The world never recognizes these dreamers. The successful man
admits limitations. He accepts conditions as they are. He uses
his imagination only as long as it can carry him to individual
success and comfort.
But the very greatest spirits among men are the spirits of
dreamers.
These are the men who refuse to acknowledge any limitations save
the limitations of absolute truth and of absolute possibility.
When nine-tenths of human beings were slaves, these dreamers
refused to recognize slavery, and they died for their belief.
Every man who led a great moral reform ahead of his time was a
dreamer. And these dreamers, whose lives are scattered through
history, each a tragedy and each a milestone on the path of
civilization, did for civilization what a frontiersman does for a
new country.
Jesus Christ was a dreamer. He saw the truth and preached it,
although it meant death, and He knew that it meant death. The
brotherhood that He preached nineteen hundred years ago has not
yet been realized, but it WILL be realized in His name, and
His teachings and His death will be eternal factors in its
realization.
Slowly through the centuries the men of imagination who do not
dream are working and striving, each doing his little part to
realize the prophecies of the Great Dreamer.
Each compared to Him is as a tiny tallow dip compared to the
noonday sun, but each is necessary.