a reverence for theoretical and absolute truth, less of common fortune will come to you in answer to equal business and professional ability than to those who do care for money, and do not care for truth.  Are you a physician?  Let me tell you that there is a possible excellence in your profession which will rather limit than increase your practice; yet that very excellence you must strive to attain, for your soul’s life is concerned in your doing so.  Are you a lawyer?  Know that there is a depth and delicacy in the sense of justice, which will sometimes send clients from your office, and sometimes tie your tongue at the bar; yet, as you would preserve the majesty of your manhood, strive just for that unprofitable sense of justice,—­unprofitable only because infinitely, rather than finitely, profitable.  In a stormy and critical time, when much is ending and much beginning, and a great land is heaving and quivering with commingled agonies of dissolution and throes of new birth, are you a statesman of earnestness and insight, with your eye on the cardinal question of your epoch, its answer clearly in your heart, and your will irrevocably set to give it due enunciation and emphasis?  Expect calumny and affected contempt from the base; expect alienation and misconstruction and undervaluing on the part of some who are honorable.  Are you a woman rich in high aims, in noble sympathies and thrilling sensibilities, and, as must ever be the case with such, not too rich in a meet companionship?  Expect loneliness, and wear it as a grace upon your brow; it is your laurel.  Are you a true artist or thinker?  Expect to go beyond popular appreciation; go beyond it, or the highest appreciation you will not deserve.  In fine, for all excellence expect and seek to pay.

No one ever held this law more steadily in view than Jesus; and when ardent young people came to him proposing pupilage, he was wont at once to bring it before their eyes.  It was on such an occasion that he uttered the words, so simple and intense that they thrill to the touch like the string of a harp, “The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man hath not where to lay his head.”  Of like suggestion his question of the king going to war, who first sitteth down and consulteth whether he be able, and of the man about to build a house, who begins by counting the cost.

The cost,—­question of this must arise; question of this must on all sides either be honestly met or dishonestly eluded.  For observe, that attempt to escape payment for the purest values, no less than for the grossest, is dishonest.  If one seek to compass possession of ordinary goods without compensation, we at once apply the opprobrious term of theft or fraud.  Why does the same sort of attempt cease to be fraudulent when it is carried up to a higher degree and applied to possessions more precious?  If he that evades the revenue law of the State be guilty of fraud, what