Page:Education and Life; (IA educationlife00bakerich).pdf/200

 our endeavor must attend successful effort to aid men.

After all it is the essential spirit that one cultivates within him that will determine his manifold deeds. We can invoke no greater blessing than a character that in all ways will assert the highest dignity that belongs to a human soul. Be brave in your faith. When materialism, indifference, doubt, ease, and unseemly pleasure claim you for theirs (the Devil's own), let your answer be what is expressed in Carlyle's "Everlasting Yea": "And then was it that my whole Me stood up, in native God-created majesty, and with emphasis recorded its Protest: I am not thine, but Free!"

When I see some grand old man, full of faith, courage, optimism, and cheerfulness, whose life has conformed to the moral law, who has wielded the right arm of his freedom boldly for every good cause, come to the end of life with love for man and trust in God, seeing the way brighten before him, turning his sunset into morning, I must believe that he represents the survival of the fittest, that his ideals are not the mere fictions of a blind nature, serving for the preservation of his physical being, but that the order of his life has been in accord with realities.