Chapter XXIII: Part II: Addresses (2)

In order to do the right thing at the right time, and do it well, we must learn to think about the right thing at the right time. This is one of the most important features in mental training. We can think well on but one thing at a time. Therefore, the mind that is filled with various kinds of thoughts can prosecute none of them successfully. We must learn to select the guests that we would have sit at our intellectual banquets, summon or exclude them at will, and never permit the intrusion of a promiscuous crowd. When our work is arranged for the day, the week, the month, the year, we should set apart the time to be devoted to each item, both in work and in thought; and then never allow the thoughts of one to encroach upon the time allotted to another. We should so train the mind that we can think about the thing only of which we wish to think, concentrate our whole mind upon it till the time comes to put it away; then dismiss it in a moment, turn to something else, and think no more about it, till its proper time. The mind is soon trained to pass from one subject to another in a moment, with all its powers of concentration. This mastery of the mind, once attained, will enable us to study at all times and places regardless of circumstances. The man who can not study amid the wild shouts of the excited multitude is not his own master. He who can command his time and his talents only when no surging billows beat against his quiet retreat, has necessarily to spend much of life in which he has neither time nor talents which he can call his own. A very important item, then, in the economy of time, is to learn to labor under difficulties, till we rise superior to external surroundings. To keep the reins of the mind well in hand when there is a stampede all around us, is absolutely essential in the great crises of life. This is attained only by training the mind to instantaneous concentration under all circumstances. This, then, I would urge you to persist in until it is accomplished. Without this you will lose much time in acquiring information, and, what is of vastly more importance, you will be unprepared to use what you have at the very time, it may be, when it is most needed.

Another important element in the economy of time we learn from the great Teacher who said, "Gather up the fragments, that nothing be lost." If He who had the power to create as well as to preserve, was such an economist of the remnants of loaves and fishes, how much more should we save the fragments of time, which we can not lengthen out a span?

Many people seem to think they can make garments only out of whole cloth. If they have not an abundance of uninterrupted time in which to accomplish a thing, they think they can not accomplish it at all. Such men accomplish but little, not for want of time, but for want of its economy. To avoid this waste, we must learn to weave whole garments out of the mere ravelings of the fabric of time. But some complain that they can not "get up steam" for intellectual labor in these fractions of time. We don't need to "get up steam." The "steam" should be already up. We only need to change the gearing. "There is a momentum in the active man," says Mathews, "which of itself almost carries him to the mark, just as a very light stroke will keep a hoop going, when a smart one was required to set it in motion. While others are yawning and stretching themselves to overcome the _vis inertiae_, he has his eyes wide open, his faculties keyed up for action, and is thoroughly alive in every fiber. He walks through the world with his hands unmuffled and ready by his side, and so can sometimes do more by a single touch in passing than a vacant man is likely to do by strenuous effort."

Let no one conclude that nothing important can be accomplished by these scattered fragments. It is said that "Hugh Miller found time while pursuing his trade as a stone-mason, not only to read but to write, cultivating his style till he became one of the most facile and brilliant authors of the day." Also, that Elihu Burritt "acquired a mastery of eighteen languages and twenty-two dialects, not by rare genius, which he disclaimed, but by improving the bits and fragments of time which he could steal from his occupation as a blacksmith."

With these examples before us, then, let no one conclude that he can not get time from his daily vocation, whatever it may be, to cultivate his mind, and develop his moral and intellectual faculties. Another essential element in self-culture is

SINGLENESS OF PURPOSE.

"A man," says Emerson, "is like a bit of Labrador spar, which has no lustre as you turn it in your hand until you come to a particular angle; then it shows deep and beautiful colors." There is no adaptation or universal applicability in man; but each has his special talent; and the mastery of successful men consists in adroitly keeping themselves where and when that turn shall need oftenest to be practiced. The successful man in every calling, whether literary, scientific or business, is he who is _totus in illo_--who can say with Paul, this one thing I do! With the exception of a few great creative minds, the men whose names are historic are identified with some one achievement, upon which all their life force is spent. "Whatever I have tried to do in my life," says Dickens, "I have tried with all my heart to do well. What I have devoted myself to, I have devoted myself to completely. Never to put one hand to a thing on which I would not throw my whole self, and never to affect depreciation of my work, whatever it was, I find now to have been golden rules." The fact is, the range of human knowledge has become so extensive that the man who would know some things well must have the courage to be ignorant of many others. There are many things for which one is wholly incapacitated; for which he has no talent, and, as a rule, time spent in this direction is time lost. Goethe justly says: "We should guard against a talent which we can not hope to practice in perfection. Improve it as we may, we shall always, in the end, when the merit of the master has become apparent to us, painfully lament the loss of time and strength devoted to such botching." Sidney Smith condemns what he calls the "foppery of _universality_--of knowing all sciences and excelling in all arts." "Now _my_ advice," he says, "on the contrary, is to have the courage to be ignorant of a great number of things, in order to avoid the calamity of being ignorant of everything."

I do not mean that you should try to learn but one thing, or be a man or woman of one idea; far from it. I simply mean that you must be select. Select your calling, and then bend all your energies in that direction. Let those branches of knowledge that bear most directly on your vocation be mastered first, then widen the circle as opportunity affords. Do not scatter your powers over so much territory that they are felt nowhere. It is only when the sun's rays are brought to a focus that they burn. The man who is one thing this year, another next; studies medicine a while, then law, is next a school-teacher, and then an insurance agent, will, in the end, be nothing. Men who are always changing, never learn enough about anything to make it of any value. Men who are eminent in their professions have stuck to them with a singleness of purpose. Men talk much about genius, when, generally, the genius of which they speak is but the result of unremitting application. The genius that blesses this world is simply a talent for hard work. They are men who have the resolution to try, and the courage to persevere. Idle men of the most eminent natural ability are soon distanced in the race by the mediocre who sticks to his purpose and plods. Then, I repeat, if you would succeed in life, in whatever calling you may select, divest yourself of the idea that you are a genius and do not need the application demanded by common mortality; rely not on the caprices of fickle fortune; but rely on God and yourself, economize your time, apply yourself with diligence and with singleness of purpose. With these you will be a blessing to the world, and fulfill the high and holy purposes of God in giving you being.

Self-culture looks not simply to time, but to eternity. No man is truly cultured who is not cultured for eternity. His culture is but one-sided, and that the most inferior side. The well-rounded and perfected culture, though it may be only partial so far as the culture of this world is concerned, is the culture that prepares one to matriculate in the great university over which God presides, and sit forever in delightful appreciation at the feet of the great Teacher. Let this, then, be the ultimatum of all your efforts.

It is for this reason that you should so highly appreciate this institution from which you go out to-day as honored students. While the various branches of the arts and sciences that pertain to this life, have been carefully and accurately taught you, the great Science of eternal life, if I may so term it, has been, I trust, indelibly engraved on your every heart. A college whose faculty is composed exclusively of Christian men and women, and in which the systematic study of the Bible by both ladies and gentlemen is made one of its most prominent features, will ever be most highly appreciated by those who appreciate true culture, and know in what it consists. I think I appreciate a high standard of education, and I want, if possible, to give my children its advantages; but I should infinitely prefer their never going beyond the common school than to be graduated with the first honors from the most renowned colleges or universities of Europe or America, in which the authority of Jesus is not held as supreme, and the Bible honored as our only divine guide. Other things being equal, we should always honor those institutions most that honor God's word most. For this reason, then, as well as for many others, we delight to honor this institution from whose fostering care you this day go forth.

In conclusion, let me entreat you to be what this world now most needs--MEN and WOMEN. The world is now burdened with "gentlemen and ladies;" but it is perishing for the want of MEN and WOMEN. The world needs men and women that are true to themselves, true to each other, and true to God--men and women who know what manliness is, and what womanly virtues are; who delight in the real, and scorn the counterfeit; who have the courage to do right because it is right; who would rather stand alone on the side of truth, than with the world on the side of error; who are governed by high and holy principle, not by selfish policy. We need men and women that will create a healthier public sentiment, rather than to float on that which exists; who will frown out of countenance the fraud, dishonesty and meanness that now lifts high its head in society; who will not live in fine palaces, drive fast horses, and occupy the first pews in the sanctuary, at ten cents on the dollar. The world needs men and women who have hearts and consciences, as well as brains; who realize that they have a soul as well as a body; who live for eternity rather than for time.

God grant that you may all make such men and women. That you may not only be a blessing to the age and generation in which you live; but that your influence for the "true, the beautiful and the good," may be felt like the gentle dews of heaven upon the earth, generations after you are gathered to your fathers! May you be diligent and faithful in the cultivation of your nobler powers of mind and heart till the world shall bless God that you have lived in it; then laying aside the body, in which you have fought the grand fight for righteousness and truth--a fight on which God and angels have looked with interest and delight--as you would lay aside a worn-out garment, and passing through "the gates ajar," enter on a higher plane of culture, where you will not have to rely upon self, and struggle against adversity as here; but where you will have all the facilities of Heaven, and be forever pupils of the great Teacher!

III.--PLUS ULTRA VS. NE PLUS ULTRA.

[An Address Delivered Before Eminence College, June 10, 1881.]

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN OF EMINENCE COLLEGE:--It has ever been a delight to me to meet with the faculty and students of Eminence College on these festive occasions. It is but natural that the hearts of those who have gone out from these classic halls should turn on these gala days, and in feeling if not in fact, renew the fond associations of the past. They are oases in the desert; well-springs to the thirsty soul in the journey of life. I should, therefore, be untrue to myself, and unjust to you, were I not to confess to a pardonable pride in the privilege of addressing for the second time one of the graduating classes of this renowned institution. The subject on which I shall to-day address you is

"_Plus Ultra vs. Ne Plus Ultra._"

Spain is the great southwestern peninsula of Europe. It juts out between two seas as does no other country of that continent. Before the discovery of America by Columbus, the Spaniards prided themselves on the supposed fact that their country was the last point of solid land on the earth westward. Beyond them, they thought, there was nothing but a vast expanse of water--a shoreless ocean--a mystery never to be solved. Consequently the early coins of that country, in order to give prominence to this idea, were indented with a picture of the pillars of Hercules, the two great sentries on each side of the straits of Gibraltar. Encircling these pillars on their coins was the inscription, _ne plus ultra_--nothing beyond. They imagined, therefore, that they constituted the limits of creation; that beyond them there was nothing. Consequently, as in creation the last is the best, they gave to themselves the preëminence. In this proud idea they rested and praised the Lord. In their own estimation, therefore, they constituted the _ne plus ultra_ of God's favored people. Thus they constituted another proud monument of man's folly and ignorance, from which it is well to take warning. In course of time, however, Columbus conceived the idea of another world west of Spain. After long years of discouragement, sufficient to crush the spirit of all but those of noble impulses and high resolves, he was permitted, with a small fleet, utterly insignificant in this age, to sail westward. He thus discovered the _new world_ whose existence, if ever known before, had faded from the memory of man. On his return, when the Spaniards became convinced that a great continent lay to the west of them, they were compelled, humiliating as it was, to change the inscription on their coins, encircling the pillars of Hercules, to _plus ultra_--more beyond. This the demonstrated truth demanded. Thus the discovery of America took the _ne_ off of their proud motto, thus teaching them a lesson which should be a lesson to the world. Their negation was changed to an affirmation. Their boasted limit of creation was changed to an acknowledgment of the unknown beyond. Thus it has ever been in man's proud history. Thus it will doubtless continue to be till we know as we are known. "Whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away; for now we know only in part, but then shall we know even also as we are known."

The first thought with which I would impress your minds to-day, especially the minds of those who go out from this institution with the honors of graduation, is that there is something beyond--the _plus ultra_ of a collegiate education. One of the most fatal mistakes in securing a collegiate education is, that this is all. If one of you entertains the idea to-day that your education is "finished," you will be a failure. We hear much in this age about a "finished education" in college. Alas! there is too much truth in it. The education of many is thus "finished," and their progress in life is also _finished_. A college course is not the end, but simply the means, of an education. This is simply the foundation, not the structure. On this you are to hereafter build; otherwise the foundation will be worthless. Without the after building the foundation itself will decay. This is alike the teaching of the history of man and the Son of God. On this foundation, therefore, I would urge you to build, not for time only, but for eternity. On it you should erect a noble structure, at once an ornament and a blessing to your race. This can not be done in a day. Patience and perseverance are the price of success. You must learn to "labor and to wait."

How often do we see the scintillations of genius within college walls, of which we see or hear nothing after the day of graduation? On that day the sun of their brilliancy seems to set forever. Why is this? Simply because they think their graduation is the _ne plus ultra_ of their literary life.

It is not what we learn in college, but what we learn after leaving it, that makes us what we are in after life. The value of a collegiate education consists not in the amount of information it imparts, but in a preparation for the accumulation and use of information. Not simply the best minds, but the best students are those who win the prize in the end. Not the best students in college, but the best students after leaving it, are those who make the world feel their power. Many study hard for the honors of graduation, and beyond this seem to have no aspirations. If this is their _ne plus ultra_, then it is worthless. This institution does not educate you for graduation; it graduates you for education. Without this end in view, its labors would better cease. An institution is honored not by what its students know on the day of commencement, but by what they know and do ere they matriculate in the great university of worlds. It is, therefore, young ladies and gentlemen, to this end and not to this hour, that your teachers have faithfully labored to bring you. Without this in view, you will miss the grand purpose of your education thus far.

Doubtless many of us know men and women who have not grown an inch since the day that they went out from these or other halls of learning. They may have promised much at the beginning. On their success high hopes were built. Loving hands were impatient to wreathe their brows with the garlands of victory. But, alas! those hopes have been blighted and those garlands have withered. We see them in the pulpit, at the bar, and in all the other vocations of life. They are failures, not for want of mind, but for want of application. They have not followed up their victories, and their victories have turned to defeat. They have been resting on the honor of faded laurels, that in their freshness so become you to-day. To gather these was the _ne plus ultra_ of their efforts, and hence the end of their success. Therefore, if any of you to-day look upon your graduation as the consummation of your literary struggles, let me exhort you to change your motto, and, like the Spaniards, on the birth of the new world, discard the idea of a possessed _ultimatum_, and imprint upon your banner _plus ultra_--more beyond.

As most of the graduating class are ladies, I feel the necessity of speaking especially of their hopes and prospects. Till recently, the hindrances of woman's education and literary position have been great and discouraging. But, thanks to the religion of Jesus, her disabilities have in Christian lands been removed. Woman was the crowning workmanship of God, and she has received the crowning blessings of Christianity. By the blessing of Christianity, the intellectual and spiritual powers of woman are encouraged. The world is often dazzled by her genius, astonished at her resources, and subdued by her spirit. She has stood in the halls of learning, walked in the groves of science, and gathered laurels on the mountains of fame. She has stimulated the world's genius, soothed its passion, and strewed her pathway through it with the sweetest flowers. Women have ever been the world's brightest angels of mercy--

"Whose company has harmonized mankind,
Soften'd the rude and calmed the boisterous mind."

There are positions in the world for which woman was not made. The finishing touches of creation's wondrous works were too delicate to fit her for the political arena, the command of armies, or the founding of empires. She was made for higher and holier ends than these. She is adapted to a work more noble and more enduring. Her empire is in the heart, and her scepter one of spiritual dominion. Here she is a queen, and reigns without a rival. While there is a limit to her appropriate field of action, there is no limit to her power. Some one has said: "The current of female existence runs more within the embankments of home." This is true, but her influence overflows those banks and inundates the world. Her influence may be compared to the sparkling rivulet that bursts from the mountain peak, then winding its way to the valley below, it flows gently onward for thousands of miles, through rugged hills and fertile plains, bathing the feet of great cities and slaking the thirst of great countries, augmented by its tributaries, till, bearing upon its bosom the commerce of a nation, it pours its flood of waters into the world's great ocean. As our grand Mississippi will readily yield to an infant's touch, and yet bear upon its bosom the proudest vessels of man's invention, so is the tenderness and the power of woman's influence.

I have spoken of woman being the "last of creation." This expression is generally used in a false sense. She was last because God created on an ascending scale. She was, therefore, last in creation and first in redemption. She gave to the world its Saviour, and first proclaimed His birth from the dead. She was His best friend while He was here, and has been most devoted to His cause during His absence. Hence where Christianity goes woman's power is felt. The extent to which woman is honored marks to-day with unerring certainty the extent of a nation's civilization.

Young ladies, you have before you a field of golden opportunities. Only thrust in your sickles and reap. In this age and country there are great potentialities to every young lady of a good mind and a pure heart. Let no one, therefore, be discouraged. Remember that there is something beyond--the _plus ultra_ of a well-begun life.

Having urged the necessity of _plus ultra_ as your motto, as against _ne plus ultra_, I may drop some profitable hints as to the attainment of success. You know that one may give good advice, though he may not have profited by it himself.

In the first place, everything depends on work. Intense application is the price of success. The world's benefactors are the world's hard workers. "Tickle the earth with a hoe, and it will laugh at you with a harvest." But it closes its fists against those who extend to it an idle hand. Many people contend that the world owes them a living, and grumble that it does not pay the debt. What have they done for the world to bring it into their debt? The world owes every man a living when he earns it by honest toil, and not before. Those who sow with a stingy hand may expect to reap a scanty harvest. You should, therefore, in whatever vocation you may elect, strive to succeed on this principle; otherwise you will not deserve success.

You should not be discouraged because surroundings are not favorable, and hope seems long deferred. Be not impatient of results. Do your whole duty, and leave the consequences with the Lord. Never strive to be great. Few men become great this way, and they never deserve it. True greatness comes as a result of devotion to principle and duty. The highest and noblest success comes through a spirit of self-forgetfulness.

Learn to be indifferent to surroundings. You need not catch the "spirit of the age" unless the "spirit of the age" is worth catching. When you contemplate Marquis de Condorcet, in the dark days of the French Revolution, hiding in a lonely room in the city of Paris, while its streets ran red with noble and innocent blood, quietly writing a book whose subject was, "_Man's Certain Progress to Liberty, Virtue, and Happiness_," you will understand what I mean.

You must learn to _think_; to think regardless of surroundings; to think only of the thing of which you wish to think; and on this to concentrate the whole power of your mind. This requires careful training; but this only is _education_. With this you have full command of all your resources; without this they avail but little. The great motive power of the world is thought. Information without thought is simply a peddler burdened with stale wares on a dead market. It is not what one knows, but what he can produce, that makes the world feel his power. Hence one must be a producer as well as a receiver. The world's thought must be regenerated in his own mind. He should turn the world's dead facts into living thoughts--"Thoughts that breathe, and words that burn."

Avoid fickleness of purpose. Decide to do something in harmony with your endowments and the will of God, _and do it_. Many people of fine attainments and intellectual powers are spending their lives trying to decide for what purpose the Lord made them. Before they determine what they are good for, the world is certain to decide that they are good for nothing. Life is too precious to be spent in hesitation. He who vacillates will do nothing. Concentration is power. The rays of the sun that would hardly warm an infant's hand will, when concentrated by a lens, blister the palms of the hardiest sons of toil.

If we would make life a success, we must live for a purpose. He who lives simply for the sake of living, has no just conception of life. Those who live for the gratification of the flesh should remember that the goat lives for the same purpose. How humiliating the thought, that so many of the cultured, as well as the ignorant; the rich as well as the poor; the "cream of society" as well as its dregs, are thus living on the low plane of animal life! The grand distinction between man and the brute creation is in his _spirit_ nature. Without spiritual culture, every thought, every aspiration, every gratification, is of the earth earthy. How sad, then, to see the gaudy "butterflies of society" spending their lives without a thought above that which alone can lift them forever above the plane of animal life! It is sad thus to think, but sadder still 'tis true. The enjoyment of "society," therefore, must not be your _ne plus ultra_, else life will be a failure.

In order to the highest success, you should live fast, but not in the world's bad sense of that word. I simply mean that your life should be intense. Mere existence is not life. Life is action. Life is not measured by time, but by experience. It is our duty, therefore, to live all we can in the time allotted us. The patriarchs lived longer than we, but we may live more than they. This is a grand age in which we live. We may now live more in fifty years than Methuselah did before the flood. The time is short. Hence if we would live much we must live fast.

But here I anticipate an objection. You say, "We shall shorten our days by fast living." Not by _this kind_ of fast living. The world will never be troubled for burying ground for those who kill themselves simply by hard work. It is not work, but worry, that wears men out. We have too much friction in our lives. This must be stopped. An hour's passion will tell more on the constitution than a week's work. The largest amount of action, with the smallest amount of friction, is the problem before you; and he is the wisest philosopher who gives to us its best practical solution.

I wish now to invite your attention to mistakes that men have made in supposing that their knowledge was the _ne plus ultra_ of human wisdom. Time was when the alchemists thought they possessed the _ne plus ultra_ of human knowledge, and that wisdom would die with them; yet their knowledge is now to chemistry what astrology is to astronomy. It is a superstition on whose claims no scientist would dare to risk his reputation. Now chemistry is the _ne plus ultra_ of human wisdom, and every man is a fool who does not hold the key to the secret chambers of its hidden treasures! But how long till we shall have a new chemistry that will render the old a bundle of laughable folly? The fact is, by the advancement of human knowledge we demonstrate that our ancestors were a set of fools, and our posterity will doubtless pay us the same compliment! The philosophy of history should teach us to be modest, and to keep as our motto _plus ultra versus ne plus ultra_.

Modern science has demonstrated that of all unreliable things, ancient science is the most unreliable. We should, therefore, expect to eventually see modern science remanded to the same category. One of the greatest inventors of the age, Mr. Edison, whose inventions have had to do wholly with modern science, tells us that he has been constantly thrown off the track and misled by the frauds of science. He thus expresses his estimate of the authorities in modern science:

"They [the text-books] are mostly misleading. I get mad with myself
when I think I have believed what was so learnedly set out in them.
_There are more frauds in science than anywhere else_.... Take a
whole pile of them and you will find uncertainty, if _not
imposition_, in half of what they state as scientific truth. They
have time and again set down _experiments as done by them_,
curious, out-of-the-way experiments, _that they never did_, and
upon which they have founded so-called scientific truths. I have
been thrown off my track often by them, and for months at a time.
You see a great name, and you believe it. Try the experiment
yourself, and you find the result altogether different.... I tell
you I'd rather know nothing about a thing in science, nine times
out of ten, than what the books would tell me--for practical
purposes, for applied science, the best science, the only science,
I'd rather take the thing up and go through with it myself. I'd
find out more about it than any one could tell me, and I'd be sure
of what I know. That's the thing. Professor this or that will
controvert you out of the books, and prove out of the books it
can't be so, though you have it right in the hollow of your hand
all the time and could break his spectacles with it."

Thus it is that these authorities have been weighed in the balances and found wanting. This is a marvelous age, an age of unsurpassed invention and discovery of truth, but it is not the _ne plus ultra_ of human wisdom--if we are to take any lessons from the past ages.

The wave theory of sound, which has been regarded as a settled scientific fact since the days of Pythagorean, is now vigorously attacked, and the adherents to the orthodox ground will have to rally their forces and reconsider their proofs, if they save the theory from slumbering among the follies of the past.

In the past few years the world has been startled by the bold theory of evolution, as advocated by Darwin, Haeckel, Huxley and others. Many have felt uneasy about the foundations of our faith. But such alarm is all premature. The glaring contradictions of one another of these modern apostles of a "gospel of dirt," and their self-stultification, are enough to convince any thoughtful reader, that if the race has not developed from apes, a few of them bear marks of descent from asses! The credulity of this class of men is simply marvelous. They can believe that a moneron can be developed into a man, but can not believe in a miracle! Their wonderful development of a moneron into a man terminates with the boundary line of time, and thus the _ne plus ultra_ is reached of their "infinite progression!"

In order to a proper appreciation of the present life, we must be deeply impressed with the nature of that which lies beyond. No one can well spend the present life who does not spend it in view of the life to come. Man must properly appreciate himself before he can live in harmonious relations with his being. No man can have that appreciation of himself essential to a true life, who believes that his ancestors were monerons and mud-turtles!

While there are many striking resemblances between animals and man, just such as we should expect to find from the hand of the same Creator, who began farthest from himself and worked to his own divine model, yet there are striking differentiae which demand profound consideration. Animals come into the world with the knowledge of their ancestors. The beaver knows just what its ancestors knew before the flood. It is born into the world with that transmitted knowledge. Its posterity will know no more during the millennium. On the contrary, man is born into the world an intellectual blank. However wise his parents, he inherits not one idea. He knows absolutely nothing except what he learns--learns from teachers and by experience. It would be incomprehensibly strange if man in his development from a mollusk, should accumulate inherited knowledge till he reaches the _ne plus ultra_ of terrestrial life, and then by a sudden break in the chain of nature lose it all, and come into the world a born fool!! This would be "development," "natural selection," and the "survival of the fittest," with a vengeance! Here is a chasm between man and the lower animals, made by the hand of God, that human wisdom can never bridge.

In his intellectual, moral and spiritual development, man starts from zero. God has thus ordained it. He is dependent on progression for all that he is and all that he is to be. God simply gives him a start in this world, with the numberless ages of eternity before him for infinite advancement. The idea, therefore, that "death ends all" nips in the bud this grand conception of man's greatness, and blights forever that which is noblest and truest in his nature. To regard this life as the _ne plus ultra_ of man's development, is to charge nature with a freak of folly, and an abortion in her best works. Men may laud human virtue for human virtue's sake; but if man is but the moth of a day, the fire-fly whose phosphorescent light flashes for a moment and then goes out in eternal night, his virtues are but the tales of the hour that have their value in the telling. If this life is all there is of man, then he is the most unmeaning portion of the creation of God. There is for him no perfection, no satisfying of his inherent wants, and the whole of his existence is a sham and a fraud. As Young has beautifully said:

"How poor, how rich, how abject, how august,
How complicate, how wonderful, is man!
How passing wonder He who made him such!
Who centered in our make such strange extremes,
From different natures marvelously mixed,
Connection exquisite of distant worlds!
Distinguished link in being's endless chain!
Midway from nothing to the Deity!
A beam ethereal, sullied, and absorbed!
Though sullied and dishonored, still divine!
Dim miniature of greatness absolute!
An heir of glory! a frail child of dust!
Helpless immortal! insect infinite!
A worm! a God!--I tremble at myself,
And in myself am lost. At home, a stranger.
Thought wanders up and down, surprised, aghast,
And wondering at her own. How reason reels!
O, what a miracle to man is man!
Triumphantly distressed! What joy! what dread!
Alternately transported and alarmed!
What can preserve my life? or what destroy?
An angel's arm can't snatch me from the grave;
Legions of angels can't confine me there."

It is only when we thus look beyond this life, and contemplate his relation to the Deity, that we realize the true dignity of man.

It is natural that you should desire power--power to bless the race and bring it nearer to God. Do not be discouraged if you do not find this power clothed in the world's pomp and parade. The most God-like power comes not in this way. God works by quiet forces that man may scorn but can not equal. Behold that mountain of ice in the polar sea held by the relentless grip of a winter's frost. All the engineering power of man could not shake it upon its throne. All the locomotives in the world could not move it an inch. But nature unveils her smiling face when the springtime comes, the sun sheds upon it his gentle rays, noiseless as the grave, too mild to hurt an infant's flesh, and soon these mountains of ice relax their grip and glide away into the great deep! This is power. This power you may possess, and should strive to possess, through the gentle forces of a regenerated nature, till the quiet influences you exert for God will pass beyond the bounds of time and be expended on a shoreless eternity.

In conclusion, then, let me urge you to live for eternity, and let the life that now is be with reference to that which is to come. Then will you progress from the low plane of our terrestrial sphere to association with God, and eternity alone will mark the _ne plus ultra_ in intellectual and spiritual development toward the Divine Being.