ew England
with its granite and ice rich. It is rugged necessity, it is the
struggle to obtain, it is poverty the priceless spur, that develops the
stamina of manhood, and calls the race out of barbarism. Labor found
the world a wilderness and has made it a garden.

As the sculptor thinks only of the angel imprisoned in the marble
block, so Nature cares only for the man or woman shut up in the human
being. The sculptor cares nothing for the block as such; Nature has
little regard for the mere lump of breathing clay. The sculptor will
chip off all unnecessary material to set free the angel. Nature will
chip and pound us remorselessly to bring out our possibilities. She
will strip us of wealth, humble our pride, humiliate our ambition, let
us down from the ladder of fame, will discipline us in a thousand ways,
if she can develop a little character. Everything must give way to
that. Wealth is nothing, position is nothing, fame is nothing,
_manhood is everything_.

Not ease, not pleasure, not happiness, but a _man_, Nature is after.
In every great painting of the masters there is one idea or figure
which stands out boldly beyond everything else. Every other idea or
figure on the canvas is subordinate to it, but pointing to the central
idea, finds its true expression there. So in the vast universe of God,
every object of creation is but a guideboard with an index-finger
pointing to the central figure of the created universe--Man. Nature
writes this thought upon every leaf, she thunders it in every creation.
It is exhaled from every flower; it twinkles in every star.

Oh, what price will Nature not pay for a man! Ages and aeons were
nothing for her to spend in preparing for his coming, or to make his
existence possible. She has rifled the centuries for his development,
and placed the universe at his disposal. The world is but his
kindergarten, and every created thing but an object-lesson from the
unseen universe. Nature resorts to a thousand expedients to develop a
perfect type of her grandest creation. To do this she must induce him
to fight his way up to his own loaf. She never allows him once to lose
sight of the fact that it is the struggle to attain that develops the
man. The moment we put our hand upon that which looks so attractive at
a distance, and which we struggled so hard to reach, Nature robs it of
its charm by holding up before us another prize still more attractive.

"Life," says a philoso