There is no finality in human history.  It is folly to believe that any religions, any social orders, any scientific hypotheses, are more than provisional, and partially possessed of truth.  Let us assume that the whole curve of human existence on this planet describes a parabola of some twenty millions of years in duration.[239] Of this we have already exhausted unreckoned centuries in the evolution of pre-historic man, and perhaps five thousand years in the ages of historic records.  How much of time remains in front?  Through that past period of five thousand years preserved for purblind retrospect in records, what changes of opinion, what peripeties of empire, may we not observe and ponder!  How many theologies, cosmological conceptions, polities, moralities, dominions, ways of living and of looking upon life, have followed one upon another!  The space itself is brief; compared with the incalculable longevity of the globe, it is but a bare ‘scape in oblivion.’  And, however ephemeral the persistence of humanity may be in this its earthly dwelling-place, the conscious past sinks into insignificance before those aeons of the conscious future, those on-coming and out-rolling waves of further evolution which bear posterity forward.  Has any solid gain of man been lost on the stream of time to us-ward?  We doubt that.  Has anything final and conclusive been arrived at?  We doubt that also.  The river broadens, as it bears us on.  But the rills from which it gathered, and the ocean whereto it tends, are now, as ever in the past, inscrutable.  It is therefore futile to suppose, at this short stage upon our journey, while the infant founts of knowledge are still murmuring to our ears, that any form of faith or science has been attained as permanent; that any Pillars of Hercules have been set up against the Atlantic Ocean of experience and exploration.  Think of that curve of possibly twenty million years, and of the five thousand years remembered by humanity!  How much, how incalculably much longer is the space to be traversed than that which we have left behind!  It seems, therefore, our truest, as it is our humblest, wisdom to live by faith and love.  ’And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.’  Love is the greatest; and against love man has sinned most in the short but blood-bedabbled annals of his past.  Hope is the virtue from which a faithful human being can best afford to abstain, unless hope wait as patient handmaid upon faith.  Faith is the steadying and sustaining force, holding fast by which each one of us dares defy change, and gaze with eyes of curious contemplation on the tide which brought us, and is carrying, and will bear us where we see not.  ’I know not how I came of you and I know not where I go with you; but I know I came well and I shall go well.’  Man can do no better than live in Eternity’s Sunrise, as Blake put it.  To live in the eternal sunrise of God’s presence, ever rising, not yet risen, which will never reach its meridian on this globe, seems to be the destiny, as it should also be the blessing, of mankind.