THE CONGRESS OF WOMEN.
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lay. We have taken for our motto “ Not matter but mind;” avowed ourselves as no longer limited by the restrictions of matter. Who shall prescribe limitations to the soul ? This to me, is what all this wonderful Exposition with its crowning congresses, is sublimely, religiously teaching. It is the turning of swords into plowshares, of spears into pruning hooks, until the Eden of past story shall lie before us in the attainable, not a lost good. Has the beautiful, odorous white lily, and the gentain of cerulean blue, in our horticultural show r , blossoming over fetid mud, no lessons of evolution that have been seized upon and applied in art, in the creation of some of the wonders of this Fair? Has this Fair no suggestions that shall reappear in higher spheres of life and thought like the light of Portia’s little candle, suggesting “good deeds in a naughty world? ”
There is one more lesson which has greatly impressed me, and which I can not forbear to note. It is the spirit of oneness through which ten thousand men and women have wrought, as to one end, in creating the wonders of this Fair. I do not believe we begin to comprehend the miracles here displayed, which have been wrought by this new gospel of oneness; and yet, altruism, the spirit of which is beginning to pervade the world as never before—it is by this divine instrumentality that these miracles have been wrought. Artisan working together with artist, the so-called working men with both, different nationalities commingling, men and women working together without jealously or selfish competition, all have been working together with God in a sense never before realized in the world’s history, and the result is a miracle of harmonious achievement, such as has been frequently observed, but was never before attained.
“There is no stoppage,” says a great poet recently departed, “and never can be stoppages. If you and I and all the worlds, and all beneath or upon their surfaces, were this moment reduced back to a pallid float, it would not avail in the long run; we should surely bring up again to where we now are, and as surely go on as much farther, and then farther and farther.”
Eternity has no limits, and we are in it; the infinite has no bounds, and we are a part of it.
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