stop-watch when the second-hand
shows that the time has expired. Burns is the best corrective of this
that I know--the best, that is, outside of the Bible itself.

Indeed the more one thinks about it the clearer it is that we might
throw away all other books but the Bible, and still have all our
mental and moral needs ministered to by those who through all time
have thought and felt most highly; for the Bible is the record of the
loftiest of all human expression, not to mention its divine origin.

Put your Bible, your Shakespeare, your Burns in your bundle when you
go for a journey, and you are intellectually and spiritually equipped.

Let a man have the courage of his thought--I repeat it. Courage is
where we fail, not intellect. We hear much about intellect, about
"brains," as the rather coarse expression is. It is not that which is
needed; it is courage.

Enter into conversation the next time you are at the club, or in a
hotel, or restaurant, or wherever you meet men in intellectual
hospitality, on almost any subject you may choose, you will be amazed
at the information, the original thought, the keen analysis, even the
constructive ideas of most of the men there.

One of the most fertile minds I have ever known is nothing but an
unsuccessful lawyer in a country town; yet his intellect is as
tropical, and as accurate, too, as was Napoleon's, or Gould's.

How is it that all these people do not achieve the successes to which
their mere thinking entitles them? I say, to which their mere
_thinking_ entitles them, because--I say it again--if you will put
them beside the great masters of affairs you will find that they have
as many ideas as have these captains of business. My young friend, it
is simply because they have not courage and constancy. Long ago I
catalogued the qualities that make up character, in relative
importance, as follows:

First: Sincerity; fidelity, the ability to be true--true to friends,
true to ideas, true to ideals, true to your task, true to the truth
Who shall deny that the martyrs Nero burned did not experience joys in
the consuming flame more delicate and sweet than ever thrilled epicure
or lover?

Second (and well-nigh first): Courage--the godlike quality that dreads
not; the unanalyzable thing in man that makes him execute his
conception--no matter how insane or absurd it may appear to others--if
it appears rational to him, and then stride ahead to his next great
deed, regardless of