Life, no doubt, this modern city life into which we are plunged, is terribly distracting.  Concentration upon a single aim is hard to attain.  So we plead in our excuse, but the excuse is a false one and we know it.  We know it because we know many people who have achieved the sort of concentration and simplicity of aim that we complain of as so difficult.  They to be sure have other ends than those we claim to be ours, but that would not seem to be important.  By far the greater part of the male population of this city is intensely concentrated in money making.  I do not believe that I have overheard during the last year two men talking in a car or on the street who were not talking about money.  There is a good enough example of the possibility of concentrating on a single end under the conditions of our life.  There are other people, you know some of them, whose lives are devoted in the most thorough manner to the pursuit of pleasure.  They find no difficulty in such concentration, and they afford an even better example of what we are discussing than the money-makers.  The money-maker says, “I have to live and my family has to live, and we cannot live unless I devote myself to business.  It is all very well to talk about spiritual interests, but those are the plain common sense facts.  A man who spends all his time on religion will find it pretty difficult to live in New York.”  Very well, that seems unanswerable.  But go back to the men and women whose sole interest is amusement—­how do they live?  In some way they seem to have so succeeded in subordinating business to pleasure that they get what they want, and they somehow escape starvation!

There, I fancy, is the explanation—­they get what they want.  In a broad way we all get what we want.  We accomplish in some degree at least the ends which we make the supreme ends of life.  We are back therefore where we started:  What are our supreme ends?  Are they in fact spiritual?  Have we mastered the technique of the Christian life sufficiently to be single-eyed and pure-hearted in our pursuit of life’s ends?  Are we devoted to the aim of manifesting the glory of God and finishing the work that He has given us to do?

This, once more, was the secret of our Lord’s life, and it is the secret of all those who have at all succeeded in imitating Him.  They have followed Him with singleness of purpose.  They have felt life to be before all else a vocation to manifest the will of God and to finish a given work.  That was the attitude of our Blessed Mother; she began on that note:  “Behold the hand-maid of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy word.”  It was the Gospel that she preached:  “Whatsoever he saith unto you, do it.”  Her whole life was a response—­the response of love to love.