thus he may become a benefactor of men and
a co-worker with God. The rational will, which is the educated will,
should give impulse and guidance to all our thinking, loving, and doing.
It should control appetite; it should nourish faith and hope; it should
lead us on through the illusory world of sensual delights, through the
hardly less illusory world of wealth and power, still bidding us look
and see that the world to which the conscious self really belongs, is
infinite and eternal, and that to seek to rest in aught else is to
apostatize from reason and conscience. Thus it would awaken in us a
divine discontent, a sacred unrest, which might urge us on through the
darkness of appetite and the unwholesome air of avarice and ambition,
whispering to us that our life-work is to know truth, to love beauty, to
do righteousness. To none is the education of the will so necessary as
to the lovers of intellectual excellence, for they who live in the world
of ideas are easily content to let the world of deeds take care of
itself. As the astronomer sees the earth lost like a grain of sand in
infinite space, so to the wide and deep view of one who is familiar with
the course of human thought and action, what any man, what the whole
race of man, may do, can seem but insignificant. From the vanity and
noise of actors who fret and storm for their brief hour, and then pass
forever from life's stage, he flies to ideal worlds where truth never
changes, where beauty never grows old, and lives more richly blest than
lovers in Tempe or the dales of Arcady. And then the habit of looking at
things from many sides leads to doubt, hesitation, and inaction. While
the wise deliberate, the young and inexperienced have won or lost the
battle. Thus the purely intellectual life tends to weaken faith, hope,
and desire, which are the sources whence conduct springs, the drying up
of which leaves us amid barren wastes, where high thinking, if it be not
impossible, brings neither strength nor joy; for the secret of strength
and joy lies in doing and not in thinking. It is a law of our nature
that conduct brings the most certain and the most permanent
satisfaction, and hence whatever our ideals, the pursuit should be
inspired by the sense of duty.

"Stern law-giver! yet thou dost wear
The Godhead's most benignant grace;
Nor know we anything so fair
As is the smile upon thy face.
Flowers laugh before thee on their beds
And fragra