Power and constant growth toward a higher life are the great end of
human existence. Your calling should be the great school of life, the
great man-developer, character-builder, that which should broaden,
deepen, and round out into symmetry, harmony, and beauty, all the
God-given faculties within you.

But whatever you do be greater than your calling; let your manhood
overtop your position, your wealth, your occupation, your title. A man
must work hard and study hard to counteract the narrowing, hardening
tendency of his occupation. Said Goldsmith,--

Burke, born for the universe, narrowed his mind,
And to party gave up what was meant for mankind.

"Constant engagement in traffic and barter has no elevating influence,"
says Lyndall. "The endeavor to obtain the upper hand of those with
whom we have to deal, to make good bargains, the higgling and scheming,
and the thousand petty artifices, which in these days of stern
competition are unscrupulously resorted to, tend to narrow the sphere
and to lessen the strength of the intellect, and, at the same time, the
delicacy of the moral sense."

Choose upward, study the men in the vocation you think of adopting.
Does it elevate those who follow it? Are they broad, liberal,
intelligent men? Or have they become mere appendages of their
profession, living in a rut with no standing in the community, and of
no use to it? Don't think you will be the great exception, and can
enter a questionable vocation without becoming a creature of it. In
spite of all your determination and will power to the contrary, your
occupation, from the very law of association and habit, will seize you
as in a vise, will mold you, shape you, fashion you, and stamp its
inevitable impress upon you. How frequently do we see bright,
open-hearted, generous young men come out of college with high hopes
and lofty aims, enter a doubtful vocation, and in a few years return to
college commencement so changed that they are scarcely recognized. The
once broad, noble features have become contracted and narrowed. The
man has become grasping, avaricious, stingy, mean, hard. Is it
possible, we ask, that a few years could so change a magnanimous and
generous youth?

Go to the bottom if you would get to the top. Be master of your
calling in all its details. Nothing is small which concerns your
business.

Thousands of men who have been failures in life have done drudgery
enough in half a dozen diff