But my time, if not your patience, fails me:  so I leave it as a hint for future thought, and will in conclusion utter a few words of courage and hope for mankind, which each event of to-day seems to strengthen and enlarge.  Yes, it is no longer fitting, that for the future we should have few hopers and many fearers.  Nay, rather let us all join hands to-day, and form a great Electric Cable of Hope, that shall stretch from sea to sea, from shore to shore.

For it is certain, then, that the planet upon which God has placed us, is absolutely well fitted for the development of the human race.  The more Science investigates, the more wonderful seems the adaptation of Human Nature to the world in which it is placed.  The more refined a man becomes, the more delicate his insight into Nature, the more satisfied, the more overjoyed is he with her exhaustless charms.  It is only our sin, our folly, our ignorance, which perpetually befools us, and robs us of our inheritance.

When the great coming race, prophesied of so long, shall at last inhabit the earth, they shall see no more glorious stars, no bluer atmosphere, than we do to-day; the moon shall pour forth no more silver from her bounteous horn; the sun shall lavish his golden rays no more freely, than he does to-day.  But yet the whole world shall be unimaginably brighter and more beautiful to that crowning race.  And why?  Because their natures shall be in tune with the outward universe; their eyes and ears, and all their senses, shall be unimaginably more acute than ours; their bodies shall be perpetual sources of joy to them, and their souls shall be awake to knowledge, truth and love.

If our eyes were endowed with magnifying powers equal to that of some colossal telescope, how would the dome of heaven expand into inconceivable dimensions, the stars would be seen to be scattered along the sky like the sands upon the sea-shore.  Each bright particular star would be magnified a thousand times, seeming vastly larger, and yet vastly more distant.  The whole concave of heaven then would appear a thousand times larger than it does to our eyes, that is, it would appear a thousand times over more like its real size, though even then, eyes thus grandly gifted would fall immeasurably short of the reality of the universe which lies in the bosom of God!  Now that great race of the future shall have their nature so in tune with things, and their spiritual conceptions so enlarged, that the great world shall be realized in its vastness, so much more vividly than we can conceive of it, that it shall be as if their material eye were exalted to the power of Lord Rosse’s telescope.