Page:A Few Hours in a Far Off Age.djvu/98

Rh the past. Experience has taught us that no matter what our righteous needs may be, the requisites for supplying them are either awaiting our learning and research, or making correlative growth. Then away with all doubt or fear upon what we cannot yet take part in! We must hope and trust with a hope and trust as infinite as our spirits."

All are silent and thoughtful. Before us the wretched old mine, with its sad workers. Naked children toiling, nearly naked women and men harnessed to carts full of coal; going through low-roofed roadways, on hands and knees, drawing their wearying loads to the apparatus for raising to the outer world those changed glories of the grand, solemn old forests—the unlovely part of whose history can only be guessed.

Long they have thought. I have before observed it is the practice of this lady, after having aroused her pupils' interest, to let them reflect awhile. At last Frederick asks, with unusual emphasis on his words:

"Did the people who were called pious warm themselves by coal obtained in so shocking a manner?"

At this moment his father enters. Having heard the lad's strange question, he defers explaining the reason of his early appearance, and answers:

"My son, the 'pious' people committed worse acts than that. You know not yet half the baseness we have evolved from. You have only reached the nineteenth century. That was scarcely past the great transition period (reckoning downwards), when those pitiable barbarians had begun to claim the right of their own minds to think for themselves. You have, of course, noted how long it took before they succeeded in quite disentangling themselves from the chains of superstition. But when you examine the centuries below