Editorial September 14, 1907 Issue

HUMANITY'S QUEST

John B. Willis

A month ago there passed through the streets of Winnipeg, Man., a band of religious pilgrims who were seeking, as they said, "the Jesus land, where there would be perpetual sunshine and flowers." Their dress was simple, their bearing dignified, and their thoughts were evidently centered on the far-away. They seemed calmly indifferent to the sometimes intrusive curiosity and ribald jest of those who looked upon them, and as they went along they chanted in quiet tones a sacred hymn.

They were recognized as Doukobors, a relic of those who came originally from an isolated province of Russia, where in impelling consciousness of "the heart's great need" and some crude sense of its possible satisfaction had been awakened at humble hearthstones and through the experience of such trials as even the most heroic cannot forever bear. Though advised and importuned to turn back, they could not be won away from their heart's emprise, and their song was heard to die away in the distance as they passed on into their unknown future. "Fanatics!" "Fools!" "Poor deluded children!" such has the world named them, and yet how fittingly do they stand for that larger humanity which through all the years has continued its unrewarded quest under an impulsion it has been able neither to understand nor to resist. Surely history presents no fact that is more universal or more pitifully appealing that that "divine unrest, the old stinging trouble of humanity," as Stevenson has said, "that makes all high achievement and all miserable failure; that spread the wings of Icarus, and that sent Columbus into the desolations of the Atlantic."

Thus did Abram depart out of Haran and from his kindred, to go forth into the land of Canaan; thus wandered Israel for forty years in the burning deserts of Sinai: thus in succeeding centuries have the waves of migration from want, or from bitterer woe, braved every sea and broken upon every distant shore; thus were our fathers led to face the cheerless isolation of the new world's wilderness, that they might find the heart's longed-for goal,—all seeking that "better country," a land "where the sunshine is perpetual and the flowers ever bloom." Despite all its distortions of sense and all its unwisdom of endeavor, this persistent quest upon every plane of life and in every region of thought—this struggle of unfruitioned yet undying hope—is the great determinative fact of the past, the explanation of its mightiest events, and to-day it gives the highest human assurance that ultimately all longing hearts will reach their home-land and find rest.

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