ermons while Beechers and Whitefields are failing as
merchants, and people are wondering what can be the cause of empty
pews. A boy who is always making something with tools is railroaded
through the university and started on the road to inferiority in one of
the "three honorable professions." Real surgeons are handling the
meat-saw and cleaver, while butchers are amputating human limbs. How
fortunate that--

"There's a divinity that shapes our ends,
_Rough-hew them how we will._"

"He that hath a trade," says Franklin, "hath an estate; and he that
hath a calling hath a place of profit and honor. A plowman on his legs
is higher than a gentleman on his knees."

A man's business does more to make him than anything else. It hardens
his muscles, strengthens his body, quickens his blood, sharpens his
mind, corrects his judgment, wakes up his inventive genius, puts his
wits to work, starts him on the race of life, arouses his ambition,
makes him feel that he is a man and must fill a man's shoes, do a man's
work, bear a man's part in life, and show himself a man in that part.
No man feels himself a man who is not doing a man's business. A man
without employment is not a man. He does not prove by his works that
he is a man. A hundred and fifty pounds of bone and muscle do not make
a man. A good cranium full of brains is not a man. The bone and
muscle and brain must know how to do a man's work, think a man's
thoughts, mark out a man's path, and bear a man's weight of character
and duty before they constitute a man.

Go-at-it-iveness is the first requisite for success.
Stick-to-it-iveness is the second. Under ordinary circumstances, and
with practical common sense to guide him, one who has these requisites
will not fail.

Don't wait for a higher position or a larger salary. Enlarge the
position you already occupy; put originality of method into it. Fill
it as it never was filled before. Be more prompt, more energetic, more
thorough, more polite than your predecessor or fellow workmen. Study
your business, devise new modes of operation, be able to give your
employer points. The art lies not in giving satisfaction merely, not
in simply filling your place, but in doing better than was expected, in
surprising your employer; and the reward will be a better place and a
larger salary.

When out of work, take the first respectable job that offers, heeding
not the disproportion between your faculties and your