Happy, indeed, our age, in that the heart is now beginning to color our civilization.  Vast, indeed, the influence of library and lecture-hall, of gallery and store and market-place, but the most significant fact of our day is that sympathy is baptizing our industries and institutions with new effort.  Intellect has lent the modern youth instruments many and powerful.  Inventive thought has lent fire to man’s forge, tools for his hands, books for his reading, has lent arts, sciences, institutions.  The modern youth stands forth in the aspect of the Roman conqueror to whom the citizens went forth to bestow gifts, one taking his chariot, one leading a steed, the children scattering flowers in the way, young men and maidens taking the hero’s name upon their lips.  Unfortunately multitudes have declined those high gifts, turning away from the open door of the schoolhouse and college; many young feet have crossed the threshold of the saloon.  Having entered our museum or art-gallery, multitudes enter places of evil resort.

Despising the opportunity offered by music or eloquence, by book or newspaper, by trade and profession, many choose sloth and self-indulgence.  These needy millions, blinded with sin and ignorance, stand forth as a great opportunity for loving hearts.  Sympathy is making beautiful the pathway of knowledge, that young hearts may be allured along the shining way.  By a thousand arts and devices young people of refinement and culture are founding centers of light among the poor.  The opportunity that William the Silent found in the starving millions of Holland; that Garrison found in the miserable slaves of the South; that Livingstone found in Africa, the modern hero is finding in the tenement-house district.  Through sympathy a new hope is entering into all classes of society.

The heart is also coloring industry.  This year it is said that more than a score of great industrial institutions in our country have, to the factory, added gymnasium, recreation-hall, schoolroom, library, free musicals and lectures.  The intellect has failed to solve the social problems by giving allopathic doses from Poor Richard’s Almanac.  Impotent also those dreamers who have insisted that society must have socialism—­either God’s or the devil’s.  Impotent those who, during the past week, have proposed to cure economic ills by spitting the heads of tyrants upon bayonets.  But what force and law cannot do is slowly being done by sympathy and good-will.  The heart is taking the rigor out of toil, the drudgery out of service, the cruelty out of laws, harshness out of theology, injustice out of politics.  Love has done much.  The social gains of the future are to be to the gradual progress of sympathy and love.