FOOTNOTES:

The Mind: and the Duty of Right Thinking

V

The Mind; and the Duty of Right ThinkingToC

With fine imagery the seer of old likened the mind unto a tree. The tree shakes down its fruits, and the mind sheds forth its thoughts. The boughs of the one will cover the land with forests; the faculties of the other will sow the world with harvests that blight or harvests that bless. The measure of personal worth, therefore, is the number and quality of thoughts issuing from man's mind. For all the doing called commerce, and all the speaking called conversation and books, begin with the thinking called ideas. Each thing was first a thought. A loom is Arkwright's thought dressed up in iron clothes. Books are the scholar's thoughts caught and fastened upon the white page. As our planet and the harvests that cover it are the thoughts of God rushing into visible expression, so all houses and ships, all cities and institutions, are man's inner thoughts, taking on outer and material embodiment.

When thoughts compacted into habits have determined character and destiny for the individual, they go on and secure their social progress. When God would order a great upward movement for society, He drops a great idea into the mind of some leader. Such energies divine have these thoughts that they create new epochs in history. Through Luther the thought of liberty in church and state set tyrants trembling and thrones tottering. Through Cromwell the thought of personal rights became a weapon powerful enough utterly to destroy that citadel of iniquity named the divine right of kings. It was a great moral thought called the "Golden Rule" that shotted the cannon of the North for victory and spiked the cannon of the South for defeat. Measureless is the might of a moral idea. It exceeds the force of earthquakes and the might of tidal waves. The reason why no scholar or historian can forecast the events and institutions of the next century is that none can tell what great idea God will drop into the soul of some man ordained to be its voice and prophet.

Now the omnipotence of thoughts is not without reason. Man is the child of genius because he is the child of God. Those beautiful words, "made in His image," tell us that the human mechanism is patterned after the divine. Reason and memory in man answer to those faculties in God, as do conscience and the moral sentiments. In creative genius man alone is a sharer with God. As the Infinite One passing through space leaves behind those shining footsteps called suns and stars, glowing and sparkling upon planets innumerable, so man's mind, moving through life, leaves behind a pathway all shining with books, laws, liberties and homes. Of all the wonderful things God hath made, man the wonderer is himself the most wonderful. No casket owned by a king, filled with gems and sparkling jewels, ever held such treasure as God hath put into this casket of bones and sinew. The imagination cannot paint in colors too rich this being, who is a miniature edition of infinity. It is not fiction, but fact, to say that reason is a loom; only where Jacquard's mechanism weaves a few yards of silk and satin, reason weaves conversation, sympathy, songs, poems, eloquence—textures all immortal. And memory is a gallery; only where the Louvre holds a few pictures of the past, memory waving her wonder-working wand brings back all faces, living and dead, causing mountains and battle-fields, with all distant scenes, to pass before the mind in solemn procession.

The Bank of England has indeed a mechanism that tests coins and throws out all light weights. But judgment is an instrument testing things invisible, weighing arguments and motives, testing principles and characters. And the desires, are they not like unto the richly laden argosies of commerce? And fancy, hath it not the skill of artist and architect? Imagination, working in the realm of the useful, turns iron into engines. Imagination, working in realms of the beautiful, turns pigments into pictures. Imagination, working in the realms of thought, can turn things true into sciences, and things good into ethical systems. Well did the philosopher say that the greatest star is the one standing at the little end of the telescope, the one looking, not looked at nor looked for. When some Agassiz dredging the Atlantic tells us what animals lived there a million years ago, the scientist's mind seems an abyss deeper than the sea itself; and when Tyndall, climbing to the top of the Matterhorn, reads on that rock-page all the events of the ancient world, the mountain is dwarfed to an ant hill and becomes insignificant in the presence of the mountain-minded scholar. Hunters tell us that when crossing a swamp they leap from one hummock of grass to another. But Herschel and Proctor, exploring the heavenly world, step from star to star. The husbandman, squeezing a cluster of grapes in his cup, does but interpret to us the way in which the scholar squeezes planets and suns to brim the cup of knowledge for man's thirsting soul. This vast and wondrous world without is matched by man's rich and various mind within! Well did Emerson exclaim, "Man, thou palace of sight and sound, carrying in thy senses the nights and mornings, the summers and winters; carrying in thy brain the geometry of the City of God, in thy heart all the bowers of love, and all the realms of right and wrong."

Such being the nature of the mind, consider its prodigious fruitfulness in thought. If all the processes of the mind were reduced to material volume, the thoughts of each moment would fill a page, the thoughts of each hour would fill a chapter, the thoughts of each day would fill a volume, the emotions of a year would fill a small library of many volumes. Value might be wanting, but not bulk. It is given to the eye to behold the harvests wrought by the secret force of roots and sunbeams. But if all the products of the soul could be made visible to the eye and ear, how marvelous would be these exhalations, rising and filling all the air. Were all the emotions and passions and dreams of one single day fully revealed, what dramas would there be beyond all the tragedies man's hand hath ever indicated! Consider what fertility the mind hath! Consider how many trains of thought reason takes up each hour. Consider all that belongs to a man as an animal, his fears and passions, defensory in nature. Consider his social equipment, with all the possible moods and combinations of affections. Consider the vast activities of his reason working outward, and the imagination working upward. Sometimes in the morning man's thoughts are for number and strength like unto the strength of armies. Sometimes in the night his aspirations exhale heavenward with all the purity and beauty of the clouds. Consider also how life's conflicts and warfare inflame man's faculties and hasten their process.

Consider how courage, despondency, hope and fear, friendship and enmity, increase the activities. Consider man's ambitions—steeds of the sun with incredible swiftness dragging forward the soul's chariot. Consider the rivalries among men. What intensities of thought are induced thereby! Consider that toward one's friends the mind sends forth thoughts that are almoners of bounty and angels of mercy. But consider that man is over against his enemy, with a mind like unto a walled city filled with armed men. Consider how in life's conflicts, thoughts become the swords of anger, the clubs of envy, stings for hissing hatred. Consider that in times of great excitement the soul literally blazes and burns, exhaling emotions and thoughts as a planet exhales light and heat. Wondrous the power of the loom newly invented, that with marvelous swiftness weaves in silk figures of flowers and trees and birds. But the uttermost speed of those flying shuttles is slowness itself compared to the swiftness of the mental loom, that without noise or clangor weaves fabrics eternal out of the warp and woof of affection and thought, of passion and purpose. Consider that every man is not simply two men, but a score of men. All the climatic disturbances in nature, all distemperatures through heat and cold, wet and dry, summer and winter, do but answer in number and variety to the moods in man's brain. Not the all-producing summer is so rich in bounty as the mind is rich in thought when working its regnant and creative moods. Vast are the buildings man's hands have reared; sweet are the songs man's mind hath sung; lovely the faces man's hand hath painted; but the silent songs the soul hears, the invisible pictures the mind sees, the secret buildings the imagination rears, these are a thousand-fold more beautiful than any as yet embodied in this material world.

The Spanish have a proverb that "He who sows thoughts will reap acts, habits, and character," for destiny itself is determined by thinking. Life is won or lost by its master thoughts. As nothing reveals character like the company we like and keep, so nothing foretells futurity like the thoughts over which we brood. It was said of John Keats that his face was the face of one who had seen a vision. So long had his inner eye been fixed upon beauty, so long had he loved that vision splendid, so long had he lived with it, that not only did his soul take on the loveliness of what he contemplated, but the very lines of the poet's face were chiseled into beauty by those sculptors called thoughts and ideals. When Wordsworth speaks of the girl's beauty as "born of murmuring sound," the poet indicates his belief that the girl's long love of the sweet briar and the thrush's song, her tender care of her favorite flowers, had ended in the saturation of her own face with sweetness. Swiftly do we become like the thoughts we love. Scholars have noticed that old persons who have "lived long together, 'midst sunshine and 'midst cloudy weather," come at length to look as nearly alike as do brother and sister: Emerson explains this likeness by saying that long thinking the same thoughts and loving the same objects mould similarity into the features. Nor is there any beauty in the face of youth or maiden that can long survive sourness in the disposition or discontent in the heart.

Contrariwise, all have seen faces very plain naturally that have become positively radiant because the beautiful soul that is enmeshed in and stands behind the muscles has shone through and beautified all of the facial tissues. Two of our great novelists have made a special study of the architectural power of thoughts. Dickens exhibits Monks as beginning his career as an innocent and beautiful child; but as ending his life as a mass of solid bestiality, a mere chunk of fleshed iniquity. It was thinking upon vice and vulgarity that transformed the angel's face into the countenance of a demon. Hawthorne has made a similar study of Chillingworth, whose moral deterioration began through evil thinking when face and physique were fully matured. Chillingworth stood forth in middle life a thoughtful, earnest, and just man; but, during his absence, he suffered a grievous wrong. Not knowing the identity of his enemy, the physician came to suspect his friend. By skillful questions he digged into Dimmesdale's heart as the sexton might delve into the grave in search of a possible jewel upon a dead man's breast. When suspicion had strengthened into certainty, enmity became hatred. Then, for two years, Chillingworth tortured his victim as once inquisitors tortured men by tweaking the flesh with red-hot pincers. Soon the face of the physician, once so gentle and just, took on an aspect sinister and malign. Children feared him, men shivered in his presence—they knew not why. Once the magistrate saw the light glimmering in his eyes "with flames that burned blue, like the ghastly fire that darted out of Bunyan's awful doorway on the hillside and quivered in the Pilgrim's face." All this is Hawthorne's way of telling us how thoughts determine character and shape destiny. He who thinks of mean and ugly things will soon show mud in the bottom of his eye. Ugliness within soon fouls the facial tissues. But he who thinks of "things true and just and lovely" will, by his thinking, be transformed into the image of the ideal he contemplates, even as the rose becomes red by exposing its bosom to the sunbeams and soaking each petal in the sun's fine rays.

Not only are thoughts the builders of character for the individual; they are also the architects of states and nations. All this wonderful fabric lying over our land like a beautiful garment is a fabric spun and woven out of ideas. Each outer substance was builded by an inner sentiment. What the eye sees are stone and brick and iron united by masons and carpenters, but the forces that hold these material things together are not iron bands, but thoughts and beliefs. Destroy the life-nerve running up through the tree, and the rings of wood will soon fall apart. Destroy the thoughts and beliefs of our people, and its homes, colleges and institutions will decline and decay. Thrust a million Mohammedans into our land, and their inner thoughts will realize themselves in mosques, minarets, and harems. But thrust a million Americans into Asia Minor and straightway their thoughts will take on these visible shapes called houses and factories, temples of learning, altars of praise and prayer. For what we call Saxon civilization is only a magnificent incarnation of a certain mental type and a moral character. Not only individuals, but nations are such stuff as thoughts are made of.

In his famous story of archery Virgil represents Acestes as shooting his arrow with such force that it took fire as it flew and went up into the air all aflame, thus opening from the place where the archer stood a pathway of light into the heavens. Now it is given to man's thoughts to fulfill this beautiful story, in that they open up shining pathways along which the human steps may move. On the practical side, it is by the thinking alone that man solves his bread-winning problem. Standing, each in his place, using his strongest faculty and working in the line of least resistance, each must conquer for himself food and support. To say that society owes us a living or to consume more than we produce is to sink to the level of pauper and parasite. The successful man is one whose thoughts about his bread-winning problem have been wise thoughts; paupers and tramps, with their hunger and rags, are men who have thought foolishly about how they could best earn a livelihood.

He who has one strong faculty, the using of which would give delight and success, yet passes it by, to use a weaker faculty, is doomed to mediocrity and heart-breaking failure. The eagle has powerful muscles under the wings, but slender and feeble legs; the fawn lacks the weight of the draught horse, but has limbs for swiftness. Now, if an eagle should become a competitor in a walking race and if the fawn should enter the list of draught horses, we should have that which answers precisely to the way in which some men seek to gain their livelihood, by tying up their strongest gift and using their feeblest faculties. When it is said that only five merchants out of a hundred succeed we perceive that the great majority of men do not think to any purpose in choosing an occupation. Recalling his friends who had misfitted themselves, Sidney Smith once said: "If we represent the occupations of life by holes in a table, some round, some square, some oblong, and persons by bits of wood of like shapes, we shall generally find that the triangular person has got into the square hole, the oblong into the triangular, while the square person has squeezed himself into the round hole." For lack of wise thinking beforehand, multitudes have died of broken hearts midst failure and misery who might have achieved great happiness and success had they used their thoughts in choosing their life-work. He who approaches his task with a leaden heart is out of the race before he is in it. Success means that the heart loves what the hand does. The bread-winning problem is the one that touches us first and most closely, and to wise thoughts only is it given to solve that problem.

The number and value of our thoughts determine a man's value to society. No investments bring so high a rate of interest as investments of brain. Hand work earns little, but head work much. In a Western camp one miner put his lower brain into the pickaxe and earned $2.00 a day; another miner put his higher brain into the stamp-mill and soon was receiving a score of dollars daily for his work; a third youth, toiling in the same mine, put his genius into an electric process for extracting ore, and sold his invention for a fortune. It seems that wealth was not in the pick, but in the thoughts that handled it. Had God intended man to do his work through the body, man's legs would have been long enough to cover leagues at a stride, his biceps would have been strong enough to turn the crank for steamships, his back would have been Atlantean for carrying freight cars across the plains.

But, instead of giving man long legs, God gave him a mind able to make locomotives. Instead of telescopic eyes, he gave man mind to invent far-seeing glasses. Instead of a thousand fingers for weaving, he gave man five fingers and genius for inventing a thousand steel fingers to do his spinning. Wealth is not in things, but in the brain that shapes raw material. Vast was the sum of gold taken out of California, but this nation might well pay down a hundred Californias for a man to invent a process to make coal drive the engine without the intervention of steam. That inventor would enable the street cars for one cent to carry the people of the tenement-house district ten miles into the country in ten minutes, and thereby, through sunshine and fresh air and solitude, would solve a hundred problems that now vex the statesman and the moralist. A young botanist in Kansas has just announced his purpose to cross the milkweed and the strawberry, so that hereafter strawberries and cream may grow upon the same bush. His task may be doomed to failure, but that youth at least understands that thought turned the wild rice into wheat; thought turned the sweet briar into the crimson rose; brains mixed the pigments for Paul Veronese, and gave the canvas worth a few florins the value of tens of thousand of dollars. Already wise thoughts have turned the barbarian into a gentleman and citizen, and some glad day thoughts will crown man with the attributes and qualities of God.

Of old, the Greek philosopher described the origin of man. One day Ceres, in crossing a stream, saw a human face emerging from the soil. It was the face of a man. Standing by this earth-born creature, the goddess extricated his head and chest; but left his legs fastened in the soil. Now, the invisible friends that free man from his earth fetters are those divine visitors called ideas and thoughts. God hath made thoughts to be golden chariots, in which the soul is swept upward into the heavenly heights.

When thoughts have sown man's pathway with happiness and peace they go on to determine character and futurity. Each life memorable for goodness and nobility has for its motive power some noble thought. Each hero has climbed up to immortality upon those golden rounds called good thoughts. Here is that cathedral spirit, John Milton. In his loneliness and blindness his mind was his kingdom. He loved to think of things true and pure and of good report. Oft at midnight upon the poet's ear there fell the sound of celestial music, that afterward he transposed into his "Paradise Regained." Dying, it was given him to proudly say: "I am not one of those who have disgraced beauty of sentiment by deformity of conduct, nor the maxims of the freeman by the actions of the slave, but by the grace of God, I have kept my soul unsullied." Here is the immortal Bunyan, spending his best years in Bedford jail because he insisted on giving men the message God had first given him; but he, too, opened his mind only to good thoughts. For him, also, dawned the heavenly vision. As the prison doors opened before Peter and the angel, so the dungeon walls parted before his thoughts. Walking about in glad freedom, he crossed the portals of the Palace Beautiful. From its marble steps he saw afar off the Delectable Mountains. Hard by ran the River of the Water of Life. The breezes of the hills of Paradise cooled his hot temples and lifted his hair. His regal thoughts crowned the Bedford tinker and made him king in English literature.

Here also is the carpenter's Son rising before each earthly pilgrim like a star in the night. A man of truly colossal intellect, incomparable as He strides across the realms and ages, yet always thinking the gentlest, kindliest thoughts; thoughts of mildness as well as of majesty; thoughts of humanity as well as divinity. His thoughts were medicines for hurt hearts; His thoughts were wings to all the low-flying; His thoughts freed those who had been snared in the thickets; His thoughts set an angel down beside each cradle; His thoughts of the incarnation rendered the human body forever sacred; His thoughts of the grave sanctified the tomb. Dying and rising, His thoughts clove an open pathway through the sky. Taught by Him, the people have learned to think—not only great thoughts, but good ones, and also how to turn thoughts into life.

Bringing their thoughts to God, God has turned thinking into character. Each spinner who in modesty and fidelity tends his loom, spins indeed, garments for others, but also weaves himself invisible garments of everlasting life. Each shipbuilder fastening his timbers together with honest thoughts will find that his thoughts have become ships carrying him over the sea to the harbor of God. Each worker putting integrity into gold and silver will find that he has carved his own character into a beauty beyond that of gems and sapphires. For his thoughts drag into futurity after them. So deeply was St. George Mivart impressed by this that he said: "The old pauper woman whom I saw to-day in the poorhouse, in her hunger saving her apple to give to the little orphan just brought in, and unraveling her stocking and bending her twisted old fingers to knit its yarn into socks for the blue feet of the child will, I verily believe, begin her life at death with more intellectual genius—mark the words, intellectual genius—than will begin that second life any statesman or prime minister or man famed in our day. For I know of none who hath been faithful in his much after the fashion of the pauper woman's fidelity with her little."

For intellect weighs light as punk against the gold of character. Should God give us to choose between goodness and genius, we may well say, "Give genius to Lucifer, let mine be the better part." Intellect is cold as the ice-palace in Quebec. Heart-broken and weary-worn by life's battle, men draw near to some great-hearted men, as pilgrims crowd close to the winter's fire. Men neither draw their chairs close around a block of ice, nor about a brilliant intellect. Our quarrel with the foolish scientist is that he makes God out as infinite brain. We rejoice at the revelation of Christ, because He portrays God as heart and not genius.

God be thanked for great thoughts, but a thousand times more, God be praised for good thoughts! They are fuel for the fires of enthusiasm. They are rudders that guide us heavenward. They are seeds for great harvests of joy. They fulfill the tale of the fairies who in the night while men slept bridged chasms, builded palaces, laid out streets and lined them with homes, built the city around with walls. For every thought is a builder, every purpose a mansion, and every affection a carpenter. As the builders of the Cologne Cathedral were guided by the plan and pattern of Von Rile, so man's thoughts are builded after that matchless model, Jesus Christ. And while our thoughts work, His thoughts work, also adding beauty to the soul's strength. In the olden tale the artist pupil through very weariness fell asleep before the picture that disappointed him. While he slept his master stole into the room, and with a few swift touches corrected the errors and brought out the lines of lustrous beauty, kindling new hope within the boy's heart. And there are unexpected providences in life, strange influences, interventions and voices in the night. These events over which we have no control, these thoughts of the Master above, shape us not less than the thoughts that build from within. It seems that not one, but two are working upon the soul's structure. As one day in the presence of his master Michael Angelo pulled down the scaffolding in the Sistine Chapel, and the workmen cleared away the ropes and plaster and litter, and looking up men saw the faces of angels and seraphs, with their lustrous and immortal beauty, so some glad day will that angel named Death pull down life's scaffolding and set forever in the sunlight that structure built of thoughts, the stately mansion reared in the mind, the building not made with hands, the character, eternal in the heavens.

The Moral Uses of Memory

VI

The Moral Uses of MemoryToC

The soul is a monarch whose rule includes three realms. Its throne is in the present, but its scepter extends backward over yesterday and forward over to-morrow. The divinity that presides over the past is memory; to-day is ruled by reason, to-morrow is under the regency of hope. In every age memory has been an unpopular goddess. The poet Byron pictures this divinity as sitting sorrowing midst mouldering ruins and withering leaves. But the orators unveil the future as a tropic realm, magical, mysterious and surpassingly rich. The temple where hope is worshiped is always crowded; her shrines are never without gifts of flowers and sweet songs.

But at length has come a day when man perceives that the vast treasure to which the present has fallen heir was bequeathed by that friend called yesterday. The soul increases in knowledge and culture, because as it passes through life's rich fields memory plucks the ripe treasure on either hand, leaving behind no golden sheaf. Philosophy, therefore, opposes that form of poetry that portrays yesterday by the falling tower, the yellow leaf, the setting sun. Memory is a gallery holding pictures of the past. Memory is a library holding wisdom for to-morrow's emergencies. Memory is a banqueting-hall on whose walls are the shields of vanquished enemies. Memory is a granary holding bread for to-morrow's hunger, seed for to-morrow's sowing. That man alone has a great to-morrow who has back of him a multitude of great yesterdays.

Aristotle used memory as a measure of genius. He believed that every great man was possessed of a great memory in his own department. He was the great artist whose mind searched out and whose memory retained the beauty of each sweet child, the loveliness of each maiden and mother. He was the great scientist who remembered all the facts, forgot no exception, and grouped all under laws. The great orator was he whose memory stood ready to furnish all truths gleaned from books and conversation, from travel and experience—weapons these with which the orator faces his hearers in a noble cause, controls and conquers them.

After driving through Windsor Park, Doré, the artist, recognized his debt to memory by observing that he could recall every tree he had passed, and draw each shrub from memory. We are indebted to the mechanical genius of Watt for the steam engine; but, before beginning his work, the inventive faculty asked memory to bring forward all objects, forces and facts suggested by and relating to that steaming tea kettle. Genius cannot create without material upon which to work. It is given to the eye and the ear and the reason to obtain the facts; memory stores these treasures away until they are needed; and, selecting therefrom, the inventive faculty fashions physical things into tools, beautiful things into pictures, ideas into intellectual philosophies, morals into ethical systems. The architect is helpless unless he remembers where are the quarries and what their kinds; where the marbles and what their colors; where the forests and what their trees.

Thus all the creative minds, from Phidias to Shakespeare, have united strength of memory with fertility of invention. As the Gobelin tapestry, depicting the siege of Troy, is woven out of myriads of tinted threads, so each Hamlet and each "In Memoriam" is an intellectual texture woven out of ideas and aspirations furnished by memory. Indeed, without this faculty there could be no knowledge or culture. Destroy memory and man would remain a perpetual infant. Because the mind carries forward each new idea and experience, there comes a day when the youth stands forth a master in his chosen craft or profession. It is memory that unifies man's life and thought, and binds all his experiences into one bundle.

In a large sense civilization itself is a kind of racial memory. Moving backward toward the dawn of history, we come to a time when man stood forth as a savage, his house a cave, his clothes a leather girdle, his food locusts and berries. But to-day he is surrounded by home, and books and pictures, by looms and trains and ships. Now yesterday was the friend that gave man all this rich treasure. We pluck clusters from vines other generations planted. We ride in trains and ships other thinkers invented. We admire pictures and statues other hands painted and carved. Our happiness is through laws and institutions for which other multitudes died. We sing songs that the past did write, and speak a language that generations long dead did fashion.

When De Tocqueville visited our country, he journeyed westward until he stood upon the very frontier of civilization. Before him lay the forests and prairies, stretching for thousands of miles toward the setting sun. But what impressed him most deeply was the civilization behind him, reaching to the Atlantic—a civilization including towns and villages, with free institutions, with schoolroom and church and library. With joy he reflected that the mental and moral harvests behind him were sufficient to sow the vast unconquered land with treasure. Thus each to-day is a frontier line upon which the soul stands. It is the necessity of life for man to journey backward into the past for food and seed with which to sow the unconquered future. For each individual yesterday holds the beginnings of art and architecture. Yesterday holds the beginnings of reform and philanthropy. Yesterday contains the rise and victory of freedom. Yesterday holds the first schoolroom and college and library. Yesterday holds the cross and all its victories over ignorance and sin. Yesterday is a river pouring its rich floods forward, lending majesty and momentum to all man's enterprises. Yesterday is a temple whose high domes and wide walls and flaming altars other hands and hearts have built. For the individual, memory is a granary for mental treasure; and, for the race, civilization is a kind of social memory.

Consider the task laid upon memory. The activity and fruitfulness of the human mind are immeasurable. Reason does not so much weave thoughts as exhale them. Objects march in caravans through the eye gate and the ear gate, each provoking its own train of thought. And the unconscious processes of the mind are of even greater number. The silent songs that genius hears, the invisible pictures that genius paints, the hidden castles that genius builds—no building of a city without can compare for wonder and beauty and richness with the building processes of the soul within. If some angelic reporter could reduce all man's thoughts to physical volume, how vast the book would be! Thoughts do not go single, but march in armies. Feelings and aspirations move like flocks of caroling songsters. Desires swarm forth from the soul like bees from a hive. The soul is a city through whose gates troop innumerable caravans, bearing treasure within, carrying treasure forth without. No Great Eastern ever carried a cargo that was comparable for vastness and richness with that voyaging forward in the mind.

Now the power and skill of God is nowhere more manifest than in this. He has endowed the mind with full power to carry forward all its joys, its friendships and victories. It is given to man to journey in a single summer over that pathway along which the human race has walked. For happiness and culture the traveler lingers by some Runnymede or Marston Moor; stays by castle or cathedral, remains long in gallery or museum. It is the necessity of his body for the traveler to leave the mountain behind him when he returns to the city in the plain. But it is the privilege of the mind to take up these sights and scenes and carry them away as so much treasure made portable by memory. By a secret process mountains and valleys and palaces are reduced in size, photographed and put away ready to be enlarged to the original proportions.

We have already heard of the inventor who planned an engine that laid its track and took it up again while it journeyed forward. But this mechanical dream is literally fulfilled in memory. Grown old and blind, each Milton may pass before his mind all the panorama of the past, to find the events of childhood more helpful in memory than they were in reality. Looking backward, Longfellow reflected that the paths of childhood had lost their roughness; each way was bordered with flowers; sweet songs were in the air; the old home was more beautiful than king's palaces that had opened to his manhood's touch.

Similarly, Dante, storm-beaten, harassed, weary of selfishness, voyaged and traveled into that foreign land that he called "youth." There he hid himself until the storms were passed. For him memory held so much that was bright and beautiful that it became to him a portfolio of engravings, a gallery of pictures, a palace of many chambers. Hidden therein, earth's troubles became as harmless as hail and snow upon tiled castle roofs. Men wonder oft how statesmen and generals and reformers, oppressed beyond endurance, have borne up under their burdens. This is their secret: they have sheltered themselves in the past, found medicines in memory, bathed themselves in old-time scenes that refreshed and cleansed away life's grime. From the chill of arctic enmity, it is given to the soul through memory to rise above the storm and cold and in a moment to enter the tropic atmosphere of noble friendship, where are fragrance and beauty, perpetual warmth and wealth.

It was a favorite principle with Socrates that the lesser man never comprehends the latent strength in his reason or imagination until he witnesses its skill in the greatest. He implies that the eloquence, art, and skill that crown the children of genius exist in rudimentary form in all men. In order, therefore, to understand memory in its ordinary processes, let us consider its functions in those in whom it is unique. Fortunately scholars in every age have preserved important facts concerning the power of recollection. The classic orators contain repeated reference to traveling singers, who could recite the entire Iliad and Odyssey. In his "Declamations," speaking of the inroads disease had made upon him, Seneca remarks that he could speak two thousand words and names in the order read to him, and that one morning he listened to the reading of two hundred verses of poetry, and in the afternoon recited them in their order and without mistake.

Muretus remarks that the stories of Seneca's memory seemed to him almost incredible, until he witnessed a still more marvelous occurrence. The sum of his statement is that at Padua there dwelt a young Corsican, a brilliant and distinguished student of civil law. Having heard of his marvelous faculty of memory a company of gentlemen requested from him an exhibition of his power. Six Venetian noblemen were judges, though there were many other witnesses of the feat. Muretus dictated words, Latin, Greek, barbaric, disconnected and connected, until he wearied himself and the man who wrote them down, and the audience who were present. Afterward the young man repeated the entire list of words in the same order, then backward, then every other word, then every fifth word, etc., and all without error.

Sir William Hamilton says that the librarian for the Grand Duke of Tuscany read every book and pamphlet in his master's library and took a mental photograph of each page. When asked where a certain passage was to be found, he would name the alcove, shelf, book, page containing the passage in question. Scaliger, the scholar, who has been called the most learned man that ever lived, committed the Iliad to memory in three weeks and mastered all the Greek poets in four months. Ben Jonson could repeat all he had ever written and many volumes he had read, as could Niebuhr, the historian. Macaulay believed that he had never forgotten anything he had ever read, seen, or thought. Coleridge tells of an ignorant family servant, who in moments of unconsciousness through fever, recited passages of Greek and Hebrew. The explanation was that the servant had been long in the family of an old clergyman whose habit it was to read aloud the Bible in the originals.

Physicians have noted instances where a foreigner coming to this country at the age of four or five has completely forgotten his native tongue. Grown old and gray, in moments of unconsciousness through fever, the aged man has talked in the forgotten language of infancy. Our best students of mental philosophy believe that no thought or feeling, no enmity or aspiration, is ever forgotten. The sentiments written on clay harden into granite. Dormant memories are not dead. At a touch they return in their old-time power and vigor. Science tells us that the flight of a bird, the falling of a leaf, the laughter of a child, the vibration of song, changes the whole universe. The boy shying a stone from one tree to another alters the center of gravity for the earth. And if the movements of dead leaves and stones are events unchangeably written down in nature, how much more are living hopes and thoughts. The soul is more sensitive than the thermometer, more delicate than the barometer, and all its processes are registered. Thoughts are events that stain the mind through in fast colors. Did man but know it, no event falls through memory's net.

It helps us to understand the immortality of memory to notice the provision made in nature for revealing hidden facts and forces. To-day chemistry shows us how events done in darkness shall be revealed in light, and the deeds of the closet be proclaimed from the housetop. In olden times princes communicated with each other by messengers. Then it was necessary to guard against the dispatch falling into the hands of the enemy, so between the lines of the apparent message was a dispatch traced in letters as colorless as water. But when the sheet was held before the blazing fire, the secret writing appeared. Thus in the kingdom of the soul, nature has provided for causing events to stand forth from the past. Under stimulus the memory performs the most astonishing feats. Excitement is a fire that causes the dim record to stand forth in clearness.

A distinguished lawyer of an Eastern city relates that while engaged in an argument upon which vast issues depended he suddenly realized that he had forgotten to guard a most important point. In that hour of excitement his faculties became greatly stimulated. Decisions, authorities and precedents long since forgotten began to return to his mind. Dimly outlined at first, they slowly grew plain, until at length he read them with perfect distinctness. Mr. Beecher had a similar experience when he fronted the mob in Liverpool. He said that all events, arguments and appeals that he had ever heard or read or written passed before his mind as oratorical weapons, and standing there he had but to reach forth his hand and seize the weapons as they went smoking by. All public men have had similar experiences—witness the testimony of Pitt, Burke and Wendell Phillips. But what event has such power to restore the records of memory as that secret excitement when the soul is like an ambassador returned home from a foreign mission to report before the throne of God? Thus, giving in its account, what sacred stimulus will fall upon memory!

In every age poets and philosophers have made much of associations as a restorer of dim memories. Porter has a story of a dinner party in which a reference to Benedict Arnold was immediately followed by someone asking the value of the Roman denarius. Reflection shows that the question was directly suggested by the topic under discussion. Benedict Arnold suggested Judas Iscariot and the thirty pieces of silver given him, and therefore the value of the coin which he received as reward. Similarly there is a tradition that Peter's face was clouded with sorrow whenever he heard the crowing of a cock. Bulwer Lytton represents Eugene Aram as scarcely able to restrain a scream of agony when a friend chanced to drive in near the spot where in murderous hate he had struck a fatal blow.

Thus, no sin is ever buried, save as a murderer buries his victim under a layer of thin sand. But let him pass that way, and a skeleton arm starts up and points to heaven and to the evil doer. The philosopher affirms that the "memory of the past can never perish until the tree or the river or the sea" with which the dark memory is associated has been blotted out of existence. Thus, the law of association ever works to bring back the ghastly phantom, to chill the blood and sear the brain. Nothing is ever forgotten. One touch, one sight, one sound, the murmur of the stream, the sound of a distant bell, the barking of a dog in the still evening, the green path in the wood with the sunlight glinting on it, the way of the moon upon the waters, the candlestick of the Bishop for Jean Valjean, the passing of a convict for Dean Maitland, the drop of blood for Donatello—these may, through the events associated therewith, turn the heart to stone and fill the life with a dumb agony of remorse.

Moreover, Shakespeare indicates how conscience in its magisterial aspects has skill for reviving forgotten deeds. In the laboratory scientists take two glasses, each containing a liquid colorless as water and pour them together, when lo! they unite and form a substance blacker than the blackest ink. As the chemical bath brings out the picture that was latent in the photographic plate, so in its higher moods events half-remembered and half-forgotten rise into perfect recollection. History tells us of the Oriental despot who in an hour of revelry commanded his butler to slay a prophet whom he had imprisoned and bring the pale head in upon a charger. Long afterward there came a day when, sitting in the seclusion of his palace, a soldier told those around the banqueting-table the story of a wonder-worker whom he had seen upon his journey. When the banqueters were wondering who this man was, suddenly the king arose pale and trembling and cried out. "I know! It is John the Baptist whom I have beheaded; he is risen from the dead!"

This old-time story tells us that dormant memories are not dead, but are like hibernating serpents that with warmth lift their heads to strike. It fulfills, as has been said, the old-time story of the man groping along the wall until his fingers hit upon a hidden spring, when the concealed door flew open and revealed the hidden skeleton. It tells us that much may be forgotten in the sense of being out of mind, but nothing is forgotten in the sense that it cannot be recalled. Every thought the mind thinks moves forward in character, even as foods long forgotten report themselves in flesh and blood. Memory is a canvas above and the man works beneath it. Every faculty is a brush with which man thinks out his portrait. Here and now, deceived by siren's song, each Macbeth thinks himself better than he is. But the time comes at last when memory cleanses the portrait and causes his face to stand forth ineffaceable in full revelation.

But memory also hath aspects gracious and most inspiring. "I have lived well yesterday," said the poet; "let to-morrow do its worst." To this sentiment the statesman added: "I have done what I could for my fellows, and my memories thereof are more precious than gold and pearls." Thus all they who have loved wisdom and goodness will find their treasures safe in memory's care. Perhaps some precious things do perish out of life. The melody trembling on the chords after the song is sung sinks away into silence. The light lingering in the clouds after the day is done at last dies out in darkness. But as the soul is consciously immortal through personality, it has an unconscious immortality through its tool or teaching, through its example or influence. Time avails not for destroying. God and the soul never forget.

Wisdom comes to all young hearts who as yet have no past, before whose feet lies the stream of life, waiting to bear them into the future, and bids them reflect that maturity, full of successes, is only the place where the tides of youth have emptied their rich treasures. He whose yesterday is full of industry and ambition, full of books and conversation and culture, will find his to-morrow full of worth, happiness and friendship. But he who gives his memory no treasure to be garnered, will find his hopes to be only the mirage in the desert, where burning sands take on the aspect of lake and river. Wisdom comes also to those who in their maturity realize that the morrow is veiled in uncertainty, and their tomb is not far distant. It bids them reflect that their yesterdays are safe, that nothing is forgotten; that no worthy deed has fallen out of life; that yesterday is a refuge from conflict, anxiety and fear.

To patriot and parent, to reformer and teacher, comes the inspiring thought that God garners in His memory every helpful act. No good influence is lost out of life. Are David and Dante dead? Are not Tennyson and Milton a thousandfold more alive to-day than when they walked this earth? Death does but multiply the single voice and strengthen it. God causes each life to fulfill the legend of the Grecian traveler, who, bearing homeward a sack of corn, sorrowed because some had been lost out through a tiny hole; but, years afterward, fleeing before his enemies along that way, he found that the seed had sprung up and multiplied into harvests for his hunger. Thus yesterday feeds in each pilgrim heart the faith that goodness shall triumph. For memory that is little in man is large in God. The Infinite One forgets nothing save human frailty and sin. Remembering the great mind, the eloquent tongue, the large purse, God remembers also the cup of cold water, and causes the humblest deed to follow its doer unto the heavenly shores.