eit man with this. And this is the chief end of
a mollusk. 2. Man's chief end is material prosperity and social
position. 3. Man's chief end is intellect, knowledge. Each one of
these three ends, while good in a subordinate place, will surely
ruin man if made his chief end. For they leave out of account
conformity to environment. "Man's chief end is to glorify God and
enjoy him for ever." And just as the plant glorifies the sun by
turning to, and being permeated and vivified and built up by, the
warmth and light of its rays, similarly man must glorify God. This
is the religion of conformity to environment: man working out his
salvation because God works in him. Thus, and thus only, shall man
overcome the allurements of these lower endowments and receive the
rewards of "him that overcometh."

Thus prosperity and adversity, success and failure, continually test
a man. If he can rise superior to these, can subjugate them and make
them subserve his moral progress, he survives; if he is mastered by
them, he perishes. Through these does natural selection mainly work
to find and train great souls. They are the threads of the sieve of
destiny.

In this struggle man must fight against overwhelming odds, and the
cost of victory is dear. He must be prepared, like Socrates, to "bid
farewell to those things which most men count honors, and look
onward to the truth." He appears to the world at large, often to
himself, eminently unpractical. The majority against his view and
vote will usually be overwhelming. Truth is a stern goddess, and she
will often bid him draw sword and stand against his nearest and
dearest friends. The issue will often appear to him exceeding
doubtful. The grander the truth for which he is fighting, the
greater the need of its defence and enforcement, the greater the
probability that he will never live to see its triumph. The hero
must be a man of gigantic faith. But all his ancestors have had to
make a similar choice and to fight a similar battle. The upward path
was intended to be exceedingly hard. This is a law of biology.

Why this is so I may not know. I only know that no better and surer
way could have been discovered to train a race of heroes. For no man
ever becomes a hero who has not learned to battle with the world and
himself. Does it not look as if God loved a heroic soul as much as
men worship one, and as if he intended that man should attain to
it? Man was born and bred in hardship that he mig