are realities opening before the growing soul like continents before explorers.  They always invite entrance and possession.  They have horizons full of splendor and beauty and music.  They alone can satisfy.  But the soul has not yet fully escaped from the mists and fogs and glooms of the earth.  It is surrounded by those who still wallow in animalism, and the sounds of the lower world are yet echoing in its ears.  But at last its face is toward the light; the far call of its destiny has been heard; it knows itself to be in a moral order; it is assured that, however closely the body may be imprisoned, no bolts and no bars can shut in a spirit; that before it is a fair and favored land, far off but ever open; and, best of all, that within its own being, impervious to all influences from without, is a guide which may be implicitly trusted and which will never betray.  Why not follow its suggestions at once and press on toward that fair land of truth and beauty which so earnestly invites?  Ah! why not?  Here we are face to face with other facts.  There are hindrances, many and serious, in the pathway of the soul, and they must be met and forced before that land can be entered.  This is the time for us to consider them.

HINDRANCES

And many, many are the souls
Life’s movement fascinates, controls;
It draws them on, they cannot save
Their feet from its alluring wave;
They cannot leave it, they must go
With its unconquerable flow;

* * * * *

They faint, they stagger to and fro,
And wandering from the stream they go;
In pain, in terror, in distress,
They see all round a wilderness.

—­Epilogue to Lessing’s “Laocoon". Matthew Arnold

IV

HINDRANCES

When the soul has heard the far call of its destiny and realizes that it may respond to that call, and that it has, in conscience, a guide which will not fail even in the deepest darkness, it turns in the direction from which the appeal comes and begins to move toward its goal.  Almost simultaneously it realizes that it has to meet and to overcome numerous and serious obstacles.  To the hindrances in the way of the spirit our thought is to be turned in this chapter.

The moral failure of many men and women of superb intellectual and physical equipment is one of the sad and serious marvels of human history.  What a pathetic and significant roll might be made of those who have been great intellectually and pitiful failures morally!  It has often been affirmed that Hannibal might have conquered Rome, and been the master of the world except for the fatal winter at Capua.  Antony, possibly, would have been victor at Actium if it had not been for something in himself that made him susceptible to the fascination of the fair but treacherous Egyptian queen.  Achilles was a symbolical as well as an historical character.  There was one place—­with him in the heel—­where he was vulnerable, and through that he fell.  Socrates was like a tornado when inflamed by anger.  Napoleon laid Europe waste and desolated more distant lands, but he was an enormous egotist and morally a blot on civilization.