If we all agree that man, in moments when active consciousness is at rest, may be shown visions of what he may be, and stimulated to grasp the unfoldment they promise, then the knowledge we seek first is how to teach consciousness to harmonize itself to receive and know these directions.

One may be mentally active and physically still, or mentally passive and physically active. He may by discipline make himself both mentally and physically still at the same moment. Elihu Burritt, as I understand his development, could be absolutely passive mentally, when striking vigorous blows on the yielding steel or iron. He had repeated them so often that he struck them almost automatically. As he saw new shapes and forms moulded under these blows, his mind was receptive to vastness, power, nature, infinity, God. Unfoldment came, because he had erected no environments or limitations.

Go in the silence as all great prophets and leaders have done, and there commune with the Infinite. In that sacred hour passively drop your beliefs - they may or may not be true. Free your minds from their possible fetters and open your soul to receive truth. If one wants anything, he goes out and seeks for it, does he not? One can hardly expect it to come to him unless he asks and seeks. Now he may have firmly entrenched many beliefs in his consciousness that are not true. He may have read countless pages to prove them true; and yet if he bring the light of law and evidence upon these beliefs, he will find their foundation to be the supposed beliefs of some other, amplified by the beliefs of the commentators themselves. These commentators may mean to help man and may be honest; but their good intentions do not mean that their beliefs are true. A belief may be true. I recognize that one may be almost convinced at times, without seeking demonstration. My warning is only that one shall logically distinguish the difference between a belief and a demonstrated truth, and always remember further investigations may overthrow the half-accepted proposition. When you have disciplined yourself to this point of discernment, your mind is open to receive knowledge and to attain truth.

In the compact made to form a union of states that a nation might be born, our patriots met, filled with love of statehood and yet possessing some pride in the possible nation to be. Many compromises were made - one great one. When nearly a hundred years had passed, a man of humble and obscure origin appeared and said, in substance, that a perfect union and a lasting peace could only be secured by making every state a slave state or every state free - that harmony under other conditions was impossible. He who said this had had a public life of but one term in Congress, and some prominence as a lawyer in a western state. That thought aroused argument and set statesmen thinking in every corner of the republic. We know to-day that that utterance was truth. It was truth, but a new truth, and, therefore, awoke a storm of opposition. Abraham Lincoln stated that proposition, and was chosen to demonstrate it to the world. After Lincoln had spoken this truth he did not stand idly waiting to see how it would be received. Down in his soul he must have felt that he had spoken, and that through him must be wrought out the demonstration.

Emerson says to say the right thing - to do the right thing - at the right time - that is genius. Lincoln said and did the right thing at the right time, and fame has placed him at the head of the roll of our honored dead. The lesson you and I may draw to-day from this life is that Lincoln was always conscious that he was guided and led by infinite energy. He could and did commune with the Infinite. He, like Joan of Arc, heard the voices that spoke truth, he trusted the messages the Infinite sent; and the whole world to-day bows as Lincoln's name is spoken, and speaks reverently of his wisdom and prophetic utterances.

A love-child, born on a small island in the Atlantic ocean, showed precociousness in his early youth, courage when hurricanes swept across the island, and an indefatigable longing for education, and to know the colony growing up in the western hemisphere under England's fostering and semi-tyrannical rule. What was it that whispered to the boy Alexander Hamilton, telling him that his future and his destiny were bound up in that far away colony? How clearly he recognized in boyhood the training required to fit him for the responsibilities so soon to be crowded upon him! With what zest and heroic purpose did he enter upon his college studies, attaining high rank therein and completing fours years' work in two. He felt throbbing about him the duties of an active and of an eventful life. He studied the course of that restless, surging thought-current, breaking down and over the barriers erected by superstition, might and wrong. He saw that strife and war, and a baptism of blood, must precede the birth of a new nation; and so closely did he identify himself with that nation unborn, that only through opposition could his best intellectual gifts be brought into expression.

At seventeen he wrote papers that patriots thought were written by John Jay - at nineteen he was captain of an artillery company and winning distinction in the battles of Long Island and White Plains.

Before the altar of freedom he stood, and on that sacred shrine he, without any ambitious or selfish reserve, cast his young manhood with all its hopes and promises. He entered the arena of strife and dedicated his life to the warfare of controversy, criticism, enmity and hate.

Think of a young man only seventeen years old who graduated from college to draw the sword for principle, but was practically taken from the field when only twenty to be the Aide-de-Camp of Washington with rank of lieutenant-colonel. Then note his series of powerful articles in the Federalist, immediately after the close of the war, educating the people to favor the ratification of the constitution; and later taking the portfolio as the first Secretary of Treasury of the new Republic and showing himself master of the situation. He had had no experience even in handling large commercial questions for business houses; and yet, against opposition, he worked out a policy that brought order out of chaos and placed this country on a firm financial basis, and secured for it credit with the nations of the old world. Hamilton stands out, at this period of our country's history, as the one genius who conceived the possibilities of the new nation, and who knew by intuition, that to endure, its foundation must rest on the indestructible pillars hewn out of the boulders of sound finance. We cannot contemplate the upbuilding of this nation without the genius of Hamilton. This man of destiny never asked to be told where he might work. The whispered breathings of the Infinite were heard by him; and though his work was beset with opposition, ridicule and danger, he plunged into it fearlessly, because he felt it was committed to him to do, and he was always ready as a child of God to answer Duty's call.