nlightened
toward the one less enlightened. One should no more consent that his
friend should do an ignoble thing than he should consent to do an
ignoble thing himself. He should hold his friend in thought to the
divine standard. He should conceive of him nobly and expect from him
only honor and integrity. "Those who trust us educate us," says George
Eliot; and still more do they who hold us in the highest thought draw us
upward to that atmosphere through which no evil may pass. Each one is
his brother's keeper, and life achieves only its just and reasonable
possibilities when it is held constantly amenable to the divine
ideal,--when it is lived according to that inspiring injunction of
Phillips Brooks: "Be such a man, live such a life, that if all lives
were like yours earth would be Paradise."

Let one put aside sorrow and enter into the joy and radiance. "Omit the
negative propositions. Nerve us with incessant affirmatives." If
biography teaches any lesson, it is that the events which occur in life
are of far less consequence than the spirit in which they are received.
It is the attitude of mental receptivity which is the alchemy to
transmute events and circumstances into experience, and it is experience
alone which determines both the quality and the trend of life. It is in
activity; in doing and giving and loving, that the joy of life must be
sought. And it is joy which is the normal condition rather than
depression and sadness, as health and not illness is the normal state.
Disease and sadness are abnormal, and if one finds himself "blue," it is
his first business to escape from it, to change the conditions and the
atmosphere. The radiant life is the ideal state, both for achievement as
well as for that finer quality of personal influence which cannot
emanate from gloom and depression. "Everything good is on the highway,"
said Emerson, and the first and only lasting success is that of
character. It may not be, for the moment, exhilarating to realize that
one's ill fortune is usually the result of some defect in his selection,
or error in his judgment, but, on the other hand, if the cause of his
unhappiness lies in himself, the cause of his happiness may also lie
with himself, and thus it is in his power to so transform his attitude
to life as to reverse the gloom and have the joy and sweetness rather
than the bitterness and sadness of life. Everything, in the last
analysis, is a matter of temperament. Nothing is h