In attempting to make deductions or to reach conclusions, how often one hears the expression, "That depends upon your point of view." This point of view from a material basis seems to be a changing, shifting thing, depending upon different opinions of different people under different circumstances. Even in the same place the vision to the human eye will change as the person or the sense changes. It is said that some one once came to Corot, the great landscape painter, and said to him that he had been just where the artist had been when he painted a certain beautiful picture, yet he did not see there what was in the picture. "Ah, yes," replied the artist; "but you did not know where to sit down to look." In that case the same vision became a different thing from a different point of view. In this case, the wonderful picture was the result of the artist's understanding of the right viewpoint.
Can we not all recall childish conceptions which have vanished with mature years and understanding? The writer well remembers her own concept of a certain city, gained from visits in her childhood, when it seemed to her the largest in the world. Now, in mature years, though it is larger than when she visited it as a child, it is seen as a nice, thriving little city, the capital of one of the middle western states. It is simply that her viewpoint has changed.
A man visiting the lower part of New York city noticed a group of foreign looking people carrying their luggage on their backs and walking in the middle of the street. On asking his friend who they were and why they did this, he was told that they were immigrants who had just landed, and that in the country from which they came it was a misdemeanor for them to walk on the sidewalks. Their vision of freedom had been broad enough to bring them across a great ocean to a land of liberty, and yet, having arrived, their viewpoint had not changed sufficiently to enable them to grasp the meaning of real freedom. So up the middle of the street they came, in the same old way, carrying their burdens on their backs. Do we never do the same thing? Have we not crossed a sea of error and trouble to find real freedom, and yet once within its boundaries have we not continued to carry our old beliefs and burdens and make no proper use of our new found liberty?
