If there were no other light the outlook would still be inspiring.  It is well sometimes to ask ourselves what we were made to be—­not these bodies which are clearly decaying—­but these spirits which seem to grow younger with the passage of time.  I have sometimes thought that the very idea of second childhood is itself a prophecy of the soul’s eternal youth.  Certain it is that we are the masters of the years.  The oldest persons that we know are usually the youngest in their sympathies and ideals.  Sorrow and opposition should not destroy, but only strengthen the spiritual powers.  Intelligence grows from more to more.  The sure reward of love is the capacity and opportunity for larger love.  Virtuous choices gradually become the law of liberty.  These facts are index fingers pointing toward large and loving, strenuous and sympathetic manhood.  And toward such human types, as a matter of fact, the race has been moving.  The expectation of the seers and prophets, also, has been of a golden age in which all souls will have had time, and opportunity, of reaching the far-off but splendid goal.  Believing, as we do, that death is never a finality, but that it is only an incident in progress; that instead of being an end it is only freedom from limitation, we find ourselves often vaguely, but ever eagerly, asking, To what are all these souls tending?  Toward a state glorious beyond language to utter we deeply feel.  But has no clearer voice spoken?  At last we have reached the end of our inquiry.  If any other voices speak they must sound from above.  We stand by the unseen like children by the ocean’s shore.  They know that beyond the storms and waves lie fair and wealthy lands, but the waters separate and their eyes are weak.  So we stand before the future, and ask, Toward what goal are all this education, experience and discipline tending?  Are they perfecting souls which at last are to be laid away with the bodies which were fortunate enough to win an earlier death?  It would be impiety to believe that.  Then indeed should we be put to “permanent intellectual confusion.”  If all the voices of the soul are mockeries, then life is worse than a mistake—­it is a crime.

The solution of the mystery is now before us.  The man that is to be has walked this earth, and wrought with human hands, and lived and labored and loved, and passed into the silent land.  Is Jesus the unique revelation of the divine?  There may be many to question that, but there are few, indeed, who doubt that He embodied all of the perfect humanity which could be expressed within the limitations of the body.  He represented Himself as essential truth and very life.  He condensed duty into such love as He manifested toward men.  He embodied the heroism of meekness, the courage of self-sacrifice, the vision of goodness.  He was an example of all that is strong, serene, sacrificial, in the midst of the lowest and most unresponsive conditions.  So much we see, and the rest we dimly, but surely, feel.