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.
[Footnote 239: Twenty millions of years is of course a mere symbol, _x_
or _y_.]
INDEX.
A
ACADEMIES, Italian, the flourishing time
Notka biograficzna
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John Addington Symonds (October 5, 1840 - April 19, 1893) was an English poet and literary critic. He was an early advocate of the validity of male love which included for him pederastic as well as egalitarian relationships, and which he would refer to as lamour de limpossible.