Part 27

I cannot see what need nor what excuse there is for all this bragging. A great many strong men lived before Agamemnon,--and after him. We indeed do some things that would astonish our forefathers; but how are we superior to them on that account? We enslave the lightnings of heaven to be our messengers, and compel the sun to take our portraits; but if our electric wires are prostituted to the chicanery of trade or politics, and the faces which the sun portrays are expressive of nothing nobler than mercantile shrewdness and the price of cotton, the less we boast of our achievements, the better. Thucydides never had his works puffed in a newspaper, Virgil and Horace never poetized or lectured for a lyceum; Charlemagne never saw a locomotive, nor did St. Thomas Aquinas ever use a friction match. Yet this unexampled age possesses, I apprehend, few historians who would not shrink from being compared with the famous Greek annalist, few poets worthy to wear the crowns of the friends of the great Augustus, few rulers more sagacious and firm than the first Emperor of the West, and few scholars who would not consider it a privilege to be taught by the Angelic Doctor.

True progress is something superior to your puffing engines and clicking telegraphs, and independent of them. It is the advancement of humanity in the knowledge of its frailty and dependence; the elevation of the mind above its own limited acquirements, to the infinite source of knowledge; the cleansing of the heart of its selfishness and uncleanness; in fact, it is any thing whatever that tends to assimilate man more closely to the divine Exemplar of perfect manhood.

*THE END.*