Slow as men are to
realize the fact and the magnitude of this great grant, and the supreme
value of it as life itself in all its abundance of blessings, there
comes a time to every generous and open heart when the youth is made
aware of the stream of beneficence flowing in upon him from the forms
and forces of nature with benedictions of beauty and vigour; he knows,
too, the cherishing of human service all about him in familiar love and
the large brothering of man's general toil; he begins to see, shaping
itself in him, the vast tradition of the past,--its mighty sheltering of
mankind in institution and doctrine and accepted hopes, its fostering
agencies, its driving energies. What a breaking out there is then in him
of the emotions that are fountain-heads of permanent life,--filial love,
patriotic duty, man's passion for humanity! It is then that he becomes a
man. Strange would it be, if, at such tidal moments, the youth should
not, in pure thankfulness, find out the Giver of all good!
"As soon as man thus knows himself a creature, he has established a
direct relation with the Creator, did he but realize it,--not in mere
thought of some temporal creation, some antecedent fact of a beginning,
but in immediate experience of that continuing act which keeps the
universe in being,
'Which wields the world with never wearied love,
Sustains it from beneath and kindles it above,'--
felt and known now in the life which, moment to moment, is his own.
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