st exemplification of them in studying the noblest
men and women he has known, or, if his life has been worth living, in
recalling the most critical and significant passages of his own
experience. The reading of these laws is the latest and finest result
of the experience of the race. In their substance, they are
acknowledged by all good men. No wholly new path to goodness and
happiness is likely to be suddenly discovered; certainly no essentially
new ideal of what kind of goodness and happiness we are to seek. The
saints and heroes are all of one fellowship, though they do not all
speak the same language. In a word, there are certain traits of
character which all men whose opinion we value now recognize as
supremely worthy of cultivation. To seek to know things as they really
are; to fit our actions to our best knowledge; to conform in word and
act to the truth as we see it; to seek the good of others as well as
our own; to be sympathetic and responsive; to be open-eyed to beauty,
open-hearted to our fellow creatures; to be reverent and aspiring; to
resolutely subject the lower elements of our nature to the higher; to
taste frankly and freely the innocent joys of life; to renounce those
joys and accept privation, suffering, death, when duty calls,--such
purposes and dispositions as these are unquestionably a true rule of
life. The main theme to be illustrated in these pages is that this
ideal and rule is in itself an all-sufficient principle. Fidelity to
the best we know, and search always for the best, is the natural road
to peace and joy, the sure road to victory. It is the key which opens
to man the treasury of the universe.

To enforce and vivify this conception,--this interpretation of the key
of life as consisting in fidelity to certain ideals of character,--we
go back to the memorable examples of the past. We use those examples,
partly to show how the spiritual laws always worked, the same
yesterday, to-day, and forever; and partly to show how as time advanced
the laws have been understood with growing clearness, and applied with
growing effectiveness. The same stars shone above the sages of Chaldea
as shine above us, but our astronomy is better than theirs. The sages
of Greece, the prophets of Palestine, the heroes of Rome, the saints of
the Middle Ages, the philanthropists and the scientists of to-day, each
made their special contribution to the spiritual astronomy. From age
to age men have read t