rwise he can never be useful in any high or valuable sense.

It would be easy to try to give comfort by the philosophy which sees
the fine fruitage that is coming from to-day's stern discipline. That
fair fruitage is coming, but the trouble is it is too far off to give
us much comfort now; we want something nearer and more easily
apprehended. Then, too, the truth is no high fruitage will ever issue
from a life crushed by slavish subjection.

After all, what life is to every one of us depends not on the demands
of outer circumstances, but on the development of the life within. The
heart determines the worth and beauty of life. It makes all the
difference whether the physical determines its circumference or whether
you have an intellect that is reaching out to the things unmeasurable
and a soul that grows into glory indescribable.

You can tie a great soul down hand and brain to a loom or a machine and
he will still see his visions and dream his deep, refreshing dreams;
you can set the brutish being down in a gallery of the world's
treasures of art and beauty and he will think of nothing and see
nothing but bread and beer.

We must do our dull and heavy tasks, but we can do them and not be
crushed by them so long as within there are fragrant memories, high
aspirations, great thoughts; so long as the task does not set the
boundary of the life. And it is the cherishing of these eternal riches
within that lifts any life and makes it worthy of higher tasks.

We need to seek out the springs of noble thoughts, to find in the
riches of the world's literature, in music, and in beauty of art the
food for that inner life in the strength of which, drawing often on its
secret resources, we can go many days through the desert of toil.

The wise life uses every opportunity of refreshing; it drinks of every
spring of the up-welling waters of life; it seeks communion with every
great soul. Holidays and rest days are to it times of replenishing
when the eyes that ache from bending over the machine or desk lift
themselves to the eternal hills and the heart turns to the things that
are infinite.

THE SENSE OF THE INFINITE

One does not have to believe in the same kind of a god as did the seers
and singers of long ago in order to obtain the spiritual values which
they found in the thought of his nearness to them. David and Browning,
Isaiah and Whittier, with all the centuries between them, still come to
the same thought--