The
reformer meets with fewer rebuffs; the philanthropist does not despair
as he did. The light is dawning. The great teachers of knowledge
multiply, bear their burdens more and more steadily; the traditions
of truth and knowledge are becoming established in the intellectual
world. It is so; and those of us who have caught a vision of the
better times coming through reason, through knowledge, through manly
and womanly endeavor, have caught a sight of a Christendom passing
away, of a religion of sorrow declining, of a gospel preached for the
poor no longer useful to a world that is mastering its own problems of
poverty and lifting itself out of disabling misery into wealth without
angelic assistance. This is our consolation; and while we admit,
clearly and frankly, the real power of the popular faith, we also see
the pillars on which a new faith rests, which shall be a faith, not
of sorrow, but of joy." Now, the deepest sorrow of the race is not
physical, neither is it bound up with material and social conditions.
As the Scotch say, "The king sighs as often as the peasant"; and this
proverb anticipates the fact that those who participate in the richest
civilization that will ever flower will sigh as men sigh now.
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