o leave all the remainder of life "bound
in shallows and in miseries."

There is something about hesitation and reconsiderations that is
curiously fatal to successful achievement. Good fortune is in going
on,--not in going back. The parable of Lot's wife, who turned into a
pillar of salt because she looked back, is by no means inapplicable to
the life of to-day. Let one on whom the vision has shone look backward
instead of forward and he becomes paralyzed and immovable. He has
invoked inimical influences. He is impeded by the shallows and the
miseries. He has withdrawn himself from all the heavenly forces that
lead him on. The fidelity to the vision is the vital motor. It gives
that exhilaration of energy which makes possible the impossible.

"The Americans have many virtues," said Emerson, "but they have not
Faith and Hope. I know no two words whose meaning is more lost sight of.
We use these words as if they were as obsolete as Selah. And yet they
have the broadest meaning and the most cogent application. The opening
of the spiritual senses," continues Emerson, "disposes men even to
greater sacrifices, to leave their signal talents, their means and skill
of procuring a present success, their power and their fame,--to cast all
things behind in the insatiable thirst for divine communications. A
purer fame, a greater power, rewards the sacrifice."

Each recurring New Year is an open door. However arbitrary are the
divisions of Time, there is inspiration and exaltation in standing on
the threshold of an untried year, with its fresh pages awaiting record.
It is, again, the era of possibilities. The imaginative faculty of the
soul must, indeed, be "fed with objects immense and eternal." Life
stretches before one in its diviner unity,--even in the wholeness of the
life that is and that which is to come. There is not one set of motives
and purposes to be applied to this life, and another set to that which
awaits us. This is the spiritual world, here and now, and it is the
business of man to live divinely in it; to be responsive to the
enthusiasms that enchant his thought; to be faithful to the vision that
beckons him on. It is well to drop the old that one may seize the new.
Progress lies in a successive series of new conditions. Let one give all
and ask for nothing,--let him yield himself wholly to the overpowering
enthusiasm; let him not look backward from his vision of the Morning
Star and the Promised Land, and thus sha