He worked knowing what the end must be—expecting little while he lived—but knowing that every fact in the wide universe was on his side. He knew that truth can wait, and so he worked patient as eternity.
He had the brain of a philosopher and the heart of a child.
Horace Seaver was a man of common sense.
By that I mean, one who knows the law of average. He denied the Bible, not on account of what has been discovered in astronomy, or the length of time it took to form the delta of the Nile—but he compared the things he found with what he knew.
He knew that antiquity added nothing to probability—that lapse of time can never take the place of cause, and that the dust can never gather thick enough upon mistakes to make them equal with the truth.
He knew that the old, by no possibility, could have been more wonderful than the new, and that the present is a perpetual torch by which we know the past.
To him all miracles were mistakes, whose parents were cunning and credulity. He knew that miracles were not, because they are not.
He believed in the sublime, unbroken, and eternal march of causes and effects—denying the chaos of chance, and the caprice of power.
He tested the past by the now, and judged of all the men and races of the world by those he knew.
He believed in the religion of free thought and good deed—of character, of sincerity, of honest endeavor, of cheerful help—and above all, in the religion of love and liberty—in a religion for every day—for the world in which we live—for the present—the religion of roof and raiment, of food, of intelligence, of intellectual hospitality—the religion that gives health and happiness, freedom and content—in the religion of work, and in the ceremonies of honest labor.