it has ceased to be so in the hearts of its citizens.  Freedom must be perpetually won, or it must be lost; and this because the sagacious Manager of the world will not let us off from the disciplines that should make us men.  The material of the artist is passive, and may be either awakened from its ancient rest or suffered to sleep on; but that marble from which the perfections of manhood and womanhood are wrought quits the quarry to meet us,