hope, by which look forward? Not a mere illusion of the craven
heart--something real, as real as the solid walls of fact against which,
like drifted sea-weed, they are dashed; something to give each separate
personality sunshine and a flower in its own existence now; something to
shape this million-handed labour to an end and outcome that will leave more
sunshine and more flowers to those who must succeed? Something real now, and
not in the spirit-land; in this hour now, as I stand and the sun burns. Can
any creed, philosophy, system, or culture endure the test and remain
unmolten in this fierce focus ofhuman life?

Consider, is there anything slowly painted on the once mystic and now
commonplace papyri of ancient, ancient Egypt, held on the mummy's withered
breast? In that elaborate ritual, in the procession of the symbols, in the
winged circle, in the laborious sarcophagus? Nothing; absolutely nothing!
Before the
fierce heat of the human furnace, the papyri smoulder away as paper
smoulders under a lens in the sun. Remember Nineveh and
the cult of the fir-cone, the turbaned and bearded bulls of
stone, the lion hunt, the painted chambers loaded with tile
books, the lore of the arrow-headed writing. What is in
Assyria? There are sand, and failing rivers, and in Assyria's
writings an utter nothing. The aged caves of India, who shall
tell when they were sculptured? Far back when the sun was
burning, burning in the sky as now in untold precedent time.
Is there any meaning in those ancient caves? The indistinguish-able noise
not to be resolved, born of the human struggle, mocks in answer.

In the strange characters of the Zend, in the Sanscrit, in the
effortless creed of Confucius, in the Aztec coloured-string
writings and rayed stones, in the uncertain marks left of the