Having urged the necessity of plus ultra as your motto, as against ne plus ultra, I may drop some profitable hints as to the attainment of success. You know that one may give good advice, though he may not have profited by it himself.
In the first place, everything depends on work. Intense application is the price of success. The world's benefactors are the world's hard workers. "Tickle the earth with a hoe, and it will laugh at you with a harvest." But it closes its fists against those who extend to it an idle hand. Many people contend that the world owes them a living, and grumble that it does not pay the debt. What have they done for the world to bring it into their debt? The world owes every man a living when he earns it by honest toil, and not before. Those who sow with a stingy hand may expect to reap a scanty harvest. You should, therefore, in whatever vocation you may elect, strive to succeed on this principle; otherwise you will not deserve success.
You should not be discouraged because surroundings are not favorable, and hope seems long deferred. Be not impatient of results. Do your whole duty, and leave the consequences with the Lord. Never strive to be great. Few men become great this way, and they never deserve it. True greatness comes as a result of devotion to principle and duty. The highest and noblest success comes through a spirit of self-forgetfulness.
Learn to be indifferent to surroundings. You need not catch the "spirit of the age" unless the "spirit of the age" is worth catching. When you contemplate Marquis de Condorcet, in the dark days of the French Revolution, hiding in a lonely room in the city of Paris, while its streets ran red with noble and innocent blood, quietly writing a book whose subject was, "Man's Certain Progress to Liberty, Virtue, and Happiness," you will understand what I mean.
You must learn to think; to think regardless of surroundings; to think only of the thing of which you wish to think; and on this to concentrate the whole power of your mind. This requires careful training; but this only is education. With this you have full command of all your resources; without this they avail but little. The great motive power of the world is thought. Information without thought is simply a peddler burdened with stale wares on a dead market. It is not what one knows, but what he can produce, that makes the world feel his power. Hence one must be a producer as well as a receiver. The world's thought must be regenerated in his own mind. He should turn the world's dead facts into living thoughts—"Thoughts that breathe, and words that burn."
Avoid fickleness of purpose. Decide to do something in harmony with your endowments and the will of God, and do it. Many people of fine attainments and intellectual powers are spending their lives trying to decide for what purpose the Lord made them. Before they determine what they are good for, the world is certain to decide that they are good for nothing. Life is too precious to be spent in hesitation. He who vacillates will do nothing. Concentration is power. The rays of the sun that would hardly warm an infant's hand will, when concentrated by a lens, blister the palms of the hardiest sons of toil.
If we would make life a success, we must live for a purpose. He who lives simply for the sake of living, has no just conception of life. Those who live for the gratification of the flesh should remember that the goat lives for the same purpose. How humiliating the thought, that so many of the cultured, as well as the ignorant; the rich as well as the poor; the "cream of society" as well as its dregs, are thus living on the low plane of animal life! The grand distinction between man and the brute creation is in his spirit nature. Without spiritual culture, every thought, every aspiration, every gratification, is of the earth earthy. How sad, then, to see the gaudy "butterflies of society" spending their lives without a thought above that which alone can lift them forever above the plane of animal life! It is sad thus to think, but sadder still 'tis true. The enjoyment of "society," therefore, must not be your ne plus ultra, else life will be a failure.
In order to the highest success, you should live fast, but not in the world's bad sense of that word. I simply mean that your life should be intense. Mere existence is not life. Life is action. Life is not measured by time, but by experience. It is our duty, therefore, to live all we can in the time allotted us. The patriarchs lived longer than we, but we may live more than they. This is a grand age in which we live. We may now live more in fifty years than Methuselah did before the flood. The time is short. Hence if we would live much we must live fast.
But here I anticipate an objection. You say, "We shall shorten our days by fast living." Not by this kind of fast living. The world will never be troubled for burying ground for those who kill themselves simply by hard work. It is not work, but worry, that wears men out. We have too much friction in our lives. This must be stopped. An hour's passion will tell more on the constitution than a week's work. The largest amount of action, with the smallest amount of friction, is the problem before you; and he is the wisest philosopher who gives to us its best practical solution.
I wish now to invite your attention to mistakes that men have made in supposing that their knowledge was the ne plus ultra of human wisdom. Time was when the alchemists thought they possessed the ne plus ultra of human knowledge, and that wisdom would die with them; yet their knowledge is now to chemistry what astrology is to astronomy. It is a superstition on whose claims no scientist would dare to risk his reputation. Now chemistry is the ne plus ultra of human wisdom, and every man is a fool who does not hold the key to the secret chambers of its hidden treasures! But how long till we shall have a new chemistry that will render the old a bundle of laughable folly? The fact is, by the advancement of human knowledge we demonstrate that our ancestors were a set of fools, and our posterity will doubtless pay us the same compliment! The philosophy of history should teach us to be modest, and to keep as our motto plus ultra versus ne plus ultra.