single side of his nature. The same
principle will hold, of course, in a myriad cases; if we have to-morrow,
or even at a later date, to plead a cause, to make an after-dinner
speech, to write a report or an article, to learn a lesson, to entertain
guests, to handle a difficult case of discipline, we have only to take
this counsel of our pillow, to reenforce it with our first morning
thought, and we shall find ourselves making a new record of success.

It is obvious that a principle so effective cannot be limited to the
active or the intellectual life. If a man has a fault or a besetting
weakness or sin, here is a way out of it. How long will a bad habit
stand such an assault upon itself as the evening and morning practice of
Forethought? One will actually feel the new force within him, like a
gyroscopic stabilizer, holding him to his predetermined course. There is
literally a world of hope for mankind in the application of this
principle on its moral side. But the business of our article is with
other applications and we must dismiss this, the greatest of all, with a
mere mention.

If anyone questions whether this principle is true or not, the best
answer will be to bid him test it. Though it be true universally, some
people may not easily apply it, and some may not have the patience to
subject themselves to such a discipline. But most will have no
difficulty, and many will succeed well enough to inspire themselves to
continue. Some, indeed, will say, and with perfect truth, that there is
nothing new in this doctrine, that they have long known and applied it.
The principle has doubtless been known for thousands of years, but it
has certainly not been widely taken up by our race, which is curiously
external in its notions of self-education and self-control. One American
writer, the late Charles Godfrey Leland, a man of the most varied powers
and accomplishments, has written in advocacy of it and gives us as his
own experience that after the age of seventy he was able to do a greater
amount of literary work, and with less fatigue, than ever before simply
by calling in the aid of his unconscious self. If one were to read the
lives and writings of eminent men with this principle of Forethought in
mind, one would find numberless instances of its more or less
unconscious practice. The best scholar in my own class, for instance,
applied it to his studies. Does anyone suppose that the old Puritan's
sweetening of his mind with