stless age.

Abundance of life is determined not alone by one's material possessions,
but primarily by one's riches of mind and spirit. A world of truth is
contained in these words: "Life is what we are alive to. It is not a
length, but breadth. To be alive only to appetite, pleasure, mere luxury
or idleness, pride or money-making, and not to goodness and kindness,
purity and love, history, poetry, and music, flowers, God and eternal
hopes, is to be all but dead."

Why be so eager to gain possession of the hundred thousand or the
half-million acres, of so many millions of dollars? Soon, and it may be
before you realise it, all must be left. It is as if a man made it his
ambition to accumulate a thousand or a hundred thousand automobiles. All
soon will become junk. But so it is with all material things beyond what
we can actually and profitably use for our good and the good of
others--and that we actually do so use.

A man can eat just so many meals during the year or during life. If he
tries to eat more he suffers thereby. He can wear only so many suits of
clothing; if he tries to wear more, he merely wears himself out taking
off and putting on. Again it is as Jesus said: "For what shall it profit
a man, if he gain the whole world and lose his own life?" And right
there is the crux of the whole matter. All the time spent in
accumulating these things beyond the reasonable amount, is so much taken
from the life--from the things of the mind and the spirit. It is in the
development and the pursuit of these that all true satisfaction lies.
Elemental law has so decreed.

We have made wonderful progress, or rather have developed wonderful
skill in connection with things. We need now to go back and catch up the
thread and develop like skill in making the life.

Little wonder that brains are addled, that nerves are depleted, that
nervous dyspepsia, that chronic weariness, are not the exception but
rather the rule. Little wonder that sanitariums are always full; that
asylums are full and overflowing--and still more to be built. No wonder
that so many men, so many good men break and go to pieces, and so many
lose the life here at from fifty to sixty years, when they should be in
the very prime of life, in the full vigour of manhood; at the very age
when they are capable of enjoying life the most and are most capable of
rendering the greatest service to their fellows, to their community,
because of greater growth, experience,