Neither does it explain, but it may profit, if the wondering inquirer turns his thoughts for a moment on his personal history. He has had his hours of clear vision and high resolve,--why have they borne such poor fruit in his actual life? His own riddle is one with the riddle of history. Again we may say, with no pretense of probing the mystery in its depths, but as gaining a touch of side-light, it is plain that what we look at as the strictly moral forces of mankind--the clear thinking, the definite purpose, the pure aspiration--must be reckoned with as only a part of the volume of force that carries along the individual and the race. Other elements of that force are the physical needs; the push and play of passions ingrained in human nature; the inherited bias; the strength of habits formed before childhood had begun to reflect,--the thousand forces which blend with reason and choice to make up our destiny. Man's noblest aim is to make reason and purpose the rulers in his little republic, but at the best those rulers must deal with a set of very vigorous and often mutinous subjects. Let us not at least wonder, though for the moment we sigh, that neither did the kingdom of God at once establish itself on earth, as Jesus hoped, nor did the Spirit guide mankind by a brief and sure path into full felicity and holiness, as Paul hoped. The disappointment is a blank contradiction only for those who assume a superhuman revelation in Scripture or in church, and then have to reconcile this infallibility with that most fallible groping by which alone mankind gets along. Unembarrassed at least by that difficulty, let us note one natural cause of the imperfect progress of Christianity, namely, the substitution of fancy for clear and sound knowledge of nature and man, which was inwrought from the beginning in its creed. We may recall the piercing question of Socrates, "Can virtue be taught?" Can the best life be so clearly shown and so skillfully inculcated, that it may be transmitted from man to man and from generation to generation as surely and safely as the knowledge of a mechanical art or a physical science? Socrates owned that he knew of no such way to teach virtue,--that while Pericles could teach his son to be a good horseman, he could not so guide him but that he became a bad man,--and Socrates himself found no sure way to guide men into the heroic path he walked himself.