Man of all ages is a selfish animal, and unreasonable in his
selfishness. It takes every one of us in turn many a shrewd fall, in
our wrestlings with the world to convince us that we are not to have
everything our own way. We are conscious in our inmost souls that
man is the rightful lord of creation; and, starting from this eternal
principle, and ignoring, each man-child of us in turn, the qualifying
truth that it is to man in general, including women, and not to one man
in particular, that the earth has been given, we set about asserting
our kingships each in his own way, and proclaiming ourselves kings from
our own little ant-hills of thrones. And then come the struggles and
the down-fallings, and some of us learn our lesson, and some learn it
not. But what lesson? That we have been dreaming in the golden hours
when the vision of a kingdom rose before us? That there is in short, no
kingdom at all, or that, if there be, we are no heirs of it?
No—I take it that, while we make nothing better than that out of our
lesson, we shall go on spelling at it and stumbling over it, through
all the days of our life, till we make our last stumble, and take our
final header out of this riddle of a world, which we once dreamed we
were to rule over, exclaiming “_vanitas vanitatum_” to the end. But
man’s spirit will never be satisfied without a kingdom, and was never
intended to be satisfied so; and a wiser than Solomon tells us, day by
day, that our kingdom is about us here, and that we may rise up and
pass in when we will at the shining gates which he holds open, for that
it is His, and we are joint heirs of it with Him.