解放军文职招聘考试Work Done for Humanity

 Work Done for Humanity

I wish we were all more thorough students of the mighty past, for we should thus be rendered braver prophets of the future, and more cheerful workers in the present. History shows us with what tenacity the human race survives. Earthquake, famine, and pesti­lence have done their worst, but over them rolls a heal­ing tide of years and they are lost to view; or sweeps the great procession, and hardly shows a scar. Rulers around whom clustered new forms of civilization pass away, but greater men succeed them. Nations are rooted up; great hopes seem blighted; revolutions rise and rivers run with the blood of patriots; the globe itself seems headed toward the abyss; new patriots are born; higher hopes bloom out like stars; humanity emerges from the dark ages vastly ahead of what it was on ente­ring that cave of gloom, and ever the right comes up­permost; and now is Christ's kingdom nearer than when we first believed.

Only those who have not studied history lose heart in great reforms; only those unread in the biography of genius imagine themselves to be original. Except in the realm of material invention, there is nothing new under the sun. There is no reform which some great soul has not dreamed of centuries ago; there is not a doctrine that some father of the church did not set forth. The Greek philosophers and early Christian Fathers boxed the compass once for all; we may take our choice of what they have left on record. Let us then learn a wise humility, but at the same time a humble wisdom, as we remember that there are but two classes of men— one which declares that our times are the worst the world has seen, and another which claims our times as best—and he who claims this, all revelation, all sci­ence, all history, witnesses is right and will be right forevermore.

The most normal and the most perfect human be­ing is the one who most thoroughly addresses himself to the activity of his best powers, gives himself most thor­oughly to the world around him, flings himself out into the midst of humanity, and is so preoccupied by his own beneficent reaction on the world that he is practi­cally unconscious of a separate existence.

 (Frances Elizabeth Caroline Willard, 1839—1898)