O far-seeing seers,
Looking over the shoulders of empires and nations,
unconsciously dwarfed with prejudice,
Telescopic in vision, down the vista of the centuries,
You know not how far and deep you thought,
Nor what beginnings you wrought;
For we hasten to crown you, the world pioneers.
* * * * *
Call the roll of the men whose minds have companioned with
the globe!
Who were these staunch henchmen of a race,
Getting their inspiration from a pillared cloud by day and
a pillar of fire by night,
And negotiating with the continents and seas of an earth?
Who were these world pioneers?
* * * * *
Courageous Magellan, you were the first of the spheric heroes,
Who with your fifteen braves looking out from an isthmian
cliff, civilization's bleakest frontier,
Out upon an untrailed, unsailed, trackless deep,
Was the first to push away from an Astec--hugged shore,
And send westward your creaking craft so mightily propelled
by an explorer's tireless heart,
That when at Maclan island the red man's arrow struck you to
the earth,
The mighty spirit of your immortal soul so fired your
companion's wills,
That they with invincible force encircled the globe--
Past the Celestial Empire, doubling Cape Good Hope
And into Seville Roads, they came!
The first to complete the voyage about the sphere!
The first to exclaim, "the world, the world."
* * * * *
And inconquerable Cyrus Field you were one;
Who by linking Valentia and New Foundland,
Awakening to mutual speech two continents that were mutually
dumb,--
Was, in spite of repeated breakings and the cowardly desertion
of avowed friends,
The first, O indomitable knight of a world's progress,
To successfully lay the Atlantic cable.
The first to start a conversation between two hemispheres
And with initial message to yonder shores proclaim:
"Europe and America are now by telegraph united
To God be glory, in the highest
And on earth peace and good will toward men."
Indispensable pioneer, you wedded the continents as Goethals
united the seas.
And now the voice of man is naturalized to a sphere.
It can be heard through the nations, around the world.
Whether Caucasian or Mongolian--he can talk about the globe.
* * * * *
And distance-vanishing Fulton, you were one;
Who--launching upon the waters the first steam-propelled ship,
the Cleremont,
From who's experimental hull leaped into existence
The Savanah, the Great Eastern and Britannia,
Each moving faster, faster than the one before--
Was the first to draw together the continents, like some
Colossus with a shortening cord of time
Until from coast range to distant shores
And from distant shores to coast range
Each new speeding steamer brings us closer,
Making more certain the intermingling of the races preparing
for the brotherhood of man.
* * * * *
And great Augustine, dissolute as a youth
But angelic as a man, you were one;
Who--the humblest and the quickest to recognize
That since the day of Christ all noble men were sent,
And that constrained and resolute with Paul and with Peter
they had gone--
Was the first--thank God you appeared--to marshal the good
men for conquest,
To organize into missionary ranks the vision'd souls of the
church,
Dispatching spirit-armored heroes from Rome to early England's
soil
And preventing the annihilation of Christian hope and truth.
* * * * *
Noble prophet! Little did you know, O Augustine, what you had
done.
Unbrazened in the face, illuminated with the divine,
With the crystal eye of goodness looking light and health into
pagan nights,
And cowering Lust's mountain hurling hosts,
Followed by new recruits, since then the ranks have grown.
Men have come one by one and year by year
Until fifteen thousand heralded volunteers and ninety thousand
native workers
Now can be seen from glad heavens Missionary Ridge, offering
light and character on heathen fields!
Far-reaching, sea-exploring, colonizing England in its youth
saved for enlightenment!
Christ inspired it! But you achieved it!
And today, as the oceans and the continents are united,
So five hundred and sixty-five million followers are gradually
demanding that the races and the peoples
In essential Christianity--the good recognizing in other
faiths--shall be one.
* * * * *
And mind-emancipating Luther, thou art one--
Fearing only God and truth.
Hating naught but sham and falsehood!
For traveling back from our day into medieval darkness--
(The chains, hear them rattle! But also hear them snap in a
true reformers clutch
Causing multitudes to rise from superstition
And stand upon their feet, erect in the freedom of a simple
faith)--
We there behold the pioneer of intellectual freedom,
A simple monk, commanding the low-browed ignorance of a whole
dark continent to think,
Awakening the western world to science, to true religion and
to thought;
Until the mind of the sullen masses of Europe now is brooding,
And in America it is voting,
While the public mind of the world is becoming more and more
habituated to reason for international concourse.
For the Bible, the rocks and the skys are unchained,
Because Luther lived and honestly dared for the truth!
* * * * *
These are the men--inspired by Him who altered times calendar
and began an Easter day--
Who took epochal steps for the world's conquest.
That directly achieved in encircling the globe.
But there are others, a host of others, worthy, noble,
world pioneers.
* * * * *
O indispensable pioneers, see them moving out in history,
Just as bravely, just as necessary, often giving inspiration
to the first,
Most of them impelled forward by Columbus and Copernicus--
The inspirers of explorers, the pioneers of the pioneers.
* * * * *
Consecrated to humanity and the world, look backward and see
the host of sphere-ward moving men;
See the explorers--with Columbus, Balboa, Drake, Desoto
opening up a new west.
See the scientists--Darwin, Spencer, Huxley, daring to say
that God is in life.
See the philosophers--Aristotle, Plato, Hegel, Kant and
Eucken.
See the missionaries--Judson, Carey, Thomas, Livingstone,
Moffat and Morrison.
See the inventors--Stevenson, Watt, Marconi, Edison and Bell.
See the patriots--Solon, Savonarola, Cromwell, Henry,
Lincoln and Gladstone.
Mighty huers through the forests,--
See them laboring for a nation in some special task or
knowledge,
But incidentally and emphatically for the world.
* * * * *
And turn your eyes from the past to the present to observe
your own world inspired sons!
See them moving toward the international congress and the
Hague,
The greatest educators, ambassadors and financiers,
See them increasing in their numbers, for they also will be
counted with the world pioneers.
* * * * *
O Copernicus, we hail thee for announcing to timid minds that
the earth, "it is a globe."
O Kepler and Newton, we celebrate you for asserting it is true.
O Galileo, we honor and respect you for looking superstition
squarely in the face and before highest potentates declaring:
"But nevertheless it does move!"
We commemorate you all master-minded men,
Who have announced, and explored and unified the globe.
Surely these are not pygmies nor dwarfs.
But in achievement, they are Titans, they are giants,
They are the immortal pioneers of the world.
* * * * *
And these lives moving forward, have they all been lived for
naught!
No! A thousand times no, O far-sighted men, now enlisting for
new world movements!
Speak the message of the united seas with at least a prophetic
international preamble
And announce the coming of essential democracy for the world.
[C]THE OLIVE BRANCH AS AN EMBLEM OF WORLD PEACE
In history the olive has been nobly emblematic of three virtues--peace,
purity and industry with its attendant prosperity. And I mention these
three virtues for which the olive stands because we will never in the
world establish peace unless it is preceded in community, state and
nation by virile-mindedness, which is the very secret of industry and
prosperity wherever they are found.
Whenever the Greek looked out at a foothill mantled with an olive
orchard, gently waving in the distance, a sea of bluish-green leaves; or
seized upon an olive branch, he was reminded of the fact that no man was
worthy of a crown of olives unless he was right-minded, peace-loving,
and industrious. For, the placing of a crown of olive twigs on the brow
of a person was the highest distinction that could be bestowed on a
citizen who had merited well of his country.
Not only were the noble-minded statesmen and poets thus honored, but
also the athletes who, by scrupulous care and development of the body,
gained physical victories at the Olympic games. The harmless and
commendable victories of peace always result from well-developed
manhood. And so on the last day of these games the victor received, in
front of the temple, the crown of wild olives gathered from the sacred
tree. For the olive was sacred to Minerva, the goddess of wisdom and
therefore of purity, peace and prosperity.
Among the Romans also it had a similar significance. The olive crown of
the Roman conqueror at an ovation and those of the equites at the
imperial review, alike typified the gifts of peace that, in a barbaric
age, could be secured by victory only. I say all history has associated
the olive with these three superb virtues, wherever the olive tree has
grown. But if secular history has offered the olive branch to the
conqueror in honor of a peace secured through contest or war, the
surprising thing about the olive in Biblical history is that it
represents peace as coming directly to an individual, community, or
nation because of a Christian-mindedness--a type of mind that is
controlled by reason, justice, love, intelligence, and purity of
thought.