Excerpt from The Torch, and Other Lectures and Addresses IT belongs to a highly developed race to become, in a true sense, aristocratic a treasury of its best in practi cal and spiritual types, and then to disappear in the sur rounding tides of men. So Athens dissolved like a pearl in the cup of the Mediterranean, and Rome in the cup of Europe, and Judaea in the cup of the Universal Com munion. Though death is the law of all life, man touches this earthen fact with the wand of the spirit, and trans forms it into the law of sacrifice. Man has won no vic tory over his environment so sublime as this, finding in his mortal sentence the true choice of the soul and in the road out of Paradise the Open highway of eternal life. Races die; but the ideal of sacrifice as the highest race destiny has seldom occurred to men, though it has been suggested both by devout Jews and by devout Irishmen as the divinely appointed organic law of the Hebrew and the Celt. In the general view of men the extinction of a race partakes of the unreasoning finality of nature. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.