opportunities; then retrospect and the end.

"We come like water, and like wind we go."

But how few of the visions are realized. Faust sums up the whole of
life in the twice-repeated word _versagen_, renounce, and history
tells a similar story. Terah died in Haran; Abraham obtained but a
grave in the land promised him and his children; Jacob, cheated in
marriage, bitterly disappointed in his children, died in exile,
leaving his descendants to become slaves in the land of Egypt; and
Moses, their heroic deliverer, died in the mountains of Moab in
sight of the land which he was forbidden to enter. You may answer
that it is no injury that the promise is too large, the vision too
grand, to be fulfilled in the span of a single life, but must become
the heritage of a race. But what has been the history of Abraham's
descendants? A death-grapple for existence, captivity, and
dispersion. Their national existence has long been lost.

Was there ever a nation of grander promise than Greece or Rome? But
Greece died of premature old age, and Rome of rottenness begotten
of sin. But each of them, you will say, left a priceless heritage to
the immortal race. But if Greece and Rome and a host of older
nations, of which History has often forgotten the very name, have
failed and died, can anything but ultimate failure await the race?
Is human history to prove a story told by an idiot, or does it
"signify" something? Is the great march of humanity, which Carlyle
so vividly depicts, "from the inane to the inane, or from God to
God?"

This is the sphinx question put to every thinking man, and on his