A VISION OF "THE PROMISED LAND"
A Vision of "the Promised Land" "My darkness was filled with the light of intelligence, and, behold, the outer day-lit world was stumbling and groping in social blindness." HELEN KELLER, now...
...in the future lies the Promised Land...
...All that has gone before has been as nothing, only the merest preparation—the getting ready to do really great things that shall perhaps help all mankind!'' And she is working and writing to the end that she may help "all mankind" come into its own...
...In the last number of the "American," Miss Keller wrote: "Step by step my investigation of blindness led me into the industrial world...
...Recently she said to a reporter: "Most persons think Helen Keller's life has been lived—that it is enough that a blind, deaf and mute girl should have won her way through school and college, should have written books, and should have finally learned to speak with her lips words she may never hear—but they: are all wrong...
...At first I was most unhappy...
...She reads and writes—and she thinks...
...And what a world" it is...
...How reconcile this world of fact with the bright world of my imagining...
...The very fact that We are still here carrying on the contest against the hosts of annihilation proves that on the whole the battle has gone for humanity...
...HELEN KELLER, now thirty-two years old, was stricken deaf, dumb and blind at the tender age of nineteen months as the result of illness...
...Helen Keller's lite, has, as a matter of fact, only just begun...
...She is to-day one of the best-educated women in America...
...self-reproached, but ever regaining faith...
...She will probably never see or hear, but she has learned to talk...
...Discouraged not by difficulties without or the anguish of the ages within, the heart listens to a secret voice that whispers: 'Be not dismayed...
...My darkness has been filled with the light of intelligence and, behold, the outer day-lit world was stumbling and groping in social blindness...
...but deeper study restored ray confidence...
...I must face unflinchingly a world of facts—a world of misery and degradation, of blindness, crookedness, and sin, a world struggling against the elements, against the unknown, against itself...
...undaunted, tenacious, the heart of man labors towards immeasurably distant goals...
...Rebuffed, but always persevering...
...How different from the world of my beliefs...
...By learning the sufferings and burdens of men, I became aware as never before of the life-power that has survived the forces of darkness, the power which, though never completely victorious, is continuously conquering...
...The world's great heart has proved equal to the prodigious undertaking which God set it...
Vol. 5 • February 1913 • No. 7
