4. You can be forming habits of self-reliance, sound judgment, perseverance, and endurance, which may, one day, stand you in good stead. You can so train yourself to right thinking and right acting, that uprightness shall be your nature, truth your impulse. His head is seldom far wrong, whose heart is always right. We bow down to mental greatness, intellectual strength, and they are divine gifts; but moral rectitude is stronger than they. It is irresistible,—always in the end triumphant.
5. There is in goodness a penetrative power that nothing can withstand. Cunning and malice melt away before its mild, open, steady glance. Not alone on the fields where chivalry charges for laurels, with helmet and breastplate and lance in rest, can the true knight exultingly exclaim,
"My strength is as the strength of ten,
Because my heart is pure;"
but wherever man meets man, wherever there is a prize to be won, a goal to be reached. Wealth, and rank, and beauty, may form a brilliant setting to the diamond; but they only expose more nakedly the false glare of the paste. Only when the king's daughter is all glorious within, is it fitting and proper that her clothing should be of wrought gold.
6. From the great and good of all ages rings out the same monotone. The high-priest of Nature, the calm-eyed poet who laid his heart so close to hers, that they seemed to throb in one pulsation, yet whose ear was always open to the "still sad music of humanity," has given us the promise of his life-long wisdom in these grand words:—
"True dignity abides with him alone
Who, in the silent hour of inward thought,
Can still suspect and still revere himself."
7. Through the din of twenty rolling centuries, pierces the sharp, stern voice of the brave old Greek: "Let every man, when he is about to do a wicked action, above all things in the world, stand in awe of himself, and dread the witness within him." All greatness, and all glory, all that earth has to give, all that Heaven can proffer, lies within the reach of the lowliest as well as the highest; for He who spake as never man spake, has said that the very "kingdom of God is within you."
8. Born to such an inheritance, will you wantonly cast it away? With such a goal in prospect, will you suffer yourself to be turned aside by the sheen and shimmer of tinsel fruit? With earth in possession, and Heaven in reversion, will you go sorrowing and downcast, because here and there a pearl or ruby fails you? Nay, rather forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those which are before, press forward!
9. Discontent and murmuring are insidious foes; trample them under your feet. Utter no complaint, whatever betide; for complaining is a sign of weakness. If your trouble can be helped, help it; if not, bear it. You can be whatever you will to be. Therefore, form and accomplish worthy purposes.
10. If you walk alone, let it be with no faltering tread. Show to an incredulous world