.

Since no man can do his best work save as he uses his strongest
faculties, the first duty of each is to search out the line of least
resistance. He who has a genius for moral themes but has harnessed
himself to the plow or the forge, is in danger of wrecking both
happiness and character. All such misfits are fatal. No farmer
harnesses a fawn to the plow, or puts an ox into the speeding-wagon.
Life's problem is to make a right inventory of the gifts one carries.
As no carpenter knows what tools are in the box until he lifts the lid
and unwraps one shining instrument after another, so the instruments
in the soul must be unfolded by education. Ours is a world where the
inventor accompanies the machine with a chart, illustrating the use of
each wheel and escapement. But no babe lying in the cradle ever
brought with it a hand-book setting forth its mental equipment and
pointing out its aptitude for this occupation, or that art or
industry. The gardener plants a root with perfect certainty that a
rose will come up, but no man is a prophet wise enough to tell whether
this babe will unfold into quality of thinker or doer or dreamer. To
each Nature whispers: "Unsight, unseen, hold fast what you have." For
the soul is shadowless and mysterious. No hand can carve its outline,
no brush portray its lineaments. Even the mother embosoming its
infancy and carrying its weaknesses, studying it by day and night
through years, sees not, she cannot see, knows not, she cannot know,
into what splendor of maturity the child will unfold.

Man beholds his fellows as one beholds a volume written in a foreign
language; the outer binding is seen, the inner contents are unread.
Within general lines phrenology and physiognomy are helpful, but it is
easier to determine what kind of a man lives in the house by looking
at the knob on his front door than to determine the brain and heart
within by studying the bumps upon face and forehead. Nature's dictum
is, "Grasp the handle of your own being." Each must fashion his own
character. Nature gives trees, but not tools; forests, but not
furniture. Thus nature furnishes man with the birth materials and
environment; man must work up these materials into those qualities
called industry, integrity, honor, truth and love, ever patterning
after that ideal man, Jesus Christ.

The influences shaping nature's raw material into character are many
and various. Of old, the seer likened the soul unto clay. The mud