The history of every brave girl is parallel with that of her play-fellow and yoke-fellow. She sighs for sympathy, for a gallant company of youths and maidens worthy of all desire. Her music, drawing, and Italian are only doors which she hopes to open upon such a company. She longs for society to make the hours lyrical, for tasks to make them epic and heroic. The attitudes and actions of imaginative young persons are exalted every moment by the invisible presence of lovers, poets, inspired and inspiring companions. Such as they are we also shall be; when we walk among them and with them, we shall wash our hands of all injustice, meanness, and pretension. Women are as tired as men of our silly civilization, its compliments, restraints, and compromises. They feel the burden of routine as heavily, and keep their elasticity under it as long as we. What they cannot hope to do, a great-hearted man, some lover of theirs, shall do for them; and they will sustain him with appreciation, anticipating the tardy justice of mankind. Every generous girl shares with her sex that new development of feminine consciousness, which the vulgar have named, in derision, a movement for woman's rights. She will seek to be more truly woman, to assert her special power and privilege, to approach from her own side the common ideal, offering a pure soprano to match the manly bass.
We all look for a future, not only better than our won past, but better than any past. Humanity is our inheritance, but not historical humanity. Man seems to be broken and scattered all abroad. The great lives are only eminent examples of a single virtue, and by admiration of every hero we have been crippled on some one side. If he is free, he is also coarse; if delicate, he is overlaid by the gross world; saints are timid and feverish, afraid of being spattered in the first puddle; heroes are profane. We must melt up all the old metal to make a new man and carry forward the common consciousness. Every failure was part of the final success. We go over a causeway in which every timber is some soldier fallen in this enterprise. Who doubts the result doubts God. We say, regretfully "If I could only continue at my best!" and we ach with the little ebb, between wave and wave, of an advancing tide. But this tide is Omnipotence. It rises surely, if it were only an inch in a thousand years. The changes in society are like the geologic upheaval and sinking of continents; yet man is morally as far removed from the savage as he is physically superior to the saurian. We do not see the corn grow or the world revolve; yet if motion be given as the primal essence, we must look for inconceivable results. Wisdom will take care of wisdom, and extend. Consider the growth of intellect in the history of your own parish for twenty years. See how old views have died out of New England and new ones come in. Every man is fortified in his opinions, yet no man can hold his opinions. The closer they are hugged, the faster in any community they change. The ideas of such men as Swedenborg, Goethe, Emerson, float in the air like spores, and wherever they light they thrive. The crabbedest dogmatist cannot escape; for, if he open his eyes to seek his meet, some sunshine will creep in. We have combustibles stored in the stupidest of us, and a spark of truth kindles our slumbering suspicion. Since the great reality is organized in man, and waits to be revealed in him, it is of no avail to shut out the same reality from our ears. Thinkers have held to be dangerous, and excluded from the desks of public instruction; but the boys were already occupied with the same thoughts. They would hear nothing new at the lecture, and they are more encouraged by the terror of the elders than by any word the wise man could speak. In pursuit of truth, the difficulty is to ask a question; for in the ability to ask is involved ability to reach an answer. The serious student is occupied with problems which the doctors have never been able to entertain, and he knows that their discourse is not addressed to him. If you have not wit to understand what I seek, you may croak with the frogs: you are left out of my game.
And the old people, unhappily, suspect that this boy, whose theory they do not comprehend, is master of their theory. They are puzzled and panic-stricken; they strike in the dark. In all controversy, the strong man's position is unassailed. His adversary does not see where he is, but attacks a man of straw, some figment of his own, to the amusement of intelligent spectators. Always our combatant is talking quite wide of the whole question. So the wise man can never have an opponent; for whoever is able to face and find him has already gone over to his side. By material defences, we shut our light for a little, by going where only our own views are repeated, and so boxing ourselves from all danger of conviction; but if a strong thinker could gain the mere brute advantage of having an audience confined in their seats to hear him out, he would carry them all inevitably to his conclusion. They know it and run away. But the press has made our whole world of civilization one great lecture-room, from which no reading man can escape, and the only defence against progress is stolid preoccupation with trade or trifles. Yet this persistency is holding the breath, and can no more be continued in the mind than that in the body. Blundering and falsehood become intolerable to the blunderers; they must return to thought, and that is proper in a single direction, is approached by ten thousand avenues toward the One. It is religious, not ignorance or dogma. We cannot think without exploration of the divine order and recognition of its divinity, without finding ourselves carried away by it to service and adoration. All good is assured to us in Truth, and Truth follows us hard, drives us into many a corner, and will have us at last. So Love surprises all, and every virtue has a pass-key to every heart. Out of conflicting experience, amid barbarism and dogmatism, from feathers that float and stones that fall, we deduce the great law of moral gravitation, which binds spirit to spirit, and all souls to the best. Recognition of that law is worship. We rejoice in it without a taint of selfishness. We adore it with entire satisfaction. Worship is neither belief nor hope, but this certainty of repose upon Perfection. We explore over our heads and under our feet a harmony that is only enriched by dissolving discords. The drag of time, the cramp of organization, are only false fifths. It is blasphemy to deny the dominant. We cannot escape our good; we shall be purified. When our destiny is thus assured to us, we become impatient of sleep and sin, and redouble exertion. We devote ourselves to this certainty, and our allegiance is religion. There is nothing in man omitted from the uplift of Ideality. That is a central and total expansion of him, is an inmost entering into his inmost, is more himself than he is himself. All reverence is directed toward this Creator revealed in flesh, though not compassed. We adore him in others, while yet we despise him in ourselves. Every other motion of man has an external centre, is some hunger or passion, acts on us from its seat in Nature or the body, and we can face it, deny and repudiate it with the body; but this is the man flowing down from his source.
We must not be tempted to call things by too fine names, lest we should disguise them. All that is great is plain and familiar. The Ideal Tendency is simple love of life, felt first as desire and then as satisfaction. The men who represent it are not seekers, but finders, who go on to find more and more; for in the poet desire has fulfilled itself. Enjoyment makes the artist. He has gone on before us, reaching into the abyss of possibility; but he has reached more mightily. He begins to know what is promised in the universal attraction, in this eager turning of all faces toward our future. There is a centre from which no eye can be diverted, for it is the beam of sight. Look which way you will, that centre is everywhere. The universe is flooded with a ray from it, and the light of common day on every object is a refraction or reflection of that brightness.