affairs that we call position is good if rightly
used, and to an increasing degree it is so used. _Noblesse oblige_ is
the watchword of modern life.

"Success in thyself, which is best of all."

That line from a poem of Emerson's most clearly defines true success.
The "power of conduct, the power of intellect and knowledge, the power
of beauty, and the power of social life and manners,"--to achieve such
power as is thus enumerated by Matthew Arnold, and adding to it that
which is greater than all, and that without which all else is useless
and unvitalized, the power of the Divine energy received through
prayer,--these are the powers and achievements that tend to the true and
only success,--the success of character.

New conceptions of the old watchwords of life are in the air. In
"Culture" President Eliot of Harvard sees new points of view; he finds a
new definition of the cultivated man, who is not, in this
Twentieth-Century reading of the term, to be "a weak, critical,
fastidious creature, vain of a little exclusive information or of an
uncommon knack in Latin verse or mathematical logic; he is to be a man
of quick perceptions, broad sympathies, and wide affinities, responsive
but independent, self-reliant but deferential, loving truth and candor,
but also moderation and proportion, courageous but gentle, not finished
but perfecting."

"The situation that has not its ideal was never yet occupied by man,"
well said Goethe; and perhaps one of the greatest aids to both
achievement and happiness would be to recognize this ideal as the
standard placed before one, the model after which he is to fashion his
life, because he is, now and here, in the Divine Presence, because now
and here he "stands before God." Nor is this too sublime a test for the
trivialities of every day. As a matter of truth, nothing is trivial that
has to do with the life of the spirit. The petty irritations,
impatience, vexations, and disappointments of life are things that
affect one's spiritual quality, that make or mar his higher self, that
accelerate or retard his progress in the upward way, according as these
feelings are allowed to take control or are resolutely conquered. The
occurrences that excite them are, to the life of the spirit, like the
"gifts" in a kindergarten,--they are the object lessons by means of
which growth and progress are attained. Now, if one can conceive of his
life, every day, every hour, as lived in the very presence