But do not the secular look upon growth as a sort of chase—­a chase for more learning, more money, a bigger business, a higher degree, a better position, a brilliant marriage,—­a struggle for wealth, renown, acclaim?  These things are not in themselves growth, nor its real index.  Growth is not a form of avarice.  Growth is a vital state of being.  Growth is the assimilation of experience.  Growth is development in the line of eternal purpose.  Growth is the combination of our souls with the things that are, in such a way as to make a perpetual progress toward the things that are to be.

We lose much because we lose avidity out of our lives, the eagerness to grasp what spiritually belongs to us,—­to share the universal enthusiasm, the universal hope.  Day by day the world wheels about us—­sunset and moonrise, wind, hail, frost, snow, vapor, care, anxiety, temptation, trial, joy, fear.  Whatever touches the sense or the soul is something by which, rightly used, we may grow.  There is nothing we need fear to take into our lives, if it receives the right assimilation.  Each experience is meant to be a vital accession.  We narrow our lives and enfeeble our powers when we try to reject any of these things, or unlawfully escape them, or are yet indifferent to them.  Prejudice, cowardice, and apathy are death.

Experience is what the race has been through.  Each of us has his personal variant of this common life.  Thought is the power by which we make it available for our own better living, and the future life of the race.

To the early man, there existed earth, air, water, fire, heat, cold, tempest, and the growth of living things.  He lived, ate, fought, but his thoughts were primitive and personal.  Have I had enough dinner? he asked, not, Is the race fed?

By and by some one arose who began to consider things in the abstract, and to relate them to his neighbor, and formulate conclusions about them.  He was the first real Thinker, Then air-philosophy and element-philosophy grew up—­beast-worship, animalism, fire-worship, and the rudiments of simple scientific learning, as, for instance, when men found that they could make a tool to cut, a spike to sew.

Since then, what the sage has done is to teach men to see, read, write, think, count, and to work; to love ideals, to love mankind and relate his work to human progress.

Man’s first primer was near at hand.  When he wished to write, he made a picture with a stick, a stone, on a leaf, or traced his idea in the mud.  When he wanted to count, he kept tally on his fingers, or with pebbles from the beach or brook.  When he wished to communicate an idea orally, it was with glances, shrugs, gestures, and imitative sounds.  Once, in a game of Twenty Questions, this was the question set to guess:  Who first used the prehistoric root expressing a verb of action?  Who, indeed?