FAREWELL

There is in man an almost hopeless phenomenon for thoughtful minds who
seek a meaning in the march of civilization, and who endeavor to give
laws of progression to the movement of intelligence. However
portentous a fact may be, or even supernatural,--if such facts exist,
--however solemnly a miracle may be done in sight of all, the
lightning of that fact, the thunderbolt of that miracle is quickly
swallowed up in the ocean of life, whose surface, scarcely stirred by
the brief convulsion, returns to the level of its habitual flow.

A Voice is heard from the jaws of an Animal; a Hand writes on the wall
before a feasting Court; an Eye gleams in the slumber of a king, and a
Prophet explains the dream; Death, evoked, rises on the confines of
the luminous sphere were faculties revive; Spirit annihilates Matter
at the foot of that mystic ladder of the Seven Spiritual Worlds, one
resting upon another in space and revealing themselves in shining
waves that break in light upon the steps of the celestial Tabernacle.
But however solemn the inward Revelation, however clear the visible
outward Sign, be sure that on the morrow Balaam doubts both himself
and his ass, Belshazzar and Pharoah call Moses and Daniel to qualify
the Word. The Spirit, descending, bears man above this earth, opens
the seas and lets him see their depths, shows him lost species, wakens
dry bones whose dust is the soil of valleys; the Apostle writes the
Apocalypse, and twenty centuries later human science ratifies his
words and turns his visions into maxims. And what comes of it all? Why
this,--that the peoples live as they have ever lived, as they lived in
the first Olympiad, as they lived on the morrow of Creation, and on
the eve of the great cataclysm. The waves of Doubt have covered all
things. The same floods surge with the same measured motion on the