succession of cycles is orderly and prearranged.

Another ideal is Progress. We are moving, not toward the bottom, but
toward the top of possibility. We reject annihilation, because then
there is nothing left. And there must always be something
left--progress--a bigger something, a better something. Should
annihilation be the truth of things, and all the race mortal, then some
day there would be a Last Man. And after the Last Man, what? He would
die, and then all that any of the other stars could view of the vast
panorama of our earthly generations would be an unburied corpse, with
not even a vulture hovering to pick it to freshness in the air!

A Last Man? No. Instead, the seers have shown us a great multitude in a
heavenly country, praising God, and singing forth His Name forever.
Immortality broods over the great thought of the race. All great minds
look upward to it: it is the final consummation of our dreams.

Another ideal is social adjustment, and social service. We must do
something for some one, or we cast current sagacity behind the back.
People crowd each other to the wall. The weak of communities and nations
are too often crushed. Redress is in the air. The longed-for wisdom of
to-day shows a kaleidoscopic front, in which are turning the
slum-dweller and the millionaire; the white man, the yellow, and the
black; the town and the territorial possession. The slave-colony,
garbage-laws, magistrates, and murderers are mixed in motley, and there
are whirling vacant-lot schemes abroad, potato-patches, wood-yards,
organized charity, Wayfarers' Lodges, resounding cries of municipal
reform, and various other interests of the wisdom-scale.

Hence, wisdom has not yet been arrived at: we are still on the run. This