t our hearts on_ daily
_improvement.--Always place a definite purpose before thee.--Get the habit
of mastering thine inclination._) These are moral precepts, and moral
precepts of the best kind. As rules to hold possession of our conduct, and
to keep us in the right course through outward troubles and inward
perplexity, they are equal to the best ever furnished by the great masters
of morals--Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius.

But moral rules, apprehended as ideas first, and then rigorously followed
as laws, are, and must be, for the sage only. The mass of mankind have
neither force of intellect enough to apprehend them clearly as ideas, nor
force of character enough to follow them strictly as laws. The mass of
mankind can be carried along a course full of hardship for the natural
man, can be borne over the thousand impediments of the narrow way, only by
the tide of a joyful and bounding emotion. It is impossible to rise from
reading Epictetus or Marcus Aurelius without a sense of constraint and
melancholy, without feeling that the burden laid upon man is well-nigh
greater than he can bear. Honor to the sages who have felt this, and yet
have borne it! Yet, even for the sage, this sense of labor and sorrow in
his march toward the goal constitutes a relative inferiority; the noblest
souls of whatever creed, the pagan Empedocles as well as the Christian
Paul, have insisted on the necessity of an inspiration, a living emotion
to make moral action perfect; an obscure indication of this necessity is
the one drop of truth in the ocean of verbiage with which the controversy
on justification by faith has flooded the world. But, for the ordinary
man, this sense of labor and sorrow constitutes an absolute
disqualification; it paralyzes him; under the weight of it, he cannot make
way toward the goal at all. The paramount virtue of religion is, that it
has _lighted up_ morality; that it has supplied the emotion and
inspiration needful for carrying the sage along the narrow way perfectly,
for carrying the ordinary man along it at all. Even the religions with
most dross in them have had something of this virtue; but the Christian
religion manifests it with unexampled splendor. "Lead me, Zeus and
Destiny!" says the prayer of Epictetus, "whithersoever I am appointed to
go: I will follow without wavering; even though I turn coward and shrink,
I shall have to follow all the same." The fortitude of that is for the
strong, for the few; even for