s a
fatal element in all effort and achievement. Depression might, indeed,
well take its place among the seven deadly sins that Dante names. There
are serious errors whose effect is less disastrous than is that of
habitual depression of spirits. Mental power is one's working capital,
and the degree of power depends, absolutely, on the quality of thought,
or, as the phrase goes, on "the state of mind." Conditions determine
events, but conditions are plastic to thought. On them one may stamp the
impress. If he persist in regarding himself as a victim to fate and his
life as a sacrifice and burnt offering, he can very soon work this
conception into actuality. He can--indeed he will, and he inevitably
must--become that which he continually sees himself, in mental vision.
But if he will take his stand, with poise and serenity, on spiritual
truth; if he will amend his life according to spiritual laws; if he will
accept failure as merely a stepping-stone to ultimate success,--as "the
triumph's evidence,"--ill fortune can establish no dominant power over
his life. That things have gone wrong is only, after all, a proof that
they _may_ go right. The consequences of error or mistake warn one not
to make the same error or mistake again; and therefore the consequences,
however unpleasant or sad at the moment, are really educative in their
nature, and their very trial or pain becomes, if truly recognized, a
friendly and redemptive power. Then, too, time is a variable factor. It
is degree, not duration, that it means. The consequences of an error may
be accepted and annulled swiftly. Intensity of feeling will condense a
year, an eternity, even, into an hour. And the "new day," days in which,
as Doctor Ames so charmingly wrote,--

"--God sets for you
A fair clean page to write anew
The lesson blotted hitherto,"--

a new day may be a new lifetime as well as that "next life" beyond the
change we call death.

How wonderfully Emerson unfolds the magic possible to a day. "One of the
illusions," he says, "is that the present hour is not the critical,
decisive hour. _Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in
the year._ No man has learned anything rightly, until he knows that
every day is Doomsday. There are days which are the carnival of the
year. The angels assume flesh, and repeatedly become visible. The
imagination of the gods is excited, and rushes on every side into forms.
Yesterday not a bird peeped; the wo