“We are here to-day,” he went on, musingly.  “To-morrow we are called dead.  The next day men are here who never heard our names.  The most famous will be forgotten even while Sydney Harbour seems unchanged.  And Sydney Harbour is changing and passing, and the continent is changing and passing, and the world is changing and passing, and the whole universe is changing and passing.

“It is all change, universal change.  Our religions, our civilisations, our ideas, our laws, change as do the nebulae and the shifting continents we build on.  Yet through all changes a thread of continuity runs.  It is all changing and no ending.  Always Law and always, so far as we can see, what we call progression.  A man is a fool who cares for his life.  He is the true madman who wastes his years in vain and selfish ambition.

“Listen, Ned,” he pursued, turning round.  “There, ages ago, millions and millions of years ago, in the warm waters yonder, what we call Life on this earth began.  Minute specks of Life appeared, born of the sunshine and the waters some say, coming in the fitness of Time from the All-Life others.  And those specks of Life have changed and passed, and come and gone, unending, reproducing after their kind in modes and ways that changed and passed and still are as all things change and pass and are.  And from them you and I and all the forms of Life that breathe to-day have ascended.  We struggled up, obedient to the Law around us and we still struggle.  That is the Past, or part of it.  What is the Future, as yet no man knows.  We do more than know—­we feel and dream, and struggle on to our dreaming.  And Life itself to the dreamer is as nothing only the struggling on.

“And this has raised us, Ned, this has made us men and opened to us the Future, that we learned slowly and sadly to care for each other.  From the mother instinct in us all good comes.  This is the highest good as yet, that all men should live their life and lay down their life when need is for their fellows.  With all our blindness we can see that.  With all our weakness we can strive to reach nearer that ideal.  It is but Just that we should live so for others since happiness is only possible where others live so for us.”

He turned again and gazed intently across the sail-dotted harbour.

“There is one thing I would like to say.”  He spoke without turning.  “Man without Woman is not complete.  They two are but one being, complete and life-giving.  Love when it comes is the keystone of this brief span of Life of ours.  They who have loved have tasted truly of the best that Life can give to them.  And this is the great wrong of civilisation to-day, that it takes Love from most and leaves in us only a feverish, degrading Lust.  It is when we lust that Woman drags us down to the level of that Lust and blackens our souls with the blackness of hell.  When we love Woman raises us to the level of Love and girds on us the armour that wards our own weakness from us.