see his would have been boundless treasure at home instead of poverty, starvation and death.  These and similar legends stand for the opportunities that have gone forever.  How many neglected their opportunities for education; how they knocked unbidden at every door and no man opened.  Others were denied culture, and now feel they are unfulfilled prophecies.  Many by one error have injured eye or ear or lung or limb or nervous system.  They grievously handicapped themselves.  Others by ingratitude, infidelity to trusts, treachery to friends, have poisoned happiness.  Repentance is theirs, and also forgiveness, but not forgetfulness.  The past is full of bitterness.

Let the dead past bury its dead.  The future is still ours.  The trees in October willingly let go their leaves to fall into the ditch.  Their life is not in last year’s leaves, but in the infant buds that crowd the old leaves off.  Put forth new activities.  Open new furrows.  Sow new seed.  All the tomorrows are thine; but they are few and short.  Fulfill his dictum who said:  “I am as one going once across this vast continent; I would lean forth and sow as far as hand can scatter my seed.  Let the angels count the bundles.”  No man should be discouraged in whom God believes, preserving him in life.  Let hope in God sweeten life’s bitterness.

Another enemy of hopefulness is found in nervous excesses and overwork.  Men drain away their vitality.  Ambitions unduly stimulate the brain.  Many break the laws of sleep and the laws of digestion and the laws of nerve sobriety.  They spend their brain capital.  Then they grow hopeless toward home and business.  Ill-health spreads a gloom over all life.  Every judgment is pessimistic; it could not be otherwise.  The jaundiced eye yellows the landscape.  The sweetest music rasps like a file upon the nervous ear.  Thomas Carlyle’s pessimism was largely physical.  He overworked upon his life of Oliver Cromwell.  Maurice once said:  “Carlyle believed in God down to the time of Oliver Cromwell.”  Once, in a moment of depression, Lyman Beecher prayed:  “Lord, keep us from despising our rulers, and help them to stop acting so we cannot help despising them.”  Poor, nerve-racked Pascal, grew fearful lest his affection for his sister, who had nursed him through a long illness, was sinful.  One day he wrote in his journal:  “Lord, forgive me for loving my dear sister so much!” Afterward he drew his pen through the word “dear.”  Hope and trust toward God go with health.  Sickliness is not saintliness.  God cannot save by hope what man destroys by ill-health.

Dean Stanley used hopefulness as a test of all systems of truth.  Rightly so.  God is the God of hope, and his truth, like himself, carries the atmosphere of good cheer.  The falsity of medievalism appears in this—­it robbed men of joy and gladness.  God was the center of darkness.  His throne was iron.  His heart was marble.  His laws were huge implements of destruction.  His penalties were red-hot cannon balls crashing along the sinner’s pathway.  Repentance toward God was moving toward the arctics and away from the tropics.  Christianity was anything but “peace on earth, good will to men.”