Years ago, work was begun on a bridge which was to connect two sections of one our large cities; slowly the stone arches were formed, and, as it seemed to onlookers, after a long time the structure was completed which, stretching across a deep gully and high above many lines of railroad tracks, to-day forms a safe and pleasant passageway for pedestrians, and direct communication for transportation and traffic across the city.
We stand before a fine painting or piece of sculpture and see the embodiment of an ideal; we read a beautiful poem and find thought wrought into expression, or listen to an artistic rendition of some musical work and trace the development of a lofty conception. To a thoughtful mind, these expressed ideals of utility, art, and beauty, suggest uplifting lessons; they mean beginnings, sometime and somewhere, small, perhaps insignificant and obscure; they mean progress through discouragement, in the face of obstacles and often opposition; they mean steady fidelity to an ideal not always, and perhaps seldom, understood or recognized, and above all they mean the capacity for work which has somewhere been described as genius.
When our years of preparation are ended, and thought, purified, yields its human concepts to the divine, the revelations of Christian Science begin to unveil a new ideal of life and its demands. We perceive not only possibilities of attainment which to frail human capacity have seemed hitherto unattainable, but we recognize an absolute demand for the manifestation or expression of the best. These demands startle human sense from its lethargy of ease, its dream of idleness, and quicken the energies to more active and vital issues. From the immortal ideal which transfigures thought, comes also the inspiration which destroys fear, banishes discouragement, causes self-distrust to sink into self-for-getfulness, and gives the endurance to suffer, if need be, till the error which seeks to obscure the light of the divine ideal, or turn us from it, shall have been destroyed.
