willing to put it up for sale.
You can sell your will for the kingdoms of the earth; and you will see,
or seem to see, many of your associates making just such bargains. But
in this be not deceived. No young man worthy of anything else ever
sold himself to the Devil. These are dummy sales. The Devil puts his
own up at auction in hope of catching others. If you fall into his
hands, you had not far to fall. You were already ripe for his clutches.

When a man steps forth from the college, he is tested once for all. It
takes but a year or two to prove his mettle. In the college high
ideals prevail, and the intellectual life is taken as a matter of
course. In the world outside it appears otherwise, though the
conditions of success are in fact just the same. It is not true,
though it seems so, that the common life is a game of "grasping and
griping, with a whine for mercy at the end of it." It is your own
fault if you find it so. It is not true that the whole of man is
occupied, with the effort "to live just asking but to live, to live
just begging but to be." The world of thought and the world of action
are one in nature. In both truth and love are strength, and folly and
selfishness are weakness. There is no confusion of right and wrong in
the mind of the Fates. It is only in our poor bewildered slave
intellects that evil passes for power. All about us in the press of
life are real men, "whose fame is not bought nor sold at the stroke of
a politician's pen." Such are the men in whose guidance the currents
of history flow.

The lesson of values in life it should be yours to teach, because it
should be yours to know and to act. Men are better than they seem, and
the hidden virtues of life appear when men have learned how to
translate them into action. Men grasp and hoard material things
because in their poverty of soul they know of nothing else to do. It
is lack of training and lack of imagination, rather than total
depravity, which gives our social life its sordid aspect. When a plant
has learned the secret of flowers and fruit, it no longer goes on
adding meaningless leaf on leaf. And as "flowers are only colored
leaves, fruits only ripe ones," so are the virtues only perfected and
ripened forms of those impulses which show themselves as vices.

It is your relation to the overflow of power that determines the manner
of man you are. Slave or god, it is for you to choose. Slave or god,
it is for yo