Remember that as thou art linked to thy ancestry, so art thou linked to posterity. The future centuries of the human race are like the future years of an individual. Thou art keenly interested in what may happen hereafter to the race with which thou art interlinked. But the race, like the individual, will be cut off and become extinct before ever the ideal is reached. Remember, therefore, that the purpose for which humanity exists is achieved at every moment in everyone who appropriates the fruits of partial success and frustration. Whosoever standing on the earth as a foundation builds up for himself the spiritual universe attains the purpose of human existence. There is indeed progress in the explicitness with which the spiritual ideal is conceived, and we are immeasurably interested in the greater light to be attained by our posterity. But the essential fruition of the contact of the infinite that is in us with the finite world is achievable at every moment in every human being. And this gives an entirely new meaning to the spiritual gains achieved in solitude, which seem vain because there are no witnesses. But neither will there be witnesses when the last human beings perish on earth. The spiritual bravery of the shipwrecked man who sinks on the lonely ocean springs from the conviction that though the sea can overwhelm him there is that in him greater than ocean’s immensity; a conviction achieved through the experience of living in the life of others. The same is the gain achieved by the sick man who lies in solitude like a helpless log in the darkened room. The altruistic philosophy fails in accounting for the moral grandeur that attaches to the spiritual victories gained in silence and solitude. Face the terrors of life before you leave life. Be resolute to the last not to cherish illusions. Face the terrors of life, the absence of observable design, the cruelties, the ferocities. Think of William Blake’s poem “The Tiger”: “Did he who made the lamb make thee?” In your philosophy there is no question any longer of a Creator. Creation is an attempt to explain the coexistence of the imperfect with the perfect, to account for a lower stage in terms of a higher. The ultimate inability of man to understand, to explain, is one of the principal frustrations he meets with, is the crucifixion of man at the point of his intellect.