A single clause in the Apocalypse has long seemed to me as fine a statement of the condition which will prevail, when this prophecy is a reality, as could be phrased,—­“The Lamb is the light thereof.”  Light is the medium in which objects are visible, and the Lamb is the symbol of sacrificial love.  The great dreamer, in his vision, beheld a time when spirits would see in sacrificial love as now we see physical objects in the medium of light.  To those who have studied the expansion of individual souls, and who then have contrasted the selfishness of earlier social conditions with the love of men as it is revealed in the laws, institutions, ministries of to-day, this dream of the Apostle rises in the distance as a new continent to a voyager over the wide and desolate ocean.

Equally prophetic is the advance which has been made from the passion of savage barbarism, or infantile wilfulness, to the moral reason of the present day as seen in the highest types of humanity in civilized lands.  Wilfulness characterizes the childish nature and passion the savage nature.  But with the growth of the soul choices are differentiated from impulses, and more and more regularly are inspired by intelligence and unselfish affection.  This progress toward intelligent and unselfish choice distinguishes the movement toward civilization.  Here, again, the advance made by the individual soul and by the race are equally prophetic.  With the years the choices become more rational and loving.  Time mellows all men somewhat, and forces a little wisdom into the hardest heads.  Even slight growth prophesies that which shall be swifter when conditions are more favorable.

The soul is a prediction of clearer vision, truer thought, more unselfish love and wiser choices.  It is a prophecy of the perfect man.

History is also prophetic of larger souls.  The stream of human history, after it has been followed backward a few thousand years, leads into the region of legend and myth—­that is, to a time when history could not be written because there was no writing, and when all truth was conveyed in symbolical forms.  That means toward a time of narrow experience, and of knowledge far more limited than the present.  Memory, in those days, was enormously and abnormally capacious and retentive, but there was no appreciation of humanity.  Few lessons from the experiences of others were possible, because the mind was filled with merely tribal legends.  What was called early civilization was only relatively splendid.  There was unsurpassed poetry but no science, ample brawn but diminutive brain, much passion but little love.  Out of the darkness of the past the stream of history, very narrow and shallow at first, has emerged and steadily expanded and deepened.  Men are now equally intense but far clearer in vision, nobler in purpose, and purer in character.  Their laws year by year have become more humane, their sympathies less contracted, their institutions more civilized.  Nature’s