While the essential nature of these things is changeless, yet their outward manifestation does undergo development. Love remains the same, yet men learn how to enlarge its meaning. Patriotism is the same, yet it assumes higher forms with advancing standards of national life. The heart of religion is changeless, yet religion receives an ever more adequate and satisfying interpretation. The new days cannot change the nature of abiding things, but they can increase the adaptability of those things to human needs. Our times are not perfect. However, the old days also fell short of perfection. Not only did they have their struggles and their failings, but those struggles and failings menaced the race just as seriously as have any of later days. We too easily forget what the past was like. We also fail to take a full inventory of the meaning of the present. All in all, it is safe to assume that men are sound at heart. Each age struggles on as well as it knows how. We get up the hill a little way and then fall back. On the whole, however, we climb a little more distance than we tumble. We are not moving backward from the perfect to the less perfect ages as Ovid wrote. We are moving forward to the divine event of which Tennyson dreamed. We are tending toward that perfect social condition revealed in the visions of the seer of Patmos—a new heaven and a new earth. The past was that the best might come. The last of life for which the first was made is a racial as well as a personal hope. Life’s Backgrounds (1919) An ancient thinker remarked that life is spent like a tale that is told. It might just as truly be said that life is like a picture that is painted. It is a series of scenes which, when all are finished, becomes a panorama. It demands perspective. In order to have this, it possesses, just as does a picture, a foreground, a mid-ground, and a background. The foreground is simply a bit of nothing in particular. It contributes nothing substantial. It is only there to give relief and proportion. It does not amount to much, but the picture would not be complete without it. Life has some phases which are quite like it. They do not count for anything substantial, but they help to furnish a setting for the parts that are really important. The mid-ground contains the real picture. The important figures, objects, and action are all there. It corresponds to the toils, the concerns, and the achievements which go to make up life. Life’s mid-ground is composed of its realities. The background is the part that stretches away in the distance. It may not consist of much. Cloudland, shadows, or distant hills or woods may be all it presents to the view. It is that against which the outlines of the real picture are cast.