... “where daylight grows weary Of wasting its smiles on a desert so dreary— What may that desert be? ’Tis life, cheerless life, where the few joys that come Are lost like that daylight, for ’tis not their home. There is a lone pilgrim, before whose faint eyes The water he pants for but sparkles and flies— Who may that pilgrim be? ’Tis man, hapless man, through this life tempted on By fair shining hopes, that in shining are gone.” In that essay of John Foster’s, from which a citation has already been made, the essayist protests against the care so many popular writers seem to take to guard against the inroad of ideas pertaining to another life—as much care as the inhabitants of Holland take against the irruption of the sea; and their writings, he adds, do really form a kind of moral dyke against the invasion from the other world. “They do not instruct a man to act, to enjoy, and to suffer, as a being that may by to-morrow have finally abandoned this orb; everything is done to beguile the feeling of his being ‘a stranger and a pilgrim on the earth.’” They fail to recognise the _c’est vrai_ of the Christian lyrist’s avowal, the— “_’Tis true_, we are but strangers And sojourners below; And countless snares and dangers Surround the path we go: Though painful and distressing, Yet there’s a rest above; And onward still we’re pressing, To reach that land of love.” The object of such a pilgrim is progress—or, rather, progress is the means to an end; and the end is not yet, is not here, but will surely come, and come quickly, and will not tarry. There is a wicket gate towards which they are making progress, and it is the portal of a city that hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God. They who professedly sojourn here as in a strange country, who obey the call to go out into a place which they shall after receive for an inheritance; who confess, and act on the confession, that they are strangers and pilgrims on the earth; they that say and do such things declare plainly that they seek a country, a better country—that is, a heavenly. Chaucer’s “old style” conveys a meaning the world can never be too old to learn: “Here is no home, here is but wyldyrnesse. Forth, pilgrime! forth, best out of thy stalle! Look up on hye, and thonke God of alle; Weyve thy lust, and let thy goste thee lede,[18] And trouthe shall thee delyver, it is no drede.”