Joel 2:28 And it shall come to pass afterward, that I will pour out my spirit on all flesh; and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy… The age is against us. The youth of the world with its buoyancy has given place to the fin de siecle, the old age of the weary Titan, with its spiritual fatigue. You feel this everywhere. It is not only in our hard, analytic views of nature that we feel this death of dreams; all life is alike. The young man to-day will find the world no way congenial to the dreamer; it will only be through a thick fog that he will see his visions. Take city life. How visionless all life seems to you, covered inch deep with dust, and that not of the cleanest. There is not much space for poetry in the model lodging-house, or furnished apartments. A hive of industry the city may be, but dreams and visions are no part of its output. Turn to the factory. In old times man's work was itself a dream. The factory system has killed all that. To-day in every sphere of life the young man will find a subtle penetrating realism banishing all visions, a fog that can be felt chilling down every enthusiasm. Nevertheless, the prophet Joel was right: dreams and visions are the very salt for all life, its one reality. All life will ultimately be weighed by this one thing, — the ideals to which men stood true in spite of every difficulty. Take the life of a nation. The study of that life is history. Look then at Greece, Rome, Israel, or any other nation, and you will find that its dreams and visions are the all in a nation's history which does not die. History is, in fact, but the science of regulated enthusiasms and their results. Hope makes history a progress instead of a cycle. The deathless element in English life and history does not find its way into our text books. Its real gold is those priceless ideas of liberty, law, and true individuality, which have been the lode-star of her destinies. The most certain verdict of history is this: when a nation once loses its dreams and visions, its end has come. That which is true of the nation is no less true of the individual. The value of every man must ultimately be reckoned by the only changeless standard of value — the dreams and visions that were his. We must be careful not to narrow down the currency of heaven to realisations only. The history of religion, in fact, is but the record of how the enthusiasms of some enthusiast have permeated and changed the lives of men. Buddhism, Mohammedanism, Jesuitism, are all the slowly stiffening result of mighty dreams. Urge every young man to be an idealist. Do not be ashamed to have your enthusiasms. The true idealist never lives in cloudland; he ever seeks to have his home amid the stern realities of life. He seeks to lift the real up to the ideal. Take the roughest blocks, and be a seer, like Michael Angelo; see in them what God sees, the possibilities of higher things. It is the idealism of Jesus that is the salvation of the world. You can be an idealist even in business. Take your dreams and visions into life as a citizen; into your politics; into your home; into the Church. (Herbert B. Workman.) Parallel Verses KJV: And it shall come to pass afterward, that I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh; and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions: |
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