This is not the cringing prayer of the coward, who asks God’s forgiveness to appease his wrath, but the utterance of a noble soul, who asks forgiveness for the shortcomings of his life, and at the same time pardons his Maker for creating him as he did. The world has heard much of man’s duty to God, of the responsibility which the unconsulted, fragile children of a day owe to the power that is responsible for all. It is time we heard more of the duty of God to man; the responsibility of the Creator for making “conscious something” out of unthinking, unfeeling clay. “Oh, many a cup of this forbidden Wine Must drown the memory of that insolence!” The world has talked the same nonsense of the duty of children to parents. It has taught this, because parents are larger, and have the brute power to compel obedience to their demands. All the duties are from parents to children,—from those who thoughtlessly, wantonly, to satisfy their own desires, call into conscious being a human life,—send another soul with all its responsibilities out on the great, wide sea, to be tossed and buffeted and torn, until, mangled and dead, it is thrown out upon the sands to bleach. But after all, whether it was wise or unwise, just or unjust, we have been placed upon the earth as sentient beings and charged with the responsibilities of life; and practical philosophy asks the question, what does it mean, and how shall we take the journey which a higher power has decreed that we shall make? The poet and the dreamer and the copy book have told us much of the meaning of life. We often repeat these lessons to make ourselves believe them true. When we feel a doubt casting its shadow across our path, we read them once again to drive the doubt away; and yet, in spite of all, we know absolutely nothing of the scheme, or whether there is any kind of plan. We are only whistlers passing through a graveyard, with our ears tied close and our eyes shut fast. It would surely be as well to step boldly up and read the inscription on the marble tomb and then walk round and look at the vacant, grinning space upon the other side, calmly waiting to record our name. Measured by the philosophy of to-day, Omar Khayyam was a pessimist; he was not gifted with second sight. He saw no spooks and ghosts, and he would not look out into the midnight, and declare that his eyes discerned a glorious rainbow, bright with fresh colors and unbounded hopes. All the proud promises and brave assumptions and false theories of the world were to him a mockery and a sham. The mysticisms of religion and philosophy alike were hollow and bare. The “jarring sects” and quibbling doctors, with their fine-spun webs, were worthy the attention only of children and professors. This is the way he put them down: