The Birmingham age-herald., 1902-08-25
Dr. MOntague's Discourse on
 Visions of the Future.
WORDS OF HOPE AND WISDOM
Plea for Larger View in Politics, a Higher Patriotism, and Other Things That Make for Sta
 pie, Honest Government

Dr. A. P. Montague, president of How ard college occupied the pulpit of the Baptist church in Woodlawn yesterday morning. and delivered a stirring and timely address. He said in part:
 The kind of vision concerning which l wish to speak this morning, is not a phantom of past misfortunes, not a spectre of impending evils, not fore cast of sad disasters. but a dream, blend- ed with hope and prays and based upon a knowledge of possibilities and of divine promises.
 'To dwell upon the failures of the past, or the troubles which tomorrow may bring is to uncrown hope and to place upon her throne a nerveless despondency, which stills the arm of progress and paralyzes the muscles of endeavor. Pes simism never built a railroad, never put a brick into a college wall, never broke ground for a hospital or church. Pes simism Is the mere wolf that would de- vour hope, the vampire that would suck the blood of brave effort The voice that croaks out, I'm nightly afraid you are going to fail.' You had better not try it, When l was young, I thought as you do, but I got over all that Is a clog upon the step of progress, burden upon the shoulder of energy
 Away from our work and our councils with the men, who with their timid eau tion, their cowardly irresolution. are the frogs and ravens among the songsters of life, who are weeds and last years stalks in the garden of hope. whose whr- ing and growing bring diseord into the melody of inspiration and endeavor.
 Optimism, with generous admixture of discretion, of good, wholesome common sense, and the name for the bright spirit which says, With Gods help, I will do it. spans a continent with the iron rails of commerce, ploughs the ocean with argosies of trade. sends the missionaries of the cross to lands that stretch from the Siberian wastes to the south Pacific, gives bread to the hungry, clothes the cold and the naked, builds the school house, the church, the home for the homeless, looks up with the shining eye of faith into the Fathers face, and be- lieves that there is laid up a crown which the Righteous Judge will give in His own good time.
 Dreamers of the Past.
 Let us imagine now some of the visions which men have had, when they dream ed dreams that mortal never dared to dream before" When the Macedonian Alexander had swept before him the armies of the Orient and had broken the power of Russia, as he looked towards the planets and consultations of the eastern sky, his fancy peopled those far distant orbats with nations whose crowns he longer to wear, and he burned for other worlds to conquer. His vision was of vassal empires. of tented fields of dethroned monarch, of the shock of bat tie. of the groans of the vanguished, of the shouts of victors. In the face of doom, his visions faded away, and soon his dreams and ambitions lay with his body in the narrow limits of a sar cophagus.
 When Caesar had conqured almost the entire world, as known to the ancients, and had dictated laws to tie nations. vision of unbounded power. of plans for the development of his vast empire, of colonization until the end of the earth should bow before the eagles of the legions, his dream vanished before the baggars of his enemies and he sank in death at the base of Pompey's statue
 "Demosthenes and Cicero, in the zenith Of their fame, when the world rang with the stories of their triumphs, dreamed of free lands and constitutional liberty, brought back by matchless logic and i'm passioned eloquence These visions na ssad away into the darkness of night, when suicide and assassination stilled the tongues that had given to ancient ora tory the heraldry of intending renown
 Under the shadow of the pyramids and at the bridge of Lodi, Napolean the Great had his vision of Russia vanquished of England enthralled, of the banner of France waving from the German ocean to the tideless sea. of himself as monarch from the Irish coast to St. Sophia. What of these dreams when his eyes looked over the waste of waters and his ears heard | only the roar of the pillows as they | broke upon the rocks of St. Helena?
 Great monarchs and law-givers scien- | lists and scholars, who knew not God. | have had their visions of peronal re- | nown and of a world made grander by | their deeds. They have dreamed of | wider empires, and of the rule of human law, of Niagaras enslaved to the will | of man, and of far-dstant lands lighted | by the splendor of their genius They | have to their own satisfaction evolved | the world from chaos, and seen cosmic | elements without divine power uniting | to form the universe. From the glacial i period to the age of reason they see | man advancing the survival of the fit test; they behold in the mutations of |