ant
ideals. Emerson is the greatest of magicians. His words will work
marvels. His thought is as luminous as a Roentgen ray.

"Heaven's perfect hour" is sure to sometime dawn if one but keep his
face turned toward the morning. "Heaven's perfect hour" is within one's
own possibilities of creation, if he live aright and think aright; and
with joy and radiance may he make it his perpetual experience; although
it is the supreme anomaly in life that the social relations which are
designed to offer the profoundest joy, the most perfect consolation for
disaster or sorrow, and to communicate the happy currents of electrical
energy, are yet those which not unfrequently make themselves the channel
of the most intense suffering. There is something wrong in this. The
friendships of life, all forms and phases and degrees through which
regard and friendship reveal themselves, are the one divinest, perhaps
it may be said are the only, part of life on earth that is absolutely
divine, and the divine element should communicate perpetual joy. This is
the ideal view of the entire panorama of social interchange and social
relations, and being the purest ideal, it is also the most intensely and
absolutely real. For nothing is real, in the last analysis, save that
which is ideal; and nothing is ideal that is not a spiritual reality.
Then the question recurs,--how is it possible, how can it be accounted
for that the one phase of suffering which seems past even trying to
endure, comes through the sources which should radiate only joy and
blessedness?

The old proverb, "Save me from my friends," is founded on a certain
basis of fact. "Twenty enemies cannot do me the mischief of one friend,"
rather cynically, but perhaps not wholly untruly, said Gail Hamilton.
For it certainly is not the avowed enemy, or the person to whom one is
indifferent, who has the power to greatly harm or pain him. So far as
injury goes, Emerson is probably right when he says, "No one can work me
injury but myself." Misrepresentation, misinterpretation, there may be,
but in the long run truth is mighty, and will, and does, prevail. One
need not greatly concern himself with misinterpretations, but, rather,
only with striving to live the life of truth and righteousness.

Perhaps one cause of much of the unhappiness and suffering that not
infrequently invests relations that should only be those of joy and
peace and mutual inspiration, is an over and an undue emphasis on
ma