stand victorious some future day.”  Today incomplete, tomorrow complete; today imperfect, tomorrow perfect; today bound, tomorrow emancipated; today humiliated, tomorrow crowned.  Hence, the future is man’s refuge, hope and strength.  And in a yet more profound sense does the future exert a wonderful power over our lives, in that it holds for us the inheritance undefiled and incorruptible, the patrimony of eternity.  And who can measure the influence of this belief over human character?  Blot it out, and what inspiration have we to struggle on?  If we are to perish as the beast of the field, wither like the grass, and vanish like the transient cloud, man has no grand, sublime impulsion in this life.  But let him believe that he is the child of God, that there is an immortal soul, not only in him, but an eternal sphere awaiting him—­let him believe that here he is but in the bud, that these seventy years are but the seed time, and that infinite eons lie before him for fruition and efflorescence, and you magnify his spirit, enlarge his hope, and inspire him with a zeal to conquer and achieve.

But now there is a popular philosophy that tells us that man can only know two points of time:  that point of time through which he has gone—­the past, and that point of time in which he is now living—­the present.  He may know experience and he may grasp opportunity, but he can know nothing of futurity.  The future is a riddle, an unexplored continent, a terra incognita into which no human eyes have ever pried or ever may pry, sealed as it is by the counsel of God against the curious vision of His children.  And to some extent I think we all must admit that this popular notion holds true.  There are those to whom the future must be a blank, who peer into it and behold nothing there.

I have noticed that no great poem, no great religion, no great creation of any kind, was ever written or conceived by people who lived in the valleys, cramped by the hills.  The hills narrow one’s horizon, make one insular, provincial, limited.  And what is true of literature and art is true also of life.  The man of low ideals never vaticinates; the man who is living down in the lower ranges of existence never prophesies.  The man with a low brow has always a limited perspective; so, also, the man with a low heart or a low conscience.  The sordid man can never measure the consequences of his wealth.  He may know that tomorrow he will be as rich as he is today, or richer, but he can not prognosticate what his riches will mean to him tomorrow—­whether he will find in them more or less felicity, whether they will be a blessing or a burden.  Neither has the base man, the immoral man, any clear vision of futurity.  He lives in doubts and fears, and is begirt with clouds and confusion.  He half fears that there is a law of God, and half doubts it; half believes in retribution, and half doubts it; half believes in moral cause and effect, and half doubts