reafter, we are
bound to so administer our talents as to make right living easy and
smooth for others. Happy is he whose soul automatically oils all the
machinery of the home, the market and the street. And this ambition to
be universally helpful must not be a transient and occasional one--here
and there an hour's friendship, a passing hint of sympathy, a transient
gleam of kindness. Heart helpfulness is to enter into the fundamental
conceptions of our living. With vigilant care man is to expel every
element that vexes or irritates or chafes just as the husbandman expels
nettles and poison ivy from fruitful gardens.

For nothing is so easily wrecked as the soul. As mechanisms go up
toward complexity, delicacy increases. The fragile vase is ruined by a
single tap. A chance blow destroys the statue. A bit of sand ruins
the delicate mechanism. But the soul is even more sensitive to injury.
It is marred by a word or a look. Men are responsible for the ruin
they work unthinkingly! To-day the engine drops a spark behind it.
To-morrow that engine is a thousand miles away. Yet the spark left
behind is now a column of fire mowing down the forests. And that
devastating column belongs not to another, but to that engine that hath
journeyed far. Thus the evil man does lives after him. The
condemnation of life is that a man hath carried friction and stirred up
malign elements and sowed fiery discords, so that the gods track him by
the swath of destruction he hath cut through life. The praise of life
is that a man hath exhaled bounty and stimulus and joy and gladness
wherever he journeys. To-day noble examples and ten thousand precepts
unite in urging every one to become a great heart. Every individual
must bring together his little group of pilgrim friends, companions,
employes, using whatever he has of wisdom and skill for guiding those
who follow him on their desert march. For happiness is through
helpfulness. Every morning let us build a booth to shelter someone
from life's fierce heat. Every noon let us dig some life-spring for
thirsty lips. Every night let us be food for the hungry and shelter
for the cold and naked. The law of the higher manhood asks man to be a
great heart, the shadow of a rock in a weary land.

THE INVESTMENT OF TALENT AND ITS RETURN.

"The universal blunder of this world is in thinking that there are
certain persons put into the world to govern and certain others to
obey