who has always had his spending money given to him never can. The young man who has been knocked about in the world appreciates kindness and love as those who have always had plenty of friends and favors too often fail to do. The man who has been misunderstood,and criticised and condemned unjustly acquires a firm reliance on his own integrity of purpose which the popular man is very likely to lose.

Even the severest physical defects and limitations have their compensations. There is no misfortune which a resolute will may not transform into an advantage. A closer acquaintance with the inner life of men of large achievement seldom fails to reveal the presence of some early privation, some bodily infirmity, some sore bereavement, some bitter disappointment, which has served as a secret spur to their endeavors. Out of hundreds of such cases I will cite two American historians: William H. Prescott, and Francis Parkman. In earlier days the order at college dining tables was not perfect; and frequently a "biscuit battle" followed the conclusion of the meal. In his Junior year, as Prescott was passing out of the Commons Hall after dinner, he turned his head quickly to see what the disturbance was, and was hit in the open eye by a large, hard piece of bread, which destroyed the sight of the eye. On his return to college after the resulting illness, he "now determined to acquire more respectable rank in his class than he had earlier deemed worth the trouble." A year and a half later the other eye became inflamed and affected with rheumatism. For weeks at a time he was compelled to remain in a room so dark that he could not see the furniture; and here he walked. hundreds of miles from corner to corner, thrusting out his elbows so as to get warning through them of his approach to the angles of the wall, from which he wore away the plaster by the constant blows thus inflicted on it. He was compelled to abandon his chosen profession of law. At the age of twentyfive he found himself with greatly impaired eyesight, and with no accurate knowledge of the modern languages. Yet he chose as his life work history, which more than any other line of liter

ary work requires eyesight; and a branch of history which required the constant use of the languages of Southern Europe. He at once set about the training of his memory; and persisted until he could prepare, work over, revise, correct, and retain in his memory the equivalent of sixty pages of printed matter; which he would then dictate to his amanuensis. In the face of these difficulties he produced the history of Ferdinand and Isabella, the Conquest of Mexico, and the Conquest of Peru. And later, when he could use his one remaining eye only one hour a day, and that divided into portions at wide intervals, he prepared his history of Philip II. As President Walker of Harvard University said, "We lamented the impairment of his sight as a great calamity; yet it helped, at least, to induce that earnestness and concentration of life and pursuit which has won for him a world-wide influence and fame."

Francis Parkman, in his college days, at the age of eighteen, devoted himself to the history of the French settlements in America. In order to understand the life of the Indians, who played so large a part in the history which he was determined to write, he went and lived among them in the far West. In doing this he greatly impaired his health. His eyesight was affected so that he could not read or write but a few minutes at a time; and his general health would not permit him to apply himself to study more than half an hour at a time. Yet, like Darwin, who could study but twenty minutes at a time, and that rarely more than twice each day, he has left us a splendid monument of work done so thoroughly that no one will ever need to do it after him.

The men who succeed best in the end are frequently the men who have most difficulty at the start. The greatest orators. from Demosthenes to Webster, have made wretched failures of their first attempts. During the years he was at Phillips Exeter Academy, Webster, although he committed piece after piece to memory, was so overcome when called upon to speak that he never was able to leave his seat. Difficulty may come, as in these cases from excess of power, which is at first uncontrol

lable, but is the condition of great achievement when control is gained. The colts which are hardest to break make the best horses to drive.

No young man should be discouraged by difficulties; for nothing worth doing was ever free from them. They are the stuff success is made of.

"Then welcome each rebuff

That turns earth's smoothness rough,

Each sting that bids nor stand, nor sit, but go!

Be our joys three parts pain!

Strive, and hold cheap the strain

Learn, nor account the pang; dare, never grudge the throe !"

The Blight of Idleness.

WR

REV. GEORGE R. HEWITT, B. D., Springfield, Mass.

E live in a day when the poet and the philosopher have combined to sound the praise and dignity of labor. Idleness is no longer deemed honorable or genteel. Work is the new patent of nobility. "The latest gospel in this world is," says Carlyle, "Know thy work and do it."

No man, rich or poor, has any right to be idle if he is able to work and can find work to do. Every man born into the world is bound to perform his proportionate share of the world's work. He cannot, unless he is a hermit, live by and for himself alone. He is born into society, stands included in society, derives unnumbered benefits from society, and so is morally bound to make some contribution to society.

Work is the law under which men live. Fish do not leap from the lakes into our frying pans, nor loaves of bread drop down from the skies; forests and clay banks do not shape themselves into dwellings, nor the mines automatically give up their treasures; and so long as they do not, the life of man on this planet can have no other law than that of unremitting toil. Let the world play holiday for a year and famine would reign from pole to pole. The world is always within one year of actual starvation. We really live from hand to mouth, and the world's incessant toil is all that keeps its fourteen hundred millions alive.

Since work is the law by which men live and society exists, the lazy man who will not work is a nuisance and a burden to society. Somebody else must do double work that he may live. without doing any. An able-bodied, healthy man who spends his days in idleness, refusing to contribute his share of work, manual or mental, for the maintenance of the world's life, is a

fraud and a cheat. A man who shuns work defrauds and disgraces himself.

Idleness if it became general would bring a universal blight over the earth's surface. If the world to-day wears a different look from what it wore when Adam walked in it, if foul jungles have been cleared and waste places reclaimed, if stately cities. have arisen and the desert been made to rejoice and blossom as the rose, it is all by reason of the labor that has been bestowed upon it. Man by his work has "stamped the brute earth and the raw materials taken out of it with the signature of mind." Let labor cease and the earth would revert to a wilderness. Industry and civilization go hand in hand. Indolence and barbarism are invariably linked together. By idleness it comes to pass that instead of the fir tree comes up the thorn, and instead of the myrtle tree comes up the brier. Says Solomon: "I went by the field of the slothful, and by the vineyard of the man void of understanding; and, lo, it was all grown over with thorns, and nettles had covered the face thereof, and the stone wall thereof was broken down. Then I saw, and considered it well: I looked upon it, and received instruction."

But idleness brings a blight not only on the earth and on man's possessions; it also brings a blight on man himself.

(1) It blights his powers. Man is a bundle of latent powers and capacities. Labor, in its varied forms muscular and mental, is the divinely appointed way by which our powers and capacities are to be quickened and unfolded. But an idle man's powers, being unexercised, remain undeveloped; and not only so, they even wither and shrink. Capacities unused waste away. We read in Scripture that the man who hid his talent lost it. Every member of the body and every faculty of the mind has a function to fulfill. Let them lie in idleness, and feebleness and atrophy ensue. A man needs work, then, not only for work's sake but for his own sake. He thereby perfects himself. Toil is a great teacher. Daily work is a daily school of patience, punctuality, fidelity, honesty, truthfulness, and all the virtues. Idleness is a school of nothing but vice.