time for self-culture and self-elevation; an occupation that will enlarge and expand your manhood and make you a better citizen, a better man.

Power and constant growth toward a higher life are the great end of human existence. Your calling should be the great school of life, the great man-developer, character-builder, that which should broaden, deepen, and round out into symmetry, harmony, and beauty, all the God-given faculties within you.

But whatever you do be greater than your calling; let your manhood overtop your position, your wealth, your occupation, your title. A man must work hard and study hard to counteract the narrowing, hardening tendency of his occupation. Said Goldsmith,

"Burke, born for the universe, narrowed his mind, And to party gave up what was meant for mankind." "Constant engagement in traffic and barter has no elevating influence," says Lyndall. "The endeavor to obtain the upper hand of those with whom we have to deal, to make good bargains, the higgling and scheming, and the thousand petty artifices, which in these days of stern competition are unscrupulously resorted to, tend to narrow the sphere and to lessen the strength of the intellect, and, at the same time, the delicacy of the moral sense. The consequence is that mental and moral obligations have been overlooked and slighted. We would see the spirit of religion introduced into business, and the method and perseverance of business carried into religion."

But choose upward, study the men in the vocation you think of adopting. Does it elevate those who follow it? Are they broad, liberal, intelligent men? Or have they become mere appendages of their profession, living in a rut with no standing in the community, and of no use to it? Don't think you will be the great exception, and can enter a questionable vocation without becoming a creature of it. In spite of all your determi

nation and will power to the contrary, your occupation, from the very law of association and habit, will seize you as in a vise, will mould you, shape you, fashion you, and stamp its inevitable impress upon you.

How often we have seen bright, open-hearted, generous, young men come out of college with high hopes and lofty aims, enter a doubtful vocation, and in a few years come back to college commencement so changed that they are scarcely recognized. The once broad, generous features have become contracted and narrowed. The man has become grasping, avaricious, stingy, mean, hard. Is it possible, we ask, that a few years could so change a magnanimous and generous youth? He is all "on the make" now. His public spirit and generosity are all lost in his little money-making schemes and he cares for nothing else.

"I say to you plainly there is no end to which your practical faculty can aim so sacred or so large that, if pursued for itself, will not at last become carrion and an offense to the nostrils. The imaginative faculty of the soul must be fed with objects immense and eternal. Your end should be one inapprehensible to the senses; then will it be a god always approached, never touched; always giving health. A man adorns himself with prayer and love, as an aim adorns an action."

Go to the bottom if you would get to the top. Be master of your calling in all its details. Nothing is small which concerns your business. This was the secret of Alexander T. Stewart's great success. When the foreman in his New York establishment died, the porter applied for the place. "Why, you are nothing but a porter," said Stewart. "I know it, but I have watched this business and I know its details, and I can fill the position." Stewart refused him. The porter obtained a position in another house and finally bought out the whole business.

Thousands of men who have been failures in life have

done drudgery enough in half a dozen different occupations to have enabled them to reach great success, if their efforts had all been expended in one direction. That mechanic is a failure who starts out to build an engine, but does not quite accomplish it, and shifts into some other occupation where, perhaps, he will almost succeed again, but stops just short of the point of proficiency in his acquisition and so fails again. The world is full of people who are "almost a success." They stop just this side of success. Their courage oozes out just before they become expert. How many of us have acquisitions which remain permanently unavailable because not carried quite to the point of skill? How many people almost know a language or two," which they can neither write nor speak; a science or two whose elements they have not quite acquired; an art or two partially mastered, but which they cannot practice with satisfaction or profit! The habit of desultoriness, which has been acquired by allowing yourself to abandon a half-finished work, more than balances any little skill gained in one vocation which might possibly be of use later.

Beware of that fatal gift, versatility. Many a person misses being a great man by splitting into two middling ones. Universality is the ignis fatuus which has deluded to ruin many a promising mind. In attempting to gain a knowledge of half a hundred subjects it has mastered none. "The jack-at-all-trades," one of the foremost manufacturers of this country says, "had a chance in my generation. In this he has none."

"The measure of a man's learning will be the amount of his voluntary ignorance," said Thoreau. If we go into a factory where the mariner's compass is made we can see the needles before they are magnetized, and they will point in any direction. But when they have been applied to the magnet and received its peculiar power, from that moment they point to the north, and are true

to the pole ever after. So man never points steadily in any direction until he has been polarized by a choice of his ideal career.

The man with a vocation he likes, the practical man, the energetic and industrious man, builds a house upon the ground, while the dreamer builds a castle in the air, and he lays up a few thousands in the bank while the other revels in imaginary millions. The dreamer's pockets are full while he is asleep, but he awakens only to find an empty purse. It takes a good many dreams of fortune to make an actual dollar.

Give your life, your energy, your enthusiasm, all to the highest work of which you are capable. Canon Farrar said, "There is only one real failure in life possible, and that is, not to be true to the best one knows." "Let men of all ranks," said Plato, "whether they are successful or unsuccessful, whether they triumph or not, let them do their duty and rest satisfied."

"What must I do to be forever known? Thy duty ever."

"It is a happy thing for us that this is all we have to concern ourselves about what to do next," says George Macdonald. "No man can do the second thing. He can do the first."

Who does the best his circumstance allows,

Does well, acts nobly, angels could do no more.

YOUNG.

"Whoever can make two ears of corn, two blades of grass to grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before," says Swift," would deserve better of mankind and do more essential service to his country than the whole race of politicians put together."

Emerson says, 66 There is at this moment for you an utterance brave and grand as that of the colossal chisel of Phidias, or trowel of the Egyptians, or the pen of Moses or Dante, but different from all these."

"We should as soon expect the people of Woolwich to suffer themselves to be fired off upon one of Congreve's rockets as to trust themselves to the mercy of such a machine going at such a rate. We trust that Parliament will limit the speed (of railroad engines) to eight or nine miles an hour, which we entirely agree with Mr. Sylvester is as great as can be ventured upon." - Quarterly Review.