another march through the wilderness toward the unabiding City of God.
Always the political government lags behind the customs of society; always the customs of society lag behind the practise of the foremost individuals; always the practise of the individual lags behind their private vision and conscience. All the world's bitterest tragedies, its colossal wars and devastations, the execution of Socrates, the crucifixion of Christ, the burnings of saints and sages, the hanging of John Brown, have been due precisely to this, that the imagination of the world was not yet permeated by the light which shone through its heretics and martyrs. That which makes every massacre of innocents so horrid, that which makes so unbearable the destruction of youth and beauty in war, that which gives to the murderous extinction of humanity's light-bringers so piercing a pathos, is that always, in the very hour and place of destruction, there are meek unprotesting witnesses who know that what is being enacted is a mistake; there are souls already on the scene, pure and humane, who pray for a divine interposition, and murmur unheeded by the howling populace, "They know not what they do."
The mission of the man of letters is to be at the point where, through the brazen dome of
