Beautiful as have been the lives which have resulted from this æsthetic spirituality, the world has been beginning to realize, during the last twenty-five years, that this is a creed partially outworn, or, rather, a creed hampered by its limitations. In taking its suggestion for the ideal from the world, noble society chose to accept economic conditions as they were, and to fashion an ideal which necessarily shut out the larger portion of humanity from the possibility of attaining it. The æsthetic satisfaction which we draw from the sunset is due to the pleasure which conscience feels in its allegiance to an ideal of its own devising, and seeing God is only another term for the solemn identification of man's aspirations. The Wordsworthian soul, as interpreted by his followers, assumed that the political conditions of society were always to remain the same, or, more accurately speaking, it accepted those conditions as permanent and continuously inevitable. In other words, it did not foresee democracy. In short, its ideal was essentially aristocratic and exclusive, and it continues so stubbornly in the present day in many circles. To be sure, it has included and continues to include in its formula the carrying of soups, jellies, coals, and blankets to the poor, and the proffering of educational advantages to the ignorant, but it never has predicated, as essential to the world's true progress, such fundamental changes in the social status of society as would involve the annihilation of class distinctions and a greater general happiness for the mass of humanity. To be sure, there have always been individual philanthropists, who insisted upon these changes as vital, but they have been ignored by the leaders of ideal thought as visionary enthusiasts, or maligned as disturbers of permanent society. It has been the struggle of democracy itself that has been the chief revealer of a new vision in the sunset, until now, at last, the soul in search of the ideal appreciates that it does not walk with God unless it sees in the saffron glory its own sympathy with these new conditions.