"Laws and principles are not for the times when there is no temptation; they are for such moments as this, when body and soul rise in mutiny against their rigor. Stringent are they, inviolate they shall be. If, at my individual convenience I might break them, what would be their worth? They have a worth-so I have always believed; and if I cannot believe it now, it is because I am insane-quite insane; with my veins running fire, and my heart beating faster than I can count its throbs. Conscience and reason are turned traitors against me, and are charging me with crime. They speak as loud as feeling in its clamors. Preconceived opinions, foregone determinations are all I have at this hour to stand by."

But we need not go to poetry or fiction for our examples. The little child of whom I spoke comes to his mother, crying, and can only offer the apology that "he did not remember" that she had bidden him keep away from the stove. If his hand be not very badly burnt, she will not be very sorry; because she now knows that he will remember better another time. Indeed, what Mr. Ruskin says of fine art, we may say of life. That all the training by which God is gradually changing us from babies into archangels is but so much accumulation by memory, more or less completely educated.

But this training of memory and this knowledge at one and the same time of the cause and consequence of the present temptation involves the right use of the imagination. The larger life, indeed, which is the purpose and object for which we live every day, requires me to command and control my imagination, to use it on the right errands, and to refuse it when it would fain travel the wrong way. The world in which I live may be the cell of a wretched prison, cabined and confined as was the unfortunate dauphin, the son of Louis XVI., or as Kaspar Hauser was said to be, so that his prison walls touched him above, below, on the right hand and on the left, behind and before.

One is really almost as badly off as he is when he is in a crowded railway car after darkness has come on. I cannot talk to my next neighbor because he is a Moqui Indian, I can see nothing but the shadows from the smoking lamp, I can hear

nothing but the clatter of the rail. This is hard circumstance. But what is circumstance to a trained child of God living by the divine order. I ought to be able to bid Shakespeare meet with Milton here. I may call Charles Dickens and Walter Scott into the interview. I may select the subject on which they shall talk, I may bid them say their say, and I may send them on their way. I may summon here all whom I have loved most in literature, be they people who have lived and breathed, or be they people who never had form or weight or visible body: such people as Jane Eyre or Di Vernon or Rosalind. I have them and they cannot leave me. The dead nausea of the disgusting car is forgotten, and in that prison cell I have enlarged my life to journey as I will.

Mme. de Genlis, in her gossiping and entertaining memoirs, goes at length into her habit of creating for herself an imaginary society. The passage is worth the search of enterprising readers, though I am afraid the book has neither index nor

contents.

Now for the same reason and for the larger life which all along we are seeking, you must train the faculty of reasoning, that you may have an opinion, and that opinion your own. To look on both sides and choose the better side, to dissect the rhetoric of a demagogue, to strip off his coat of many colors, and to show him for what he is, to decide between rival plans and to determine one's aim, for one's own purposes, by one's own abilities—all this is the duty of a man. Without this he forfeits a man's privilege. He is a chip on the current, whirled down in this flood, whirled up in that eddy, or left stagnant in some standing pool. How often, alas, one meets a man who never knew the luxury of an opinion. He has taken his morning impression from one newspaper, his evening impression from another. Meanwhile he has been the tool and the fool of every person who chose to use him, or to tell him what to think and what to say. To keep clear of that vacancy of life, a true man cares diligently, lovingly, for the weapons which have been given him, weapons of defense-yes, and sometimes weapons of attack, if need may be. He learns how to reason, how to search for truth, how to question nature, how to inter

pret her answers. He learns how to arrange in right order such eternal truths and such visible facts as relate to the matter he has in hand. He clears and enlarges his power of reasoning.

The power of induction and deduction man has because he is a child of God. It is the faculty which distinguishes him from the brutes. A body of wolves in the Pyrenees may gather round the fire which a peasant has left, and will enjoy the warmth of the embers. A group of chattering monkeys on the rock of Gibraltar might gather so round the watchfire which an English sentinel had left burning. They can enjoy the heat; but they cannot renew the fire. They cannot work out the deduction which is necessary before one kicks back upon the glaring embers the black brand which has rolled away. Were it to save their lives, they must freeze before one of them can deduce from what he sees the law or the truth as to what he must do. Here is it that man differs from the brute. He can learn. He can follow a deduction. He can argue. He can rise, step by step, to higher life.

This he does when he takes the control of thought. He rises to a higher plane and lives in a larger life.

There is no neater or better illustration of the way in which a wise teacher draws out the thinking faculty of a child than that which Warren Colburn borrowed from Miss Edgeworth, I believe, to place in the beginning of that matchless oral arithmetic which still holds its place in many well-regulated schools. The advantage which the thinking faculty gains from a good training in mathematics cannot be overstated. A master in that business used to say to me that, when you meet a man who says that he has no mathematical faculty, he is simply a man who was not well taught his "vulgar fractions" or his "rule of three" in childhood. I am inclined to think that this is true. A thousand writers have been eager to prove that good grammatical work does the same thing-and I believe that they are right. It is just the same mental process by which I build up a Latin verb, pronoun, and noun, so that they shall express the fact that "George Washington had taken off his own hat before he met Henry Knox," as the process by which I work out the truth that seventy-two apples costing

nine cents a dozen may be exchanged for two pecks of walnuts costing three cents and three-eighths a quart. Why the parallel of the two studies of language and mathematics as mental gymnastics should have been so much belabored as it has been, I have never known.

This is certain, that no one learns to think without thinking. I believe we may say more. I believe he must make a business of thinking. He must take hold of the control of his thought intentionally, resolutely, and energetically. If he does this I believe he will think more clearly, and with better results next year than he does to-day.

CHARACTER-BUILDING

Tranquillity

By EPICTETUS

[Epictetus, a Stoic philosopher, was, according to the received account, born about 40 A.D., at Hierapolis in Phrygia. While young he was a slave of Epaphroditus, a freedman and courtier of Nero, and was allowed to attend the lectures of Musonius Rufus, a teacher of the Stoic system, flourishing during the reigns of Nero and Vespasian. He was lame and of feeble health; but, later in life, obtaining his liberty, he became one of the recognized teachers at Rome, and so lived until all the philosophers were banished by an edict of Domitian. He then settled at Nicopolis, a town of Southern Epirus, and continued there until his death. He wrote nothing; but records of his teachings, which he conveyed through conversation, were taken down by his pupil Flavius Arrianus and preserved in two treatises; one, the "Discourses," of which four books are extant, and the other, the more popular manual, or "Enchiridion," containing his principal doctrines put in the form of aphorism.

His system is of an extremely practical nature. Everything earthly, he teaches, may be divided into two classes, things which are within our own control, and things over which we have no control, and it is the point of wisdom to live for the one and not to let the mind be disturbed by the other. The latter come to us as loans, and we must be unlamentingly acquiescent in their loss. Marcus Aurelius ranks him with Socrates; and men of modern time have given him no lower a place among the philosophers. The date of his death is unknown, but is thought to have been about the year 120. His epitaph, written by himself, is preserved to the world by Aulus Gellius: “Epictetus, a slave maimed in body, an Irus in poverty, and favored by the Immortals."]

CONSIDER, you who are about to undergo trial, what you wish to preserve and in what to succeed. For if you to preserve a mind in harmony with nature, you are entirely safe; everything goes well; you have no trouble on your hands. While you wish to preserve that freedom which belongs to you, and are contented with that, for what have you longer to be anxious? For who is the master of things like these? Who can take them away? If you wish to be a man of modesty and