and happiness and satisfaction as would make the poor, weak something she calls by this name so pale before it, that she would quickly see that she hasn’t known what true pleasure is, and that what she has been mistaking for the real, the genuine, is but as a baser metal compared to the purest of gold, as a bit of cut glass compared to the rarest of diamonds, and that would make this same woman who scarcely deigns to notice the poor woman who washes her front steps, but who, were the facts known, may be living a much grander life, and consequently of much more value to the world than she herself, see that this poor woman is after all her sister, because child of the same Father; and that would make the humble life of this same poor woman beautiful and happy and sweet in its humility; that would give us a nation of statesmen in place of, with now and then an exception, a nation of politicians, each one bent upon his own personal aggrandizement at the expense of the general good; that would go far, ay, very far toward solving our great and hard-pressing social problems with which we are already face to face; that, in short, would make each man a prince among men, and each woman a queen among women.

I have seen the supreme happiness in lives where this principle has been caught and laid hold of, some, lives that seemed not to have much in them before, but which under its wonderful influences have been so transformed and so beautified, that have been made so sweet and so strong, so useful and so precious, that each day seems to them all too short, the same time that before, when they could scarcely see what was in life to make it worth the living, dragged wearily along.  So there are countless numbers of people in the world with lives that seem not to have much in them, among the wealthy classes and among the poorer, who might under the influence of this great, this simple principle, make them so precious, so rich, and so happy that time would seem only too short, and they would wonder why they have been so long running on the wrong track, for it is true that much the larger portion of the world to-day is on the wrong track in the pursuit of happiness; but almost all are there, let it be said, not through choice, but by reason of not knowing the right, the true one.

The fact that really great, true, and happy lives have been lived in the past and are being lived to-day gives us our starting-point.  Time and again I have examined such lives in a most careful endeavor to find what has made them so, and have found that in each and every individual case this that we have now come to has been the great central principle upon which they have been built.  I have also found that in numbers of lives where it has not been, but where almost every effort apart from it has been made to make them great, true, and happy, they have not been so; and also that no life built upon it in sufficient degree, other things being equal, has failed in being thus.