that
she needs, or would make a young artist happy and encouraged by buying
his picture, and some one else might be made happy and helped on to new
endeavor by having the gift of the picture. Money can be transmuted into
spiritual gifts, and only when thus used is it of much importance in
promoting any real comfort or enjoyment or stimulus to progress. The
event, the thing, is purely negative, and only when acted upon by force
of spirit does it become positive.

Let one go on through the days doing the beautiful thing in every human
relation. Life is a spiritual drama, perpetually being played. The
curtain never goes down. The actors come and go, but the stage is never
vacant. To inform the drama with artistic feeling, with beauty, with
generous purpose, is in the power of every one. It depends, not on
possessions, but on sympathy, insight, and sweetness of spirit. These
determine the Life Radiant.

* * * * *

"I will wait heaven's perfect hour
Through the innumerable years."

[Sidenote: Heaven's Perfect Hour.]

The saving grace of life is the power to hold with serene and steadfast
fidelity the vision, the ideal, that has revealed itself in happier
hours; to realize that this, after all, is the true reality, and that it
shines in the spiritual firmament as the sun does in the heavens,
however long the period of storm and clouds that obscure its radiance.
The tendency to doubt and depression is often as prevalent as an
epidemic. In extreme cases it becomes the suicidal mania; in others it
effectually paralyzes the springs of action and leaves its victim
drifting helplessly and hopelessly with the current; and any such
mental tendency as this is just as surely a definite evil to be
recognized and combated as would be any epidemic of disease. To rise in
the morning confronting a day that is full of exacting demands on his
best energies; on his serenest and sunniest poise; that require all the
exhilaration and sparkle and radiance which have vanished from his
possession, and yet to be forced, someway and somehow, to go through his
appointed tasks,--no one can deny that here is a very real problem, and
one that certainly taxes every conceivable force of will far more than
might many great and visible calamities. For all this form of trial is
invisible and very largely incommunicable, and it is like trying to walk
through deep waters that are undiscerned by those near, but which impe