life are hidden, who, standing in the presence of the unseen, infinite world of truth and beauty, can only dream some aldermanic nightmare. They thrust themselves into the noisy crowd, and are thrown into contact with disenchanting experience at a time of life when the mind and heart should draw nourishment and wisdom from communion with God and with great thoughts. Amid the universal clatter of tongues, and in the overflowing ceaseless stream of newspaper gossip, the soul is bewildered and stifled. In a blatant land, the young should learn to be silent. The noblest minds are fashioned in secrecy, through long travail like,—

Is it not worth the labor and expectation of a life-time to be able to do, even once, the right thing excellently well? The eager passion for display, the desire to speak and act in the eyes of the world, is boyish. Will is concentration, and a great purpose works in secrecy. Oh, the goodness and the seriousness of life, the illimitable reach of achievement, which it opens to the young who have a great heart and noble aims! With them is God's almighty power and love, and his very presence is hidden from them by a film only. From this little islet they look out upon infinite worlds; heaven bends over them, and earth bears them up as though it would have them fly. How is it possible to remain inferior when we believe in God and know that this age is the right moment for all high and holy work? The yearning for guidance has never been so great. We have reached heights where the brain swims, and thoughts are confused, and it is held to be questionable whether we are to turn backward or to move onward to the land of promise; whether we are to be overwhelmed by the material world which we have so marvelously transformed, or with the aid of the secrets we have learned, are to rise Godward to a purer and fairer life of knowledge, justice, and love.

Is the material progress of the nineteenth century a cradle or a grave? Are we to continue to dig and delve and peer into matter until God and the soul fade from our view and we become like the things we work in? To put such questions to the multitude were idle. There is here no affair of votes and majorities. Human nature has not changed, and now, as in the past, crowds follow leaders. What the best minds and the most energetic characters believe and teach and put in practice, the millions will come to accept. The doubt is whether the leaders will be worthy,—the real permanent leaders, for the noisy apparent leaders can never be so. And here we touch the core of the problem which Americans have to solve. No other people has such numbers who are ready to thrust themselves forward as leaders, no other has so few who are really able to lead. In mitigation of this fact, it may be said with truth, that nowhere else is it so difficult to lead; for nowhere else does force rule so little. Every one has opinions; the whole nation is awakened; thousands are able to discuss any subject with plausibility; and to be simply keen-witted and versatile is to be of the crowd. We need men whose intellectual view embraces the history of the race, who are familiar with all literature, who have studied all social movements, who are acquainted with the development of philosophic thought, who are not blinded by physical miracles and industrial wonders, but know how to appreciate all truth, all beauty, all goodness. And to this wide culture they must join the earnestness, the confidence, the charity, and the purity of motive which Christian faith inspires. We need scholars who are saints, and saints who are scholars. We need men of genius who live for God and their country; men of action who seek for light in the company of those who know; men of religion who understand that God reveals himself in science, and works in Nature as in the soul of man, for the good of those who love him. Let us know the right moment, and let us know that it comes for those alone who are prepared.

CHAPTER II.

EXERCISE OF MIND.

Wordsworth.

Learning is acquaintance with what others have felt, thought, and done; knowledge is the result of what we ourselves have felt, thought, and done. Hence a man knows best what he has taught himself; what personal contact with God, with man, and with Nature has made his own. The important thing, then, is not so much to know the thoughts and loves of others, as to be able ourselves to think truly, and to love nobly. The aim should be to rouse, strengthen, and illumine the mind rather than to store it with learning; and the great educational problem has been, and is, how to give to the soul purity of intention, to the conscience steadfastness, and to the mind force, pliability, and openness to light; or in other words, how to bring philosophy and religion to the aid of the will so that the better self shall prevail and each generation introduce its successor to a higher plane of life.

To this end the efforts of all teachers have, with more or less consciousness, tended; and in this direction too, along winding ways and with periods of arrest or partial return, the race of man has for ages been moving; and he who aspires to gain a place in the van of the mighty army on its heavenward march,—

may be rash, but his spirit is not ignoble. To him it may not be given "to fan and winnow from the coming step of Time the chaff of custom;" but if he persevere he may confidently hope that his thought and love shall at length rise to fairer and more enduring worlds. He weds himself to things of light, seeks aids to true life within, learns to live with the noble dead, and with the great souls of the present who have uttered the truth whereby they live, in a way more intimate and higher than that granted to those who are with them day by day; for minds are not separated by time and space, but by quality of thought. But to be able to love this life, and with all one's heart to seek this close communion with God, with noble souls, and with Nature is not easy, and it may be that it is impossible for those who are not drawn to it by irresistible instincts. For the intellect, at least, attractions are proportional to destiny; and the art of intellectual life is not most surely learned by those whom circumstances favor, but by those whom will impels onward to exercise of mind; whom neither daily wants, nor animal appetites, nor hope of gain, nor low ambition, nor sneers of worldlings, nor prayers of friends, nor aught else can turn from the pursuit of wisdom; who, with ceaseless labor and with patient thought, eat their way in silence, like caterpillars, to the light, become their own companions, walk uplifted by their own thoughts, and by slow and imperceptible processes are transformed and grow to be