Is a morning star throughout the month, and has a direct motion of 1° 0′ 16″. Diameter increases from 2.5″ to 2.6″. It rises as follows: On the 1st, at 3:47; on the 16th, at 2:49; and on the 30th, at 1:56 a. m. On the 5th, at 2:00 p. m., is 48′ north of Mercury; on the 10th, at 6:00 p. m., 1° 29′ south of Mars; on the 10th, at 7:49 p. m., 2° 21′ north of the moon. The 26-inch equatorial of the National Observatory at Washington, D. C., was during the past year chiefly employed in observations of the satellites of Neptune, Uranus, Saturn and Mars.
HOW TO WIN.
BY FRANCES E. WILLARD,
President National W. C. T. U.
CHAPTER IV.
Thus far I have been trying to impress upon you the reasons why you should cultivate individuality and independence in word and deed. I have claimed that each one of you has a “call” to some specific work, indicated by God’s gifts to you of brain, or heart, or hand. But I would not have you only, or indeed chiefly, concerned with the evolution of your powers for your own sake. If you acquire, let it be that you may dispense; if you achieve, that others may sun themselves in the kind glow of your prosperity. The people who spend all their strength in absorbing are failures and parasites. It is alike the business of the sun and of the soul to radiate every particle of light that they can muster. There is reason to believe that this is precisely what they are for. And so, having made sure of your light, strength and discipline, strike out from the warm and radiant center of a self-poised brain and heart, into the lives about you, and you will find that “What is good for the hive is also good for the bee.” The luminous characters of history have done this, always. Losing their lives in those of other men, they have found them in the crest of the world’s gratitude and fame. What they have done on a grand scale, we, from identical motives, may do on a small one. Such natures are as different from those who cultivate their strongest gift simply for their own sake, as a lighthouse is different from a dark lantern. “Self-culture” is much in vogue nowadays, and has for its high priests some of the most incisive minds of this or any age. But self-culture stops in the middle of the sentence I would fain help you to utter. It says: “Make the most of your powers;” it does not say “for others’ sake as well as your own.” It claims that if we set the candle of our gifts upon the candlestick of modern society, its light will inevitably radiate according to its power of shining, and thus while brightening ourselves we shall have done our utmost toward lighting up the general gloom. But self-culture forgets that a candle is no type of you and me. We are human spirit-lamps, whose rays should be directed and intensified by the blow-pipe of an unceasing purpose; for we are all so made that unless we will to light up other lives, we can never do so to the limit of our power. Self-culture is never base; it is often noble, but it can never be the noblest aim of all.
Why is the memory of Mrs. Browning loved beyond that of almost any poet who has sung? Because “the cry of the human” is so strong in that wondrous voice of hers. Why is the name carved deepest on the republic’s heart that of its martyr President? Because he gave their manhood back to four millions of slaves, and lived and toiled for his people’s sake, “with malice toward none, with charity for all.” Why was the lamentation well nigh universal when under the sea flashed the telegraphic message, “John Stuart Mill is dead?” Because this quiet thinker lived for other men; because he “struck out from the center,” from himself, that pitiful pivot on which so many human wind-mills turn, and measured, in the swift flight of its benignant thought, the long radius between him and the remotest circle of human need; because, more than any other philosopher of his day, he labored for the time when “all men’s weal shall be each man’s care.”
Nay, while I mourn, as I have seldom mourned for an historic character, the cloud that early dimmed, for Stuart Mill, the Star of Bethlehem, I will not, as a woman, withhold from his memory the tribute of my humble gratitude. But while I speak of all these lives, shining like beacon lights of our own day, I would not fail to point you in conclusion toward a wide-armed cross upon a lonely hillside, while I repeat his words who said, “And I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men unto me.” Dear girls, Christ is the magnet of humanity, and she has found the best vocation, and the highest, who brings most souls diseased within the healing power of his immortal gospel. This is a work for which women have gifts preëminent. The Saxon word for lady means “a giver of bread,” and is full of beautiful significance, but America’s new century shall evolve another meaning, freighted with greater blessing for humanity: lady, giver of the bread of life! In later years we have had a revelation of our duty to the ungospeled masses, the “elbow heathen,” as an evangelist has called them, to the intemperate (who, as a rule, are quite beyond the hearing of the pulpit’s voice), and to the dusky dwellers in the Zenana, whose faces are misty with the unshed tears of generations passed in misery and shame. Two thirds of the Church of Christ are women. By the freer life and richer opportunity which you and I enjoy; by society’s growing tolerance, not to say its kindly appreciation, of our activities; by the heart transformed and the peace imparted through the gospel, the voice of our Redeemer pleads for our consecrated service. I would not undervalue the culture of the intellect, but would exalt the culture of the heart.