Unseen Opportunities. 



By Rev. F. W. Moot, Johnstown, N. Y. 



We are living in a wonderful age. We cross the continent 

 or the mighty ocean in five days; wfe talk with a friend a thou- 

 sand miles away and recognize his voice; within an hour we can 

 communicate with almost any portion of the civilized world; we 

 travel, we read, we warm ourselves by that mysterious agent, 

 electricity; an event occurs in South Africa and within three 

 hours the newsboys are selling for a cent, printed newspapers con- 

 taining an account of the affair. When we pause and look back 

 two, four, five or ten centuries at the conditions and incon- 

 veniences of our forefathers, and then at all the wonderful 

 achievements of the nineteenth century, we are tempted to be- 

 lieve that we are living in another world or, at least, under some 

 new laws of nature. But we are not. This is the same old earth, 

 and the laws of nature are the same as when man first saw the 

 light of the sun. There is but one thing that makes this age so 

 marvelously superior to any other — the men of this century have 

 seen what was unseen by their ancestors. 



There is but one reason why Christopher Columbus did not 

 cross the Atlantic ocean in a steamboat instead of his sailboat — 

 men did not then see the power in steam which had ever been 

 oi)€n to their investigation. It remained an unseen opportunity 

 until Watts and Stephenson and Fulton put it into practical 

 use. There is but one reason — the unseen opportunity — why the 

 Magna Charta, which was signed by King John, of England, 

 June 15, 1215, was not printed the next morning in a daily news- 

 paper. The act of writing had been known for ages, but the 

 opportunity in movable type was unseen until 1438, when Guten- 



