peaking, your life is an
example of misdirected and dissipated energy. There is no spiritual
result because there is no continuous and energetic effort in a
spiritual direction. You are not like a master-builder planning and
erecting a house. You are like a child playing with a box of blocks who
begins to build a house with them and, when it is half built, is
attracted by something else and runs after that--not even waiting to put
the blocks back into the box!

Life, no doubt, this modern city life into which we are plunged, is
terribly distracting. Concentration upon a single aim is hard to attain.
So we plead in our excuse, but the excuse is a false one and we know it.
We know it because we know many people who have achieved the sort of
concentration and simplicity of aim that we complain of as so difficult.
They to be sure have other ends than those we claim to be ours, but that
would not seem to be important. By far the greater part of the male
population of this city is intensely concentrated in money making. I do
not believe that I have overheard during the last year two men talking
in a car or on the street who were not talking about money. There is a
good enough example of the possibility of concentrating on a single end
under the conditions of our life. There are other people, you know some
of them, whose lives are devoted in the most thorough manner to the
pursuit of pleasure. They find no difficulty in such concentration, and
they afford an even better example of what we are discussing than the
money-makers. The money-maker says, "I have to live and my family has to
live, and we cannot live unless I devote myself to business. It is all
very well to talk about spiritual interests, but those are the plain
common sense facts. A man who spends all his time on religion will find
it pretty difficult to live in New York." Very well, that seems
unanswerable. But go back to the men and women whose sole interest is
amusement--how do they live? In some way they seem to have so succeeded
in subordinating business to pleasure that they get what they want, and
they somehow escape starvation!

There, I fancy, is the explanation--they get what they want. In a broad
way we all get what we want. We accomplish in some degree at least the
ends which we make the supreme ends of life. We are back therefore where
we started: What are our supreme ends? Are they in fact spiritual? Have
we mastered the technique of the Christian life