ilent pressure steadily and almost insensibly
shapes or influences the whole texture of our lives. It is still more
true of the smaller circle of our intimacies which will do more than
almost any other thing to make the path of virtue easy or difficult. How
large a proportion of the incentives to a noble ambition, or of the
first temptations to evil, may be traced to an early friendship, and it
is often in the little circle that gathers round a college table that
the measure of life is first taken, and ideals and enthusiasms are
formed which give a colour to all succeeding years. To admire strongly
and to admire wisely is, indeed, one of the best means of moral
improvement.

Very much, however, of the management of character can only be
accomplished by the individual himself acting in complete isolation upon
his own nature and in the chamber of his own mind. The discipline of
thought; the establishment of an ascendency of the will over our courses
of thinking; the power of casting away morbid trains of reflection and
turning resolutely to other subjects or aspects of life; the power of
concentrating the mind vigorously on a serious subject and pursuing
continuous trains of thought,--form perhaps the best fruits of judicious
self-education. Its importance, indeed, is manifold. In the higher walks
of intellect this power of mental concentration is of supreme value.
Newton is said to have ascribed mainly to an unusual amount of it his
achievements in philosophy, and it is probable that the same might be
said by most other great thinkers. In the pursuit of happiness hardly
anything in external circumstances is so really valuable as the power of
casting off worry, turning in times of sorrow to healthy work, taking
habitually the brighter view of things. It is in such exercises of will
that we chiefly realise the truth of the lines of Tennyson:

Oh, well for him whose will is strong,
He suffers, but he will not suffer long.

In moral culture it is not less important to acquire the power of
discarding the demoralising thoughts and imaginations that haunt so
many, and meeting temptation by calling up purer, higher and restraining
thoughts. The faculty we possess of alternating and intensifying our own
motives by bringing certain thoughts, or images, or subjects into the
foreground and throwing others into the background, is one of our chief
means of moral progress. The cultivation of this power is a far wiser
t