The temperance movement, too, embodies itself in a fountain
that runs ice-water instead of claret. The less tangible but perhaps
more fruitful form of reunions and discussions must in a greater or less
degree enhance the power for good of these organizations. They are led
by men of mind and energy, seldom averse to enlightenment, and all
professing to seek nothing else. When men of these qualities, aiming at
the same or a like object, meet to compare their respective
admeasurements of its parallax made from as many different points, they
cannot fail to approach accuracy. Faith is a first element in all great
undertakings. It removes mountains at Mont Cenis, as it walked the waves
with Columbus. In our century even faith is progressive, and does not
shrink from elbowing its way through what Bunyan would have styled
Vanity Fair.
Modestly in the rear of the moral reformers, yet not wholly and
uniformly unaggressive, nor guiltless altogether of isms and schisms,
step forward the literary men. As a rule, they do not affect
expositions, or exhibitions of any kind. But one general meeting, with
some minor and informal ones, is on the programme for them. This is
well. The world and the fullness thereof belongs to them, and they may
care to come forward to scan this schedule of their inheritance. We do
not hear of their having combined to put up a pavilion of their own,
like the dairymen and the brewers, "to show the different processes of
manufacture.
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