“Their prejudice and fears and cares and doubts All with a touch of nobleness; despite Their error, upward tending all, though weak, Like plants in mines which never saw the sun, But dream of him and guess where he may be, And do their best to climb and get to him.” The daily toil, in city office, in factory, in ship, in mine, in home, is really a struggle for Life, for freedom, for joy, for something wider and better than we at present know, for pleasures that satisfy and do not pall. We needs must love the highest when we see it, but as yet we do not see it: so we are working in the dark, and the best of us try hard to do our duty. The end is unrecognised, the means may be mistaken, but the energy is there; and the race as well as the individual is instinctively working out its destiny;—thwarting itself constantly by misdirected endeavour, yet constantly striving for self-development and enlargement, for progress and happiness. And this is true even when the main idea of enlargement is the amassing of money in unwieldy heaps, when happiness is sought in an exaltation of imagination by deleterious drugs, or when progress is thought to consist in the slaughter and impoverishment of opponents who might be our auxiliaries and allies. If our vision could be cleared, and the aim of human effort could be changed, the earth would put on a new complexion; we should no longer be tempted to think of humanity as of an ancient and effete and played-out product of evolution,—we the latest-born and most youthful of all the creatures on the planet,—but should regard everything with the eye of hope, as of one new born, with senses quickened to perceive joys and beauties hitherto undreamt of. That is the meaning of Regeneration or new birth: it must be like an awakening out of trance. At present we are as if subject to a dream illusion, in a slumber which we are unable to throw off. Revelation after revelation has come to us, but our senses are deadened and we will not hear, our hands are full of clay, we have no grasp for ideals, we are mistaking appearance for reality. But the time for awakening must be drawing nigh—the time when again it may be said: “The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light: they that dwell in the land of the shadow of death, upon them hath the light shined.” Meanwhile our seers depict man’s half-hoping half-despairing attitude, not so much as a striving, as a waiting:—the striving is obvious, but the unconscious waiting is what they detect—waiting as it were for the arrival of a new sense, a new perception of the value of life:— “And we, the poor earth’s dying race, and yet No phantoms, watching from a phantom shore Await the last and largest sense to make The phantom walls of this illusion fade, And show us that the world is wholly fair.”