The soul is monarch of three kingdoms.  Man lives at once in the present, the past and the future.  Memory presides over yesterday; to-day is ruled by reason; to-morrow is under the sway of hope.  The ancient seer who stood by the historic vine reflecting how the rain of yesterday had disappeared to give its sweet liquors to the roots only to reappear to-morrow in purple clusters, gave us a beautiful image of himself.  Each human life is like unto a vine—­its trunk manifest in the present; its roots deeply buried in the past; its branches throwing themselves forward, ripening fruit for days to come.  Life is a solid column of days all compacted together.  To-day’s usefulness is in the number of wise, happy and helpful yesterdays, whose accumulated treasures crowd forward the soul’s present activities.  But for his yesterdays stored up in memory man would be impotent for any heroic thought or deed.  He would remain a perpetual infant.  As the child journeys away from the cradle memory gathers up and carries forward faces, words, books, arts, sciences, literatures, and these recollections are embalmed and transmitted as soul-capital, legacies unspeakably precious.

Yesterday, therefore, is no mausoleum of dead deeds; no storehouse of mummies.  Memory is a granary holding seed for to-morrow’s sowing; memory is an armory holding weapons for to-morrow’s battles, memory is a medicine-chest with balms for to-morrow’s hurts; memory is a library with wisdom for to-morrow’s emergency.  Yesterday holds the full store of to-day’s civilization, contains our tools, conveniences, knowledges; contains our battlefields and victories; above all gives us Bethlehem and Calvary.  But alone man’s yesterday is impotent; his to-morrow insufficient.  The true man binds all his days together with an earnest, intense, passionate purpose.  His yesterdays, to-days and to-morrows march together, one solid column, animated by one thought, constrained by one conspiracy of desire, energizing toward one holy and helpful purpose, to serve man and love God.

God governs man through the regency of hope.  The reasons thereof are self-evident.  Man is born a long way from home.  No cradle rocks a full-orbed manhood.  The babe begins a mere handful of germs; a bough of unblossomed buds.  It is a weary climb from nothing to manhood, at its best.  As things rise in the scale of being the distance between birth and maturity widens.  Mollusks are born close up to their full estate, sandflies mature in two days, butterflies in two weeks, humming-birds in as many months.  But let no man think the vast all-shadowing redwood trees of California grew in a mushroomic night.  When the seed first thrust its rootlets down into the soil and its plumule up to the sunshine it entered upon a long career.  Saved by hope after 800 years of growth it gives shade to myriads of birds; beams for lath and loom and ship in the service of industry; lends pen and pencil to poet and artist in the service of beauty; through desk and pew enters into man’s intellectual and moral life; through instruments of convenience strengthens the sweet amenities of the home; working, it also waited and is saved by hope.