ritual perfection best nurses itself. The soul
communes with itself in loneliness until its energy often becomes
intense. But whether a man profits by solitude or not will mainly
depend upon his own temperament, training and character. While, in a
large-natured man, solitude will make the pure heart purer, in the
small-natured man it will only serve to make the hard heart still
harder; for though solitude may be the nurse of great spirits, it is
the torment of small ones.

Not only have many of the world's greatest benefactors, men whose
lives history now records the most successful, had not only to
contend with poverty, but it was their misfortune to be
misunderstood and to be regarded as criminals. Many a great reformer
in religion, science, and government has paid for his opinions by
imprisonment. Speaking of these great men, a prominent English
writer says: Prisons may have held them, but their thoughts were not
to be confined by prison walls. They have burst through and defied
the power of their persecutors. It was Lovelace, a prisoner, who
wrote:

"Stone walls do not a prison make,
Nor iron bars a cage;
Minds innocent and quiet take
That for a hermitage."

It was a saying of Milton that, "who best can suffer, best can do."
The work of many of the greatest men, inspired by duty, has been
done amidst suffering and trial and difficulty. They have struggled
against the tide and reached the shore exhausted, only to grasp the
sand and expire. They have done their duty and been content to die.
But death hath no power over such men; their hallowed memories still
survive to soothe and purify and bless us. "Life," said Goethe, "to
us all is suffering. Who save God alone shall call us to our
reckoning? Let not reproaches fall on the departed. Not what they
have failed in, nor what they have suffered, but what they have
done, ought to occupy the survivors."

Thus, it is not ease and facility that try men and bring out the good
that is in them, so much as trial and difficulty. Adversity is the
touchstone of character. As some herbs need to be crushed to give
forth their sweetest odor, so some natures need to be tried by
suffering to evoke the excellence that is in them. Hence trials
often unmask virtues and bring to light hidden graces.

Suffering may be the appointed means by which the higher nature of
man is to be disciplined and developed. Assuming happiness to be the
end of being, sorrow may be the indispen