life, and each of us may make his little share a seed of pride. We
are strangely ingenious here. We have an easy faculty of persuading
ourselves that ours is best of everything and growing arrogant,
unfilial and worldly over it. I speak to the men confident in their
youth and health, to the merchants strong in their business credit,
to the thoughtful brains at work over their problems of settling the
universe for themselves. I warn them all against the pride of life. I
would try to show them all that the same material which is capable of
being made into pride is capable also of being made into humility. I
would tell them therefore that they have not to be made old or sick or
poor or stupid before they can be made humble, that the best humility,
as well as the hardest, is that which can come to them here, right in
the midst of their strength and wealth and study!

Do you ask how that can be? It is time that I tried to tell you, tried
to tell how one may be full of life and yet be free from the pride of
life. That question must somehow be answered, or else the world will
be condemned to choose forever between an arrogant prosperity and a
salvation by misery, distress and disaster, by death. What do we need
for the salvation of a prosperous life? The answer in one word is
consecration. Consecration, that is what we need. There have been men
in whom life seemed complete who have yet walked very humbly. They had
no pride of life. And why? Because always before them and above them
there stood some great principle, some idea, some duty to which
their life belonged, not to themselves. All work is modest, all idle
self-contemplation is vain. And what the young man needs with his
vague aspirations and conceits is to make himself the servant of some
worthy purpose. And what the merchant needs with his growing business
is to count himself the steward of some worthy Master. And what the
student needs with his active mind is to trace the footsteps of the