Intellectual Opportunities, Past and Present [pp. 88-100]

INTELLECTUAL OPPORTUNITIES,
INTELLECTUAL OPPORTUNITIES, PAST AND
PRESENT.
A CONTRAST BETWEEN THE SEVENTEENTH AND NINETEENTH
CENTURIES.
PERSONS living at the present day amid all the conveniences
and amenities of modern life, surrounded by every comfort that
human wisdom and industry can devise and every luxury and
gratification that human ingenuity can suggest, can form but a
very poor and inaccurate idea of the state of society as it existed
a few centuries ago. Men in prosperity and abundance are little
wont to notice, much less to sympathize with, those in poverty
and distress. Once in the land of promise, once safe amid its
pleasures and delights, and the memory of the long and tedious
journey through the arid desert that led to it languishes in the
mind or is lost in oblivion.
So, to a great extent, is it with us. We are living in the enjoyment of favored times, in an age of wonderful material prosperity. WVe have our share, too, in all the improvements of the
hour. The march of science has made itself felt in every corner
of the globe, and reaches the meanest of the poor as well as the
most powerful of the rich, dispensing its blessings and shedding
its light on every inhabitant of the earth. We can travel from
the east to the west and from the north to the south with comparatively little expenditure of time or money, and with a facility
and a security not only utterly unknown but utterly inconceivable to our ancestors. The stirring events and momentous occurrences enacted in the most distant and unknown regions of the
globe we may discuss and comment on, almost as soon as they
take place, over our tea and toast at the breakfast-table or in the
reading-room of a neighboring club. The dusky natives of the
Soudan or the Congo grin out upon us in their natural colors
from the illustrated papers, and the history of their manners and
customs, their successes and overthrows, are chronicled by competent writers on the spot. Indeed, more than this, our very
wishes may be expressed, our very sympathies made known, to
friends and relations whose hands we have not grasped for many
a long year, and who are living at our extreme antipodes.
Such a state of things, indeed, could hardly have entered into
[April,
88