I have noticed that no great poem, no great religion, no great creation
of any kind, was ever written or conceived by people who lived in the
valleys, cramped by the hills. The hills narrow one's horizon, make
one insular, provincial, limited. And what is true of literature and
art is true also of life. The man of low ideals never vaticinates; the
man who is living down in the lower ranges of existence never
prophesies. The man with a low brow has always a limited perspective;
so, also, the man with a low heart or a low conscience. The sordid man
can never measure the consequences of his wealth. He may know that
tomorrow he will be as rich as he is today, or richer, but he can not
prognosticate what his riches will mean to him tomorrow--whether he
will find in them more or less felicity, whether they will be a
blessing or a burden. Neither has the base man, the immoral man, any
clear vision of futurity. He lives in doubts and fears, and is begirt
with clouds and confusion. He half fears that there is a law of God,
and half doubts it; half believes in retribution, and half doubts it;
half believes in moral cause and effect, and half doubts it. He sees,
with no certain sight, the inevitable penalty awaiting his wrong-doing,
else he would not and dare not sin. No man would sin, could he read
the future; no man would defy the Infinite, did he unerringly know that
God is a just God, and that He shall visit inevitable retribution upon
him who trangresses His holy law. The wicked man, like the sordid man
living in the low lands, never vaticinates, and can not, not by reason
of any want of talent or conscience, but by reason of want of altitude
of vision. But St. John does not tell us here that all men shall know
all things that must be; that all men have a sense of futurity. What
he does say is that there is an intimate and indissoluble relationship
between elevation and futurity; that only the man who stands upon the
altitudes can command the future; for only there, when he is at his
best, and when he is living on the summit of his soul, does he behold