ry day. The neurosis of our American life is seducing
too many of our best and busiest men to the use of chemicals,
mixtures, nostrums, pick-me-ups, etc., which make nerves and brain
utter brave falsehoods of a strength that is not theirs.

Your doctor won't let you do this--he will stay your unconsciously
suicidal hand. If your machinery is out of order, he will tell you so,
and do what is necessary to repair it. He will comfort and reassure
you, too, and administer to the mind a medicine as potent as powder or
liquid. But you will get no false sympathy from him. If you have
nothing the matter with you, yet think you have, your doctor will take
you by the collar of your coat, stand you on your feet, and bid you be
a man. So don't dose yourself. Be a faithful guardian of the treasures
Nature gave you.

Returning now to reading: You are not to neglect books. They must be
read. If you are a professional man they must be more than read; they
must be studied, absorbed, made a part of your intellectual being. I
am not despising the accumulated learning of the past. Matthew Arnold,
in his "Literature and Dogma," quite makes this point. What I am
speaking of is miscellaneous reading.

After a while one wearies of the endless repetition, the "damnable
iteration" contained in the great mass of books. You will finally come
to care greatly for the Bible, Shakespeare, and Burns. Compared with
these most others are "twice-told tales" indeed. Of course one must
read the great scientific productions. They are an addition to
positive knowledge, and are a thing quite apart from ordinary
literature.

My recommendation of the Bible is not alone because of its spiritual
or religious influences; I am advising it from the material and even
the business view-point. By far the keenest wisdom in literature is in
the Bible, and is put in terms so apt and condensed, too, that their
very brevity proves its inspiration--_is_ an inspiration to you.

Carry the Bible with you, if for nothing else than as a matter of
literary relaxation. The tellers of the Bible stories tell the stories
and stop. "He builded him a city"--"he smote the Philistines"--"he
took her to his mother's tent." You are not wearied to death by the
details. Go into any audience addressed by a public speaker, and you
will perceive that his hearers' interest depends on whether he is
getting to the point. "Well, why doesn't he get to the point," is the
common expression in publi