_Strength for the Daily Task_ _The Sense of the Infinite_ _The Great Inspiration_
_Living heartily is one secret of living happily._
_Life is early blighted if it knows no clouds._
_You can tell the character of any age by the place it gives to character._
_There is little danger in the discontent with conditions that is equalled by discontent with character._
_Heart health never comes so long as the hand is kept on the pulse._
_Feed on garbage and you soon lose faith in good things._
_The fruitful life seeks showers as well as sunshine._
_It's hard for a man who has ground of his nose on the money mill to smell a taint on anything._
_Many a man goes back by trying to put up a good front and nothing more._
It is the dull grind and monotony of life that makes it so hard to bear for the ninety-nine per cent. of us. Sometimes it seems as though we spend all our days toiling, wearing strength, and hope, and heart away for no other end than to gain just bread and shelter so as to keep the machine in condition for further toil.
How hopeless is the outlook of many a life! The mother with the weary round of home duties day after day, the father who goes to the same task year after year, seeing the same people, doing the same things, and coming home at the day's end with the same weariness, only augmented as age makes itself felt--all who toil feel at times these depressing limitations.
Little wonder that lives snatch at every fleeting, alluring promise of relief, through amusement, through anything that offers change and excitement. Little wonder that, robbed of opportunity for vision, they foment blind discontent, so that we all feel there is a mighty substratum of wretchedness and of menace lying under our social order.
Yet there are few lives, perhaps no worthy ones, without tasks that often seem monotonous and become matters of dull grinding that bring weariness and longing for relief. All worth while work involves much tediousness, painstaking exertion. All great things stand for so much life poured out, and life is never poured out without pain and loss.
The stern Puritan was doubtless wrong when he saw nothing in life but repression and stern duty, but he was nearer right than he who looks only for frivolity and amusement. Life is too large a business to be always light and trivial. Yet we must not allow its high purposes to be thwarted by robbing ourselves and our fellows of all joy and brightness and converting life into dull, mechanical servitude.