Each of us is born for a sceptre and a crown.  It gives a strange new thrill to life, to realize that we may be just as ambitious as we please, that we may long earnestly for high things, and work for them, if our inmost desire is not for self but for God.  This new idea of ambition should be at the root of education and of religious teaching.  Piety is not a namby-pamby sentiment; it is a great intellectual force.  Desire is architectural:  our dreams should be of prestige and power.  True ambition is the reaching-out of the soul toward preordained things.  What else is the meaning of our love for excellence, our insatiable yearning for perfection?  “What is excellent,” says Emerson, “is permanent.”  To excel in any work is to combine in that work the most enduring qualities of human labor; to excel in any place is to shine forth with the great qualities of the race.  Hence, ambition has a rightful place.

The power of a king is the power of control.  All about us are moving the great forces of the universe—­physical, intellectual, moral, spiritual.  What we can do with them is a test of our power.  Life is in many ways a majestic trial of one’s power to command.

Three men buy adjoining tracts of land.  One man mines coal upon his acres.  He amasses wealth and influence because he is in control of the Carboniferous age and the human need of light and heat.  The second man tills his ground and raises wheat and corn.  He is in command of living nature—­of the rotation of seasons, of wind, frost, rain; he uses them to provide food for those that hunger and must be fed.  The third man lies under the trees.  He digs no mine.  He plants and reaps no corn and grain.  He simply lies under the trees, gazes into the sky and dreams.  Men call him idle, but he is not so.  One day he writes a book.  It lives a thousand years.  His control is over the spirit of man.  He has entered into its hopes and sorrows, its aspirations and its dreams.

This story is a Parable of Kings.  Such is the power of control that is granted to each new soul.  Each child is bequeathed at birth a sceptre and a crown.

The first rule is parental.  The primitive monarchy is in the home.  A young baby cries.  The trained nurse turns on the light, lifts the baby, hushes it, sings to it, rocks it, and stills its weeping by caresses and song.  When next the baby is put down to sleep, more cries, more soothing and disturbance, and the setting of a tiny instinct which shall some day be will—­the power of control.

The grandmother arrives on the scene.  When baby cries, she plants the little one firmly in its crib, turns down the light, pats and soothes the tiny restless hands that fight the air, watches, waits.  From the crib come whimpers, angry cries, yells, sobs, baby snarls and sniffles that die away in a sleepy infant growl.  Silence, sleep, repose, and the building of life and nerve and muscle in the quiet and the darkness.  The baby has been put in harmony with the laws of nature—­the invigoration of fresh air, sleep, stillness—­and the little one wakens and grows like a fresh, sweet rose.  The mother, looking on, learns of the ways of God with men.