I was in the class room: a hundred young girls sat there listening. It was a question-and-answer class. The lecturer held in his hand some slips of paper. He read from one: "Will my achievement equal my aspiration?" The reader looked up; the fair young faces looked at him anxiously: aspiring, longing hearts were there. He looked back at them seriously, and he answered, "Yes, yes, your aspiration shall live in achievement some time. It may not be here, but what matters that. If the aspiration is noble, —if it is for one's own best good and for the good of others that it should be realized,—then it will—it must."
Something more the lecturer said on the same subject, solemnly and well, and the lesson was ended, and then came to me a surprise. I had heard in that class-room sentences of subtle analysis and of artistic love, accompanied with finest illustration, and yet all quiet, not a murmur of enthusiasm, but now the quick applause followed. What the ethical and artistic could not win the pure spiritual thought could and did. To me it was a sign of the times,—the new times in which the things of the spirit are becoming tangible, —that all this fresh young life should find inspiration and satisfaction in the thought that their aspirations, seeming to them so importunate for realization, should be realized—when? how? in this life? Possibly, but if not, in the hereafter; and I went away, and I said to my friends, "I have heard something so beautiful!" They said, "What?" I told them. "Why, is that new to you?" they said. I stopped and thought. Of course not; I had heard it always, and yet I seemed to hear it now for the first time.
"Most moral truths have been said," some one said once. "Why go on saying them over and over?" Because many minds need many fountains; not all will drink at one. Truth needs more than to be heard—it needs to be perceived.
