In this manner the sway of man's genius is extended on earth. Already life is far easier than it was among our ancestors ten thousand years ago; the epidemic is checked by wise sanitary regulations, greater justice prevails in government, and the means of happiness are extended over wider areas of the population. What we thus behold realized on a partial scale, we conceive in our visions of the future to be indefinitely prolonged, the course of development leading to higher and higher planes, healthier conditions, wiser laws, nobler manners. The moral order will thus increase on earth. The moral order never is, but is ever becoming. It grows with our growth, and to bring on the triumph of intellect over mechanism, of responsible morality over irresponsible force, is our mission. The purpose of man's life is not happiness, but worthiness. Happiness may come as an accessory, we dare never make it an end. There is that striving for the perfect within us: in it we live, by it we are exalted above the clod; it is the one and only solace that never fails us, and the experience of progress in the past, the hope of greater progress in the future, is the redeeming feature of life. But the condition of all progress is experience; we must go wrong a thousand times before we find the right. We struggle, and grope and injure ourselves until we learn the uses of things. Pain therefore becomes a necessity, but it acquires in this view a new and nobler meaning, for it is the price humanity pays for an invaluable good. Every painful sickness, every premature death, becomes the means of averting sickness and death hereafter. Every form of violence, every social wrong, every inmost tribulation, is the result of general causes and becomes a goad in the sides of mankind, pressing them on to correct the hoary abuses it has tolerated, the vicious principles of government, education and economy to which it has conformed. Wide as the earth is the martyrdom of man, but the cry of the martyr is the creaking of the wheel which warns us that the great car of human progress is in motion. If we keep duly in mind the position which the human race occupies over against nature, we shall not accuse fate. Fate is our adversary; we must wrestle with it, we are here to establish the law of our own higher nature in defiance of fate. And this is the prerogative of man, that he need not blindly follow the law of his being, but that he is himself the author of the moral law, and creates it even in acting it out. We are all soldiers in the great army of mankind, battling in the cause of moral freedom; some to fight as captains, others to do valiant service in the ranks; some to shout the paean of victory, others to fall on the battle field or to retire wounded or crippled to the rear. But as in every battle so too in this, the fallen and the wounded have a share in the victory; by their sufferings have they helped, and the greenest wreath belongs to them.