in the course of ages here and hereafter it is sure to be effectual. But the way is hard, the road of discipline and penitence is long, is across deep and appalling abysses, with many a frightful fall to their bottom, and of this tragic side of our being it is strictly true that —
- The moving Finger writes, and having writ
- Moves on: nor all your piety nor wit
- Shall lure it back to cancel half a line,
- Nor all your tears wash out a word of it.
Here speaks the fact of Fate — the changeless bond among experiences, the “irrevocable fixity of the past” embosomed within our very freedom: we “sow in Atê’s fields” and reap the fitting crop. Remorse, remorse! But Fate is the indispensable means to freedom in a shifting world of experience, is therefore a consistent product of freedom, and the passing over of the “judgment of regret” into this judgment of remorse, stirred in us by the sense of Fate, is exactly what makes in our time-world the signal of our eternal freedom, and points to the coming better judgment of repentance and reform. We cannot, indeed, recall the past that is behind any specific present; but it is only a past thus arbitrarily isolated that is fixed. The real past is a flowing whole, and we are forever pouring the future into the flood, through the gate of the present. Our past is really always changing, and it is we who initiate the
