Let us enlarge our horizon by ascending still higher, so that we can at a glance command the present and the past; for so come many instructive lessons to the mind. We behold far back in the distance, days like those of Wat Tyler, of Wycliffe, of Knox, and Luther and Washington. On closely observing any such era of accelerated progress, we perceive great bodies of men, unaccountably to us, giving back at a critical instant--thrown into confusion by circumstances which we, at this distance of time, discern to have been of but the smallest moment; and, seeing how the speedy and triumphant success of the right is thereby prevented, we suffer a sort of pain that we are unable to cast upon their path the light of our knowledge. “Had they but known what we so readily discern,” we exclaim, “how different would have been their course!” and we marvel that they were unable to break the spell that bound them, and which one added glance of foresight or of faith would have shivered. We forget that, besides the natural obscurity of the hour unilluminated by the future, there is ever a shrinking terror on men’s minds, which forbids them boldly to face the phantoms of their own times:--a spurious charity for wrong, which, prompted by a vision of _oneself_ in a similar condemnation, is not forgiveness, but treachery to Right. We overlook the obvious consideration that those transition periods were, like our own, infested with the treacherous and the selfish, whose fancied interest it was to suppress facts, circulate falsehoods, make up false issues, apologise for wrong, palliate crime, veil baseness under “decent pretexts,” exalt profession into performance, and by any and every means delay impending change.