and they do not guess the presence of the intellectual ideals.  They are at cross-purposes all along the line, regarding each other as they might regard a set of dangerously gesticulating automata, or, if they seek to get at the inner motivation, making the most horrible mistakes.  Often all that the poor man can think of in the rich man is a cowardly greediness for safety, luxury, and effeminacy, and a boundless affectation.  What he is, is not a human being, but a pocket-book, a bank-account.  And a similar greediness, turned by disappointment into envy, is all that many rich men can see in the state of mind of the dissatisfied poor.  And, if the rich man begins to do the sentimental act over the poor man, what senseless blunders does he make, pitying him for just those very duties and those very immunities which, rightly taken, are the condition of his most abiding and characteristic joys!  Each, in short, ignores the fact that happiness and unhappiness and significance are a vital mystery; each pins them absolutely on some ridiculous feature of the external situation; and everybody remains outside of everybody else’s sight.

Society has, with all this, undoubtedly got to pass toward some newer and better equilibrium, and the distribution of wealth has doubtless slowly got to change:  such changes have always happened, and will happen to the end of time.  But if, after all that I have said, any of you expect that they will make any genuine vital difference on a large scale, to the lives of our descendants, you will have missed the significance of my entire lecture.  The solid meaning of life is always the same eternal thing,—­the marriage, namely, of some unhabitual ideal, however special, with some fidelity, courage, and endurance; with some man’s or woman’s pains.—­And, whatever or wherever life may be, there will always be the chance for that marriage to take place.

Fitz-James Stephen wrote many years ago words to this effect more eloquent than any I can speak:  “The ‘Great Eastern,’ or some of her successors,” he said, “will perhaps defy the roll of the Atlantic, and cross the seas without allowing their passengers to feel that they have left the firm land.  The voyage from the cradle to the grave may come to be performed with similar facility.  Progress and science may perhaps enable untold millions to live and die without a care, without a pang, without an anxiety.  They will have a pleasant passage and plenty of brilliant conversation.  They will wonder that men ever believed at all in clanging fights and blazing towns and sinking ships and praying hands; and, when they come to the end of their course, they will go their way, and the place thereof will know them no more.  But it seems unlikely that they will have such a knowledge of the great ocean on which they sail, with its storms and wrecks, its currents and icebergs, its huge waves and mighty winds, as those who battled with it for years together in the little craft, which, if they had few other merits, brought those who navigated them full into the presence of time and eternity, their maker and themselves, and forced them to have some definite view of their relations to them and to each other."[T]