[T] Essays by a Barrister, London, 1862, p. 318.

In this solid and tridimensional sense, so to call it, those philosophers are right who contend that the world is a standing thing, with no progress, no real history.  The changing conditions of history touch only the surface of the show.  The altered equilibriums and redistributions only diversify our opportunities and open chances to us for new ideals.  But, with each new ideal that comes into life, the chance for a life based on some old ideal will vanish; and he would needs be a presumptuous calculator who should with confidence say that the total sum of significances is positively and absolutely greater at any one epoch than at any other of the world.

I am speaking broadly, I know, and omitting to consider certain qualifications in which I myself believe.  But one can only make one point in one lecture, and I shall be well content if I have brought my point home to you this evening in even a slight degree. There are compensations:  and no outward changes of condition in life can keep the nightingale of its eternal meaning from singing in all sorts of different men’s hearts.  That is the main fact to remember.  If we could not only admit it with our lips, but really and truly believe it, how our convulsive insistencies, how our antipathies and dreads of each other, would soften down!  If the poor and the rich could look at each other in this way, sub specie aeternatis, how gentle would grow their disputes! what tolerance and good humor, what willingness to live and let live, would come into the world!

THE END.