eir sons. The self-denial of yesterday brought the
influence of to-day. Upon this principle God has organized the
industrial world. Man must take his choice between ease and wealth,
either may be his but not both.

Sacrifice is also the secret of beauty, culture and character.
Selfishness eats sweetness from the singer's voice as rust eats the
edge of a sword. St. Cecilia refused to lend the divine touch to lips
steeped in pleasure. He who sings for love of gold finds his voice
becoming metallic. In art, also, Hitchcock has said: "When the brush
grows voluptuous it falls like an angel from heaven." Fra Angelico
refuses an invitation to the Pitti palace, choosing rather his crust
and pallet in the cell of the monastery. The artist gave his mornings
to the poor, his evenings to his canvas. But when the painter had worn
his life away in kindly deeds, men found that the light divine had been
transferred to the painter's canvas. Eloquence also loves sincere
lips. The history of oratory includes few great scenes--Demosthenes'
plea for Athenian liberty that resulted in his death, Luther's single
challenge to the hosts of Pope and Emperor, Wendell Phillips' at
Faneuil Hall, Lincoln's at Gettysburg. All these risked life for a
cause, and were baptized with eloquence, their words being tipped with
fire, their minds hurling thunderbolts.

Sacrifice also is the secret of beauty. After a little time the life
of pleasure and selfishness will make the sweetest fact opaque and
repellent, while self-sacrificing thoughts are cosmetics that at last
make the plainest face to be beautiful. In the calm of scholarship men
have given up the thought that culture consists of an exquisite
refinement in manners and dress, in language and equipage. The poet
laureate makes Maud the type of polished perfection. She is "icily
regular, splendidly null," for culture is more of the heart than of the
mind. But as eloquence means that an orator has so mastered the laws
of posture, and gesture and thought and speech that they are utterly
forgotten, and have become second nature, so knowledge becomes culture,
and physical perfection becomes beauty, only when it is unconscious.

In the moral realm also, the gains for the soul begin with loss. In
the hour of temptation he who sacrifices the higher duty to the lower
pleasure will find that ease has shorn away the strength of Samson.

Victor Hugo has pictured a man committing suicide through