Once the soul really looks forth and sees, there can be, after that, no more sleeping. All is effort, weighing, balancing, deciding, groping painfully along, or running swiftly the race, bracing against fearful odds, or bravely out-riding the storm. Taking it all as it comes, it is increasing action, motion, change. HUMAN DESTINY. Confucius, long considered the oldest and wisest of all the ancient teachers, when he was consulted upon an abtruse point of ethics, said in effect: "Ask the ancients. I do not know." The results of modern research are constantly undermining the first-recorded ideas concerning the age, and the degree of scientific and religious culture of the race, and we may well feel like turning from the authenticated historical records with which we are familiar to ask of the old, old world the occult meanings of the messages graven on pillar and on chiselled stone. The records which have survived the storm and stress of the ages bringing down to us unexpected knowledge of the lives, the achievements, and the histories of far-off, long-buried, hidden and lost peoples, communities, and even distinct personalities, were carefully planned and exactly executed by those who, already perceiving the mutability of all human life, and all its affairs, who--in a word--realizing that "the fashion of this world passeth away," sought to immortalize and perpetuate forever an absolute history of their own, and kindred races, by the uprearing of vast, imperishable monuments and temples, and abodes of men. The pyramids, majestic rock-hewn places of worship, and subterranean crypts are but the fingerposts of destiny. The voice of the weird spirit of "Memnon" who sits enthroned within the awful wastes of the desert sands, moans on and on, ever the same awe-inspiring warning. "Listen, listen, vain, evanescent, puerile chrysalis, man! Such as thou art, so were these most ancient of days over the history of whose toilsome, groping lives we keep forever jealous watch and ward. As they are today, so shall ye become. A little space, a few cycles of time, and all that lives and stalks abroad in the full plentitude of energy and ambition shall become resolved into the unfathomable the unreadable mysteries of the ages." Not after such fashion shall we of this age of widespread enlightenment write our history on the annals of the planet's life, and evolution. All that has gone before this time--the closing in of the vast cycle--has been, in a way, fragmentary, comet-like; the whole race of mankind has marched around the globe again and again. The leaders--the head--were the favored few, priests and kings, warriors and nobles; the vast tail, the untaught, the unawakened, the ignorant, servile masses, the grovelling slaves, but a remove from the beasts of burden.