Every man needs the inspiration of a great mission to lift him above the pettiness and cheapness which are the bane of ordinary lives. Some great undertaking with an element of heroism and moral sublimity in it, the very contemplation of which quickens the blood and fires the soul and awakens an ever-present sense of the dignity and significance of life, this is an essential condition of all great achievement.

"Tis not for man to trifle: life is brief,

And sin is here.

Our age is but the falling of a leaf,
A dropping tear.

We have no time to sport away the hours;
All must be earnest in a world like ours.

Not many lives, but only one have we;
One, only one.

How sacred should that one life ever be
Day after day filled up with blessed toil,
Hour after hour still bringing in new spoil!

EXERCISES

1. Can one meditate too little in advance of action? Too much? Why?

2. Do really good men think much about their motives? To what extent and why ought one study his motives? What is the effect of too much fingering of one's motives?

3. In making a speech have you ever found that, although you seem to have nothing to say at the start, relevant thoughts will begin to come to you after you are once launched in your speech? Does the same thing happen when you sit down to write or to study? Do one's purposes in life analogously begin to take on definiteness and force only when one begins to act them out?

4. What is the relation of work to happiness?

5. Men who write books are usually scholarly in the particular field in which they write. Do they write because they are scholars, or are they made scholars by their writing?

6. Spinoza, while urging that one should help his neighbor where he could, condemned pity. Discuss the value of pity which does not express itself in actual help.

7. Is it true that a person is known by what he does

- by the

plan that runs through his life rather than by any other characteristic?

8. What would be the effect of following Dr. Alexander's advice to the young minister to live in his sermon?

advice apply also to other work?

9. Discuss the value of "diffused ambition

Would that

that is am

bition not directed toward attainment of success in some specific work.

10. Can you measure love by the sacrifices to which it prompts one? By any other standard?

11. Give examples of persons whose lives took on a new forcefulness and definiteness in consequence of accepting some new responsibility as that of supporting the family thrust upon them by the death of a father.

12. What did the Apostle James mean by saying that “Faith without works is dead"? Show that that is true.

CHAPTER XXIV

HOW WORK MAY BE SAVED FROM DRUDGERY

In the preceding chapter we saw that only in work is strength to be found. As long as one depends upon external conditions to supply him with the means of enjoyment, or as long as he keeps his attention turned inward upon his own interests and feelings, so long is his life flabby, scattered, and unsatisfactory. But when he focuses his powers upon some line of work, and plunges wholeheartedly into this work, his life takes on unity, coherence, and momentum. Work as drudgery. But work alone is drudgery. It gradually grinds the life out of a man. If his work is hard and monotonous it will in time inevitably benumb his faculties. The superintendent, the office clerk, the traveling salesman, may sustain, or even develop, their culture, but the manual laborer is in danger of progressively sinking to the brute level. He may leave school with the intention of continuing to study in the evenings, but he soon finds out that he returns from work too tired to think, and with too little ambition to hunger any longer after cultural opportunities. Bodily fatigue has an extremely paralyzing effect upon the brain. One can not well work hard and think hard.

Edwin Markham has expressed this fact with terrible vividness in his poem 66 The Man With the Hoe":

Bowed by the weight of centuries he leans
Upon his hoe and gazes on the ground,

The emptiness of ages on his face

And on his back the burden of the world.

Who made him dead to rapture and despair,
A thing that grieves not and that never hopes,
Stolid and stunned, a brother to the ox?

Who loosened and let down his brutal jaw?
Whose was the hand that slanted back his brow?
Whose breath blew out the light within his brain?

Is this the thing the Lord God made and gave
To have dominion over sea and land;

To trace the stars and search the heavens for power;
To feel the passion of Eternity?

Is this the Dream He dreamed who shaped the suns
And pillared the blue firmament with light?
Down all the stretch of Hell to its last gulf
There is no shape more terrible than this-

More tongued with censure of the world's blind greed
More filled with sign and portents for the soul
More fraught with menace to the universe.

What gulfs between him and the seraphim!
Slave of the wheel of labor, what to him
Are Plato and the swing of Pleiades?
What are the long reaches of the peaks of song,
The rift of dawn, the reddening of the rose?
Through his dread shape the suffering ages look;
Time's tragedy is in that aching stoop;
Through this dread shape humanity betrayed,
Plundered, profaned, and disinherited,

Cries protest to the judges of the world,
A protest that is also prophecy.

And something like the same thing is true of work other than manual. The endless whirl of busy office routine, the typewriting of a monotonous series of letters, the adding of endless columns of numbers, or the serving of hordes of customers is likely to sap the life out of the worker. Mere work - work only for one's daily bread, work to which one goes reluctantly and which he quits with joy is not this the destroyer rather than the maker of individuality in men?

Work and play. But need work be of this benumbing kind? Is it merely the fact that it is hard that makes it

dispiriting, brutalizing? Is not play often quite as strenuous as any work and yet refreshing rather than benumbing? Are there not even men and women who plunge into what is really work in such a spirit as to give it for them the value of play?

Difference between work and play. These queries lead us to ask what is the difference between work and play. When the child imitates his father in shoveling snow he does so because he delights in the activities involved. Each time he lifts up a shovelful he feels his superiority and enjoys the feeling. He does not care about the end-getting the snow away but is absorbed in his delight in the means by which that end is being realized. This is pure play. Play is always marked by this pleasure in the means rather than in the remote end. Again consider the man playing cards. He is, of course, somewhat interested in winning the game and therefore is concerned with a remote end but most of all he enjoys the steps by which the game is won. He is thrilled with pleasure every time he draws a good hand or makes a clever play. The winning of the game is really forgotten in the intense joy of the process.

On the other hand, in work one is interested chiefly in the end to be attained. The means by which the end is to be reached are not enjoyed. Indeed so far as the activity is mere work the means are irksome. The day-laborer is looking forward to his dollars at the end of the day. He would, if possible, gladly evade the unpleasant tasks by which the money is to be earned. It is only his entirely extraneous interest in a result that can not be otherwise gained that holds him to the uncongenial activities in which he must engage.

No fixed dividing line. Plainly, then, there is no strict dividing line between work and play. In so far as one enjoys the process it is play. In so far as one cares for an extraneous end it is work. The ball player if he is a profes