reins_, did his best, and won the honors of the season.

We are all blind racers on the track of earth. The king, the
millionaire, the statesman, the lawmaker, the beggar, the laborer, the
cripple, we are all in the dark. The only thing is to trust the hand
of the Master, and _do our best_.

Believe your position is the right starting point for _you_, merely the
starting point.

It is the shapeless block of stone from which you are to fashion the
perfect statue.

Or it is the mere mud from which you are to mould the clay image, and
later that is to be put into enduring marble.

What is uglier or more unattractive than mud?

Yet think of the glorious conceptions which it imprisons.

Take the mud of your present environment and thank God for it, and make
the image of the future you desire.

You can do it--you must do it--you will do it.

Sympathy

Are you of a sympathetic nature?

If so, do not let your sympathies help to add to the world's miseries.

That may seem a strange expression, but it can be explained if you will
listen.

Much of the misery in the world is the result of imagination.

All of it is the result of selfishness and ignorance.

But hundreds and thousands of people believe themselves sick, sorrowful
and poverty stricken, who would be well, glad and prosperous, if they
only thought themselves so.

Every time you pour out your sympathy upon these self-made sufferers,
you add to their burden of wrong thought, and make it just so much more
difficult for them to rise out of their troubles.

I do not believe all the misfortune in the world is caused by wrong
thinking in this life, or can be done away with by right thinking. The
three-year-old child who toddles in front of a trolley car and loses a
leg, while the tired mother is bending over the washtub to keep the
wolf of hunger at bay, cannot be blamed for wrong thinking as the cause
of its trouble. Neither can the deaf mute or the child born blind or
deformed. We must go farther back, to former lives, to find the first
cause of such misfortunes.

No "New Thought," no amount of optimistic theology or philosophy can
restore the child's leg, or ears, or eyes. It is utter nonsense to say
that miracles like these can be performed.

There are scores of individuals whom we meet handicapped in life's race
by such dire calamities that we spontaneously pour forth our sympathy.

But, even to these, it were kinder and wiser to give