(1890)
Born in 1839, died in 1898; graduated from Northwestern Female College at
Evanston, Illinois, in 1859; taught and traveled until1874, when she became
Secretary of the Women’s Christian
Temperance Union; in 1883 founded the World’s Women’s Christian Temperance
Union.
I WISH 1 we were all
more thorough students of the mighty past, for we should thus be rendered
braver prophets of the future, and more cheerful workers in the present. History
shows us with what tenacity the human race survives. Earthquake, famine, and
pestilence have done their worst, but over them rolls a healing tide of years
and they are lost to view; on sweeps the great procession, and hardly shows a
scar. Rulers around whom clustered new forms of civilization pass away; but
greater men succeed them. Nations are rooted up; great hopes seem blighted;
revolutions rise and rivers run with the blood of patriots; the globe itself
seems headed toward the abyss; new patriots are born; higher hopes bloom out
like stars; humanity emerges from the dark ages vastly ahead of what it was on
entering that cave of gloom, and ever the right comes uppermost; and now is
Christ’s kingdom nearer than when we
first believed.
Only those who have not studied history lose heart in great reforms; only those
unread in the biography of genius imagine themselves to be original. Except in
the realm of material invention, there is nothing new under the sun. There is
no reform which some great soul has not dreamed of centuries ago; there is not
a doctrine that some father of the Church did not set forth. The Greek
philosophers and early Christian Fathers boxed the compass once for all; we may
take our choice of what they have left on record. Let us then learn a wise
humility, but at the same time a humble wisdom, as we remember that there are
but two classes of men— one which
declares that our times are the worst the world has seen, and another which
claims our times as best— and he who
claims this, all revelation, all science, all history witnesses is right and
will be right forevermore.
The most normal and the most perfect human being is the one who most thoroughly
addresses himself to the activity of his best powers, gives himself most thoroughly
to the world around him, flings himself out into the midst of humanity, and is
so preoccupied by his own beneficent reaction on the world that he is
practically unconscious of a separate existence. Introspection, and
retrospection were good for the cloister; but the uplook, the outlook and the
onlook are alone worthy the modern Christian. To change the figure, a normal
Christian stands in the midst of a great, beautiful and varied landscape. It is
the landscape of beneficent work. Above him reaches the boundless skies,
brilliant with the stars of God and Heaven.
Love and friendship form a beautiful rainbow over his landscape and reach up
toward his sky. But the only two great environments of the soul are work for
humanity and faith in God. Those wounded in love will find that affection, dear
and vital as it is, comes to us not as the whole of life, not as its wide
wondrous landscape of the earth, not as its beautiful vision of the sky, but as
its beautiful embellishment, its rainbow fair and sweet. But were it gone there
would still remain the two greatest and most satisfying pictures on which the
soul can gaze— humanity and God.
Note 1. From an address before the
Seventeenth Convention of the World’s Women’s
Christian Temperance Union at
from "The World's Great
Orations" ed. by William Jennings Bryan, 1906, published in full by
bartelsby.com