"The value of each man is that he has no duplicate. The development of his particular effectiveness on the constructive side is the one important thing for him to begin. A man is at his best when he is at his work; his soul breathes then, if it breathes at all. Of course, the lower the evolution of a man, the harder it is to find a task for him to distinguish; but here is the opportunity for all of us to be more eager and tender.
"When I wrote to Washington asking how to plant asparagus, and found the answer; when I asked about field-stones and had the output of the Smithsonian Institute turned over to me, my throat choked; something sang all around; the years I had hated put on strange brightenings. I had written Home for guidance. Our national Father had answered. Full, eager and honest, the answer came—the work of specialists which had moved on silently for years. I saw the brotherhood of the race in that—for that can only come to be in a Fatherland.
"Give a man his work and you may watch at your leisure, the clean-up of his morals and manners. Those who are best loved by the angels, receive not thrones, but a task. I would rather have the curse of Cain, than the temperament to choose a work because it is easy.
"Real work becomes easy only when the man has perfected his instrument, the body and brain. Because this instrument is temporal, it has a height and limitation to reach. There is a year in which the sutures close. That man is a master, who has fulfilled his possibilities—whether tile-trencher, stone-mason, writer, or a carpenter hammering his periods with nails. Real manhood makes lowly gifts significant; the work of such a man softens and finishes him, renders him plastic to finer forces.
"No good work is easy. The apprenticeship, the refinement of body and brain, is a novitiate for the higher life, for the purer receptivity—and this is a time of strain and fatigue, with breaks here and there in the cohering line.
" ... The best period of a man's life; days of safety and content; long hours in the pure trance of work; ambition has ceased to burn, doubt is ended, the finished forces turn outward in service. According to the measure of the giving is the replenishment in vitality. The pure trance of work, the different reservoirs of power opening so softly; the instrument in pure listening—long forenoons passing, without a single instant of self-consciousness, desire, enviousness, without even awareness of the body....
"Every law that makes for man's finer workmanship makes for his higher life. The mastery of self prepares man to make his answer to the world for his being. The man who has mastered himself is one with all. Castor and Pollux tell him immortal love stories; all is marvellous and lovely from the plant to the planet, because man is a lover, when he has mastered himself. All the folded treasures and open highways of the mind, its multitude of experiences and unreckonable possessions—are given over to the creative and universal force—the same force that is lustrous in the lily, incandescent in the suns, memorable in human heroism, immortal in man's love for his fellow man.
"This giving force alone holds the workman true through his task. He, first of all, feels the uplift; he, first of all, is cleansed by the power of the superb life-force passing through him.... This is rhythm; this is the cohering line; this is being the One. But there are no two instruments alike, since we have come up by different roads from the rock; and though we achieve the very sanctity of self-command, our inimitable hallmark is wrought in the fabric of our task."
Guiding one's own for an hour or two each day is not a thing to do for money. The more valuable a man's time (if his payment in the world's standards happens to be commensurate with his skill) the more valuable he will be to his little group. He will find himself a better workman for expressing himself to his own, giving the fruits of his life to others. He will touch immortal truths before he has gone very far, and Light comes to the life that contacts such fine things. He will see the big moments of his life in a way that he did not formerly understand. Faltering will more and more leave his expression, and the cohering line of his life will become more clearly established.