sus.

MAKING THE MOST OF ONE'S SELF

"Till we all come unto the perfect man."--_St. Paul._

"_Every soul is a seed._ It does not yet appear what it
shall be."--_H._

"'Very early,' said Margaret Fuller, 'I perceived that
the object of life is to grow.' She herself was a
remarkable instance of the power of the human being to go
forward and upward. Of her it might be said, as Goethe
said of Schiller: 'If I did not see him for a fortnight,
I was astonished to find what progress he had made in the
interim.'"--_James Freeman Clarke._

"Persons who are to transform the world must be
themselves transformed. Life must be full of inspiration.
If education is valuable, the age must double it; if art
is sweet and high, we must double its richness and might;
if philanthropy is divine, we must double its quantity
and tenderness; if religion is valuable, double its
truths and hasten with it unto more firesides; if man's
life is great, let him count more precious all its
summers and winters. The one duty of life is, lessen
every vice and enlarge every virtue."--_David Swing._

XIV

MAKING THE MOST OF ONE'S SELF

Two great principles run through all society. First comes the
principle of self-care and self-love. Each man is given charge of his
own body and life. By foresight he is to guard against danger. By
self-defense he is to ward off attack. By fulfilling the instincts for
food, for work and rest he is to maintain the integrity of his being.
Upon each individual rests the solemn obligation to make the most
possible of himself, and to store up resources of knowledge and
virtue, of friendship and heart treasure. But when a man has treated
his reason as a granary and stored it with food, his memory as a
gallery, and filled it with pictures of a beautiful past, his reason
and will as armories, and stored them with weapons against the day of
battle, then a second principle asserts itself. Responsible for his
own growth and happiness, man is made equally responsible for the
happiness and welfare of those about him. By so much as he has secured
his own personal enrichment, by that much he is bound to secure the
enrichment and social advantage of his fellows. To love one's self at
the expense of one's fellows is for selfness to become malignancy. To
love one's neighbors more than one's self is