Page:The World's Famous Orations Volume 5.djvu/51

 Curious to see how, in Oxford and other places that used to seem as lying at anchor in the stream of time, regardless of all changes, they are getting into the highest humor of mutation, and all sorts of new ideas are afloat. It is evident that whatever is not inconsumable, made of asbestos, will have to be burnt in this world. Nothing other will stand the heat it is getting exposed to.

And in saying that, I am but saying in other words that we are in an epoch of anarchy. Anarchy plus a constable! There is nobody that picks one's pocket without some policeman being ready to take him up. But in every other point man is becoming more and more the son, not of cosmos, but of chaos. He is a disobedient, discontented, reckless, and altogether waste kind of object (the commonplace man is, in these epochs); and the wiser kind of man—the select few, of whom I hope you will be a part—has more and more to see to this, to look vigilantly forward, and will require to move with double wisdom; will find, in short, that the crooked things he has got to pull straight in his own life all round him, wherever he may go, are manifold and will task all his strength, however great it be.

But why should I complain of that either? For that is the thing a man is born to in all epochs. He is born to expend every particle of strength that God Almighty has given him, in doing the work he finds he is fit for; to stand up