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Let the newborn enthusiast, just come eagerly to the flag, be warned of hours of depression that seize even the most earnest, the boldest and the strongest.  Our work is the work of men, subject to such vicissitudes as hover around all human enterprise; and every man enrolled must face hard struggles and dark hours.  Then the depression rushes down like a horrible, cold, dark mist that obscures every beautiful thing and every ray of hope.  It may come from many causes:  perhaps, a body not too robust, worn down by a tireless mind; perhaps, the memory of long years of effort, seemingly swallowed in oblivion and futility; perhaps contact with men on your own side whose presence there is a puzzle, who have no character and no conception of the grandeur of the Cause, and whose mean, petty, underhand jealousies numb you—­you who think anyone claiming so fine a flag as ours should be naturally brave, straightforward and generous; perhaps the seemingly overwhelming strength of the enemy, and the listlessness of thousands who would hail freedom with rapture, but who now stand aloof in despair—­and along with all this and intensifying it, the voice of our self-complacent practical friend, who has but sarcasm for a high impulse, and for an immutable principle the latest expedient of the hour.  Through such an experience must the soldier of freedom live.  But as surely as such an hour comes, there comes also a star to break the darkened sky; let those who feel the battle-weariness at times remember.  When in places there may be but one or two to fight, it may seem of no avail; still let them be true and their numbers will be multiplied:  love of truth is infectious.  When progress is arrested, don’t brood on what is, but on what was once achieved, what has since survived, and what we may yet achieve.  If some have grown lax and temporise a little, with more firmness on your part mingle a little sympathy for them.  It is harder to live a consistent life than die a brave death.  Most men of generous instincts would rouse all their courage to a supreme moment and die for the Cause; but to rise to that supreme moment frequently and without warning is the burden of life for the Cause; and it is because of its exhausting strain and exacting demands that so many men have failed.  We must get men to realise that to live is as daring as to die.  But confusion has been made in our time by the glib phrase:  “You are not asked now to die for Ireland, but to live for her,” without insisting that the life shall aim at the ideal, the brave and the true.  To slip apologetically through existence is not life.  If such a mean philosophy went abroad, we would soon find the land a place of shivering creatures, without the capacity to live or the courage to die—­calamity, surely.  All these circumstances make for the hour of depression; and it may well be in such an hour, amid apathy and treachery, cold friends and active enemies, with worn-down frame and baffled mind, you, pleading for the Old Cause, may feel your voice is indeed a voice crying in the wilderness; and it may serve till the blood warms again and the imagination recover its glow, to think how a Voice, that cried in the wilderness thousands of years ago, is potent and inspiring now, where the voice of the “practical” man sends no whisper across the waste of years.