They do me wrong who say I come no more,
When once I knock and fail to find you in;
For every day I stand outside your door,
And bid you awake and rise to fight and win.
Wail not for precious chances passed away;
Weep not for golden ages on the wane;
Each night I burn the records of the day,
At sunrise every soul is born again.
Laugh like a boy at splendors that are sped;
To vanished joys be blind and deaf and dumb;
My judgments seal the dead past with its dead,
But never bind a moment yet to come.
Though deep in mire, wring not your hands and weep,
I lend my arm to all who say, "I can."
What a magnificent view of human evolution! No ultimate failure possible because there is always another chance. The failure of one incarnation made good by the sincere efforts of the next. All the faults and frailties—the shadow blots of the past—vanishing in the light of a higher wisdom that has been won. No endless hell, no eternal torment; not even the ghosts of vanished chances to haunt the mind; but only the insistent voice of immortal Opportunity, urging us to wake and rise to strive and win!
FOOTNOTES:
[L] Interview in San Francisco Examiner, March 5, 1916.
CHAPTER XI.
REBIRTH: ITS NECESSITY
There are apparently but three ways in which anybody has attempted to explain the origin of the race. If two of these are shown to be impossible we have no course open to us but to accept the one which remains. One of the three theories is that of the materialist. Another is the common belief that God created an original human pair and continues to create souls for babies. The third hypothesis is that of the evolution of the soul.
The materialist's position seems to be, briefly, that the forces of nature, with no directive intelligence, are sufficient to account for man as we see him; that a continuing consciousness in the human being is a delusion; that immortality is a vain dream and that humanity has neither a past nor a future. Yet the very facts of science to which the materialist appeals contradict such conclusions.
This materialistic belief regards the human body as a self-sufficient machine whose brain generates thought. But the savage has a completely evolved physical body with eyes, ears and other organs like our own. His brain under the microscope shows no trace of difference in its material constitution from the brain of civilized man. Indeed, his physical body is not only as complete a machine as ours but is likely to be materially sounder. Why, then, if the brain produces thought, does not this savage produce the thoughts of a philosopher? If there is no directing soul back of the brain, why the marvelous difference in the product of the two brains?
Materialists go too far in the assumption that they can explain the phenomena of life. They can talk learnedly about it but they must stop short of the source of life. Everything about anatomy and physiology they know, but the life that flows through the human machine remains unexplained. They can trace the circulation of the blood from the heart through the arteries, from the arteries across to the veins, from the veins back to the heart, but the greatest mind the race has produced cannot say what makes the heart beat. Life has not been explained and cannot be explained from the materialist's viewpoint. Every human being is a miracle. A fingernail is a mystery of evolution. It is formed from the same food that makes the flesh and it will continue to be formed regardless of the variety or quality of the food. Why do certain particles become flesh or nails? Who can draw the division line between them? With marvelous instruments and wondrous skill science has explored and mapped and charted the "tabernacle of clay," but it cannot throw a single ray of light upon the intelligence that animates it.