The lives of the remarkable men and women who have been canonized by the church have left the world the better for their being and humanity the richer for the inheritance of their experience. Their history is not to be held merely as tradition or as superstition. Let one visit in Italy Assisi, the home of St. Francis; Siena, the home of St. Catherine, and follow the footsteps of others whose names enrich the church calendar, to their homes and haunts, and their record becomes vivid and vitalized as, to a stranger visiting Boston, might become the footsteps of her noble and consecrated lives which are yet almost within universal personal remembrance: the lives of Lydia Maria Child, William Lloyd Garrison, Emerson, Whittier, Lucy Stone, Lowell, Mary A. Livermore, James Freeman Clarke, and Phillips Brooks,—men and women whom Boston may well hold as her prophets and her saints. They, too, were of the order of "The Beginners." They sowed the seeds of the higher life. They were receptive to all high counsels from the ethereal world, from the divine realms; they listened to great truths which the multitude did not hear, and they gave it anew by voice and by pen, till all the world might hear and read and receive it. They were, indeed,—
"God's prophets of the Beautiful."
Such persons were living a twofold life during their entire earthly pilgrimage, and we may well recall their lives and link them with those of the great and the holy men and women of all ages and all climes.
The pathfinders of human progress do not live for personal ease,—
"The hero is not fed on sweets."
These are royal natures, who come into the world not to enjoy ease and prosperity, but who bring with them the high destiny of sacrifice. Their lives are companioned with struggle and conflict. Of such experiences as theirs well might be asked the question so impressively conveyed in these noble lines by America's great woman poet,—our poet who sang the song of the nation's "Battle-Hymn,"—Julia Ward Howe:
"What hast thou for thy scattered seed,
O Sower of the plain?
Where are the many gathered sheaves
Thy hope should bring again?"