That is the time of danger; and how many lose heart and hope and fall weakly by the way when they first learn that to state a truth with power is not enough to insure its acceptance! That one should set himself with courage and faith to the long, slow processes of actual change of the social order after he has learned how difficult that is, is to be indeed a hero--a hero of the actualization of the ideal, even though he dies with the promised land hardly in sight.
In later life comes to many, and should to all, another gift.

Not alone the vision of youth, never lost and always dear; not only the strength of open-eyed effort to achieve so much of the ideal, even its very least atom, as the times and the conditions allow and not lose heart that it is so little, but also the interpretative and harmonizing spirit of those who see, beyond the personal ideal and vision and far beyond the personal achievement, the upward march of all mankind--not alone the leaders of that march; not alone those who will and know the upward way, but all who feel the under-current pressure "toward the better, ever onward toward the best," This pressure even those feel who fondly imagine they are holding all life to outgrown patterns, and they prove its power by their unconscious response.
Another gift of insight they may have who grow old in the spirit of youth.

It is the gift of seeing in one picture those who have come a long way up the path of progress and those who have but just entered upon it.

The harsh judgments of youth, so tonic and useful, that measure moral actions by their exact position in ethical perception (judgment so tonic and useful that youth without that element misses its own gift to human progress) cease to serve in old age for purposes of just discrimination.

In later life may come the wisdom of understanding those from whom one differs, the gift of seeing the helpful interrelations of newer and older "mores" in normal human development and the glad recognition that even defective moral vision, though retarding needed changes, may be used by the powers that balance our complex life to hold, its course steady in chaos of change.