intellectual muscle. Out of dull and selfish seclusion go forth.
Regulate with care your basal endowments. Prove thy strength, and
render it sure. Deliver thy conceptions from narrowness, thy charity
from scrimpness, thy purposes from smallness. Deny thyself and take up
thy cross. Do and dare, love and suffer. So shalt thou build a
character that will abide all the tests which future years or ages may
bring.

Bear constantly in mind that you are endlessly improvable. "It is for
God and for Omnipotency to do mighty things in a moment; but
degreeingly to grow to greatness is the course that He hath left for
man." To the conscious human self there belong possibilities of such
moment that no one can well study them without being either thrillingly
impressed or made to experience unusual emotions. The conclusion is,
therefore, unavoidable, that every soul can become great. By processes
of culture to which it is able to subject itself, it can perpetually
increase in wisdom, in strength, and in nobleness.

The soul's chief capabilities may, for the sake of elucidation, be
represented as so many different rooms within itself, each of which can
be made to have a spaciousness equaled by no material amplitude ever
yet ascertained, and each of which, so long as it is kept in the
process of growth, is and will be susceptible of fresh furnishing.
These apartments of the minor man are too wonderful to admit being
depicted either by a writer's pen or by a painter's brush. Their most
distinguishing characteristics can, at best, only be indicated. Who
can tell how much knowledge can find place in them, or what volumes of
feeling they can contain? Who can declare the magnitude of the
grandest traits that, in them, can have freedom to thrive and bear
fruit? Who can estimate the length and breadth, the height and depth