Sketcher. VISION SEERS.

Waikato Times, Volume XVIII, Issue 1550, 10 June 1882, Page 2 (Supplement)

Sketcher.

VISION SEERS.

It ii sot an uncommon thing to how men of narrow intellects and great vital energy ditparage those who are called " visionaries," while it is the faihion to land the " praotioal." A man who has talent for working a treadmill is tickled, being told that he ii " praotioal." He oongratniates himself tbat he ii attempting no impractical thing. He is straggling np no heights of fanoy— not he; He thinks that the silliest youth of whom he ever heard is that young person in Longt fellow's poem who bore a flag with " thf strange device of Exoelsior," and went olimfy ing up the snow' and ice therewith, foolf bkrdily beginning his journey in the after* noon. If that young visionary hid been a praotioal person he wonld have heeded the warnings of that old nan and of the peasant, and, instead of going on, with a tear stand> ing in his bright blue eye, he would have turned in al the voice of the maiden, eapeoially if the maiden's father had a store of bread and oheese in the chalet. But that Alpine youth wai not praotioal. The pious monks of St. Bemud were, and none of them ever perished in the snow ; bat they did find this nnpraotioal youth half buried in the drift of the avalanche, " lifeless but beautiful." " There," says our praotioal friend, " what's the use of being beautifalif you are lifelcBB?" And, as the meaning of the last three lines of the poem.Jabout a voioe falling from the sky "serene and fair," our praotioal friend gives it all up ; he does not even ask the solution of the conundrum wbioh it involves. Now, the real fact is that one " visionary man, in the highest meaning of the phrase, is worth a dozen " praotioal." men, and for the simple reason that there would be np praotioal men if there were no visionaries, as there would be no praotioal activity without high thought. The whole use of praotioal men — and they are never to be disparaged — is to make real in every-day life what the visionary men have first seen with their spiritual eyes. The visionary is he who, before a foot of \i is laid, sees a railway reaching from New York to San Francisco, over river and bay and lake and mountain and oanyon. The practical men are the labourers who blast the rooks and bring dirt in the carts and wheelbarrows to make the grade and oonstruot the road. : The visionary is the engineer who learohei up and down a river, and at last deteots this precise spot where a bridge should span the stream, and who, at the same moment, sees every blook of stone which is to go into the abutments, and every piece of timber, iron, or steel which is to make the strings, the thwarts, the ohessex, and the couplings. The praotioal man is the mason or the oarpenter, or the labourer, who makes tbat vision a real, strong, safe passageway for loaded wagons or thundering trains. Without these necessary praotioal men there would be no bridge over the river; but without the indispensable visionary there would be no bridge anywhere, and no kind of employment for praotioal men, who must stand holding in reserve their most valuable powers until the visionaries suddenly say, " Fat such a cottage there, and such a palace there, and suoh a ohuroh there, and suoh a warehouse there, and suoh a bridge there, and snob, a tunnel under yon mountain, and snoh a telegraphic oable under the ooean;" At the command of the visionaries, the praotioal men find something to do, and they do it. " Your young men shall see visions," said the prophet, in one of the grandest passages in literature. 81/BSSED ABB THE SBBBS ! We owe them everything. It was a seer of visions who beheld the people of larael led out from the home of bondage into the land which Jehovah had promised unto Abraham. The seer of that vision (Mosei) would never have been able to endure the prodigious strain whioh oame upon him when he had to oarry all that people forty years about in the Smaitio desert and organise a nationality which should revolutionise the anoient world of thought and aotion. It was a seer of visions who heard, near the gates of Damascus, that Jesus who vouchsafed him suoh a vision of glory as enabled the young pupil of Gamaliel to organise forces which should revolutionise the modern world of thought and action. It was a seer of visions who went forth from his cell in the Eriurth monastery to begin the Herculean task of cleansing the fouler than Augean stables of medieval Rome. It was a eeer of visions who, standing on the western shore of Europe, gazed over the waters towards the West, and beheld a-.great land stretching where praotioal men saw only a waste of waters. America, lay large and fair in the eyes of Columbus, alluring and attracting him long before his vessels beaohad themselves upon its unknown ooast, The world had gone on without this addition of Amerioa but for that vision in some man's eyes, if not in the eyes of Columbus. It was one seer of visions who beheld printed sheets before a type was made. It was another who saw boats and oarriages propelled at rapid rates before any steam engine had been constructed. It was another who saw telegrams outflyingthe winds before the olipk of an instrument had been heard in the land. It was a seer of visions whose eye ran np and down from end to end of an ooean telegraph, and whose ear heard the nations whispering to eaoh other and kissing eaoh other through these thousand miles of ooean long before a strand of the cable hud been formed. And in art as in science, literature, government, trade, and religion, it is the visionaries who pioneer the way for the praotioal men, and draw their heavier brothers forward by the socga they sing far up great heights and far away beyond great mountain ranges. The Good Father knows, and only He how much practical repentance, faith, selfdenial, and wand, godly living have been oreated in hut and palace by the vision whioh John Banyan saw in Bedford gaol. Since Jesus aaosnded no history of aotual personal or national tcansaotioss has had a hundredth part the influence whioh has been exerted on mankind by the simple narrative of the Eaglish tinker's vision of the "Pilgrim's Progress." Banyan has done more for the world than Thuoydides and IJerodotui, than Taoiius and Livy, than Gibbon and Hume, than $ollin and Tbiers, than Niebuhr and Dahlmann, than Presaott nnd Banoroft, and than all of them pat together. For true religion thai Dxeamer has done more than any dozen " praotioai " preachers who have lived sinoe his day. He enlarged the possibilities of praotioal pleaching. The general foot is that it is the, men that see visions who make possible the existence of the work of the men who do deeds ; and when "practical men " sneer at "vissionaries," aud when cur current speeph compels, our lexicographers to defiae a, " Vii< sionary " as '• one whose imagination is disturbed/ and ** one Who, forms impracticable schemes," \i ia simply another infltanpe of the olay criticising the potter. In every such qase, so much worse for the olny.T-CHABLHa F. Deems, D.D., in the Phrenological Journal. ' ,

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