him; but Epictetus in chains was equally
unconquerable and equally a king. We all have the choice between the Crown
and the Muck Rake, and I think we sometimes turn to the straws and the
rubbish, not because they are fascinating to us, but because they seem
the only things open to us: we do not feel as if our lives had anything to
do with Crowns. If you think of your various homes from the point of view
of turning their "necessities to glorious gains," and as a field for
winning your spurs, I suspect you are each feeling that this is very "tall
talk" for such a commonplace home as yours. "All lives have an ideal
meaning as well as their prose translation;" but you feel perhaps that you
are sure to be swamped in little bothers and duties, and pleasures, and
dulness and stagnation, so that you will find it hard to see any ideal
meaning at all. This is not true, and to look on an ideal life as "tall
talk" is a snare of the Devil; and in these days of common sense and
higher education we need to guard against it, and to remember that "a
thing may be good enough for practical purposes, but not for ideal
purposes." "Ideal life" is not tall talk, but our plain duty, unless our
Lord was mocking us when He said, "Be ye perfect, as your Father in Heaven
is perfect."

To know our ideal is one step towards attaining it. "So run, not as
uncertainly; so fight, not as one that beateth the air." Before taking
such a definite step in life as leaving school, it would be very
interesting to draw up a plan of what you would like your life to be, and
also of what you hope to make of the life apparently before you, which
may be very different from the life you would like. If you kept it, like
sealed orders, for five years, it would be interesting to see how your
views had changed, and how prayers had been answered in unexpected ways,
and it would also be a solemn warning to see, as we assuredly should, that
wilful prayers had been heard to our hurt.

Bacon, when he made a new start as Solicitor-General, made a survey of his
life, past and future, his faults and blunders, his strong and weak
points, his hopes, the books he meant to read and to write, the friends he
wished to make. I am sure that thinking over our own lives as a whole
would strengthen and guide us. We rush into action and fight our best, but
we do not make a plan of the campaign, and thus much of our energy is
wasted by misdirected effort; and, in leaving a school-life of rul