We are privileged more than any who have as yet lived on this planet
in being able to foresee, and in some measure estimate, the results of
our wealth of labour as it may be possibly extended over and through
the unborn. A few scholars of the past, like him who, writing to the
close of his mortal day, sang himself to his immortal rest with the
'_Gloria in excelsis_,' a few scholars might foresee, even as that
Baeda did, that their living actual work was but the beginning of
their triumphant course through the ages,--the momentum. But the
masses of the nations, crude and selfish, have had no such prescience,
no such intent. 'Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die!' That has
been the pass, if not the password, with them and theirs.

We, scholars of modern thought, have the broader, and therefore more
solemn and obligatory knowledge, that however many to-morrows may
come, and whatever fate they may bring, we never die; that, strictly
speaking, no one yet who has lived has ever died; that for good or
for evil our every change from potentiality into motion is carried on
beyond our own apparent transitoriness; that we are the waves of the
ocean of life, communicating motion to the expanse before us, and
leaving the history we have made on the shore behind.

Thus we are led to feel this greater object: that to whatever extent
we, by our exertions, confer benefits on those who live, we extend the
advantage to those who have to live; that one good thought leading to
practical useful action from one man or woman, may go to the virtue
of thousands of generations; that one breath of health wafted by our
breath may, in the aggregate of life saved by it, represent in its
ultimate effect all the life that now is or has been.

At the close of a Parliamentary session, an uneventful leader of a