Your fingers tingle with mad expectancies; your eyes roam, lost in
estimates. Your note-book shows long lines of figures. Your reading of
the news centres in the stock-list. Your brow grows cramped with the
fever of anxiety. Through whole church-hours your dreams range over the
shadowy transactions of the week or the month to come.
Even with old religious habit clinging fast to your soul, you dream now
only of nice conformity, comfortable faith, high respectability; there
lies very little in you of that noble consciousness of Duty
performed,--of living up to the Life that is in you,--of grasping boldly
and stoutly at those chains of Love which the Infinite Power has lowered
to our reach. You do not dream of being, but of seeming. You spill the
real essence, and clutch at the vial which has only a label of Truth.
Great and holy thoughts of the Future,--shadowy, yet bold conceptions of
the Infinite,--float past you dimly, and your hold is never strong
enough to grapple them to you. They fly, like eagles, too near the sun;
and there lies game below for your vulture beak to feed upon.
[Great thoughts belong only and truly to him whose mind can hold them.
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