moreover, become continually harder for you to refrain from it, until resentment, anger, and possibly even hatred and revenge become characteristics of your nature, robbing it of its sunniness, its charm, and its brightness for all with whom you come in contact.  If, however, the instant the impulse to resentment and anger arises, you check it then and there, and throw the mind on to some other object of thought, the power will gradually grow itself of doing this same thing more readily, more easily, as succeeding like causes present themselves, until by and by the time will come when there will be scarcely anything that can irritate you, and nothing that can impel you to anger; until by and by a matchless brightness and charm of nature and disposition will become habitually yours, a brightness and charm you would scarcely think possible to-day.  And so we might take up case after case, characteristic after characteristic, habit after habit.  The habit of fault-finding and its opposite are grown in identically the same way; the characteristic of jealousy and its opposite; the characteristic of fear and its opposite.  In this same way we grow either love or hatred; in this way we come to take a gloomy, pessimistic view of life, which objectifies itself in a nature, a disposition of this type, or we grow that sunny, hopeful, cheerful, buoyant nature that brings with it so much joy and beauty and power for ourselves, as well as so much hope and inspiration and joy for all the world.

There is nothing more true in connection with human life than that we grow into the likeness of those things we contemplate.  Literally and scientifically and necessarily true is it that, “as a man thinketh in his heart, so is he.”  The “is” part is his character.  His character is the sum total of his habits.  His habits have been formed by his conscious acts; but every conscious act is, as we have found, preceded by a thought.  And so we have it—­thought on the one hand, character, life, destiny on the other.  And simple it becomes when we bear in mind that it is simply the thought of the present moment, and the next moment when it is upon us, and then the next, and so on through all time.

One can in this way attain to whatever ideals he would attain to.  Two steps are necessary:  first, as the days pass, to form one’s ideals; and second, to follow them continually whatever may arise, wherever they may lead him.  Always remember that the great and strong character is the one who is ever ready to sacrifice the present pleasure for the future good.  He who will thus follow his highest ideals as they present themselves to him day after day, year after year, will find that as Dante, following his beloved from world to world, finally found her at the gates of Paradise, so he will find himself eventually at the same gates.  Life is not, we may say, for mere passing pleasure, but for the highest unfoldment that one can attain to, the noblest character that