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58 almost impossible for you to conceive the vividness of this sense in them; it is totally impossible for you to conceive the comfort, peace, and force of it. In everything that you now do or seek, you expose yourselves to countless miseries of shame and disappointment, because in your doing you depend on nothing but your own powers, and in seeking choose only your own gratification. You cannot for the most part conceive of any work but for your own Interests, or the interests of others about whom you are anxious in the same faithless way; everything about which passion is excited in you or skill exerted is some object of material life, and the idea of doing anything except for your own praise or profit has narrowed itself into little more than the precentor's invitation to the company with little voice and less practice to "sing to the praise and glory of God."

I have said that you cannot imagine the feeling of the energy of daily life applied in the real meaning of those words. You cannot imagine it, but you can prove it. Are any of you willing, simply as a philosophical experiment in the greatest of sciences, to adopt the principles and feelings of these men of a thousand years ago for a given time, say for a year? It cannot possibly do you any harm to try, and you cannot possibly learn what is true in these things, without trying. If after a year's experience of such method you find yourself no happier than before, at