dencies are toward harmonious growth and mutual harmony. Else there were no world, no cosmos, no universe replete with mutually functioning spheres, which act like organs in an infinite body. If ill comes to us, it is but the result of our own perverse use of what was convertible to our good.

Nature teaches us how to carve our destiny; but too oft we accuse her of compelling what we our selves have invited.

"Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie,
Which we ascribe to heaven."

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CHAPTER III.

The Heart.

N the subsoil of the mind the seeds of awakening thoughts are planted. In the subsoil of the heart lie deeply-concealed

the propulsive powers of the soul that make for character and compelling action. Long ages antecedent to conscious thought invisible powers have worked secretly on the sensitive chords of the heart, leaving inerasable impressions on the responsive strings.

Thoughts are themselves creators of thought, as one sea-wave generates another in its path of agitation. But the primal mother of all thought is the emotion from whose travail leaps some child of the throbbing brain.

Only when the heart burns is the mind luminant. Only when the breast is writhed or elated is the brain quickened with the living thought. To think keenly one must first have felt deeply. Myriads of thoughts that now swarm through the realm of the conscious brain are but the lingering wraiths of

ancient emotions that have lain long in the limbo of oblivion. Some sudden incident-the glimpse of a forgotten face, the touch of a tender hand, the angle of gabled roof, the flit of a bird, the bark of a dog,stirs again the smouldering flames of the heart and calls into being a thought that points as a guide-post on the highway of some life.

THE SECRET SPRINGS OF DESIRE.

We are so curiously made that we can but little tell what effect an experience will have upon one's entire career. We are divided, so to speak, into various compartments, and each of these constitutes almost a distinct personality, so that one consciousness lies upon another, as the various strata of the earth are conjoined. Seldom do we experience consciously more than one personality which we regard as ourself. But sometimes we are suddenly aroused from the continuity of our self-conscious existence and are seized wth an impulse that seems to be foreign to our nature.

Sometimes such sudden awakening wholly changes the quality of our characters, acting like a dam against the waters of life, and diverting them into an unfrequented channel. We have not been made aware, perhaps, for years of the revolutionary effects

of such experiences, but when least suspecting they suddenly gush forth from the nether spiritual depths, like the bursting of a subterranean fountain.

Horace Fletcher, the eminent Optimist, narrates an incident in his life which illustrates the sudden energy of a new idea that wholly transforms one's future. A Japanese Buddhist had said to him: "You must get rid of anger and worry." "But," said I, "is that possible?" Yes," he replied, "it is possible to the Japanese, and it ought to be possible to you."

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"On my way back I could think of nothing else but the words, 'get rid,' 'get rid ;' and the idea must have continued to possess me during my sleeping hours, for the first consciousness in the morning brought back the same thought, with the revelation of a discovery, which framed itself into reasoning, If it is possible to get rid of anger and worry, why is it necessary to have them at all? I felt the strength of the argument, and at once accepted the reasoning. The baby had discovered that it could walk. It would scorn to creep any longer. From the instant I realized that these cancer-spots of anger and worry were removable, they left me. With the discovery of their weakness they were exorcised. From that time, life has had an entirely new aspect.

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Doubtless deep in the heart of this man, who has since his Japanese experience proved himself so useful in awakening the hope and prosperity of many a despairing soul, there had lain the seed of many past experiences that promptly responded to the new idea the Japanese Buddhist had inculcated in his mind. Long had he become ashamed of his anger and worry, as many of us so often do. Long had he felt that he must rid himself of them, yet never dreamed such a possibility was within his powers. When he meets the teacher who assures him others have really done what he had so long hoped to attain, but never felt strong enough to attempt, the subterranean waters of his soul rise at once to mingle with the new stream that trickles through his consciousness from a foreign source.

Here, again, is another great soul who according to his own confession was his mother's dear child, yet till almost full grown had "never gotten from behind the stove." His heart burns to do something of importance for his age, yet the way is not clear. It is Pestalozzi. He tries law, theology, but of no avail. He fails; such pursuits are distasteful to him. But suddenly he falls on Rousseau's "Emile," and with eyes reddening and flooded he reads what calls up the dead ideas of his buried past, that throng the palace of his soul with a thousand inspirations. He has