But what of our tendencies to specialization in education and business?  Are these wrong and injurious?  Specialization, like great wealth, is a great danger and a fearful test of character.  It tends to narrowness.  If you will know everything about something, you must make a great effort to know something about, and have some interest in, everything.  The great scholar is often anything but the large-minded, whole-souled man which he might have become.  He has allowed himself to become absorbed in, and fettered by, his specialty until he can see and enjoy nothing outside of it.  There is no selfishness like that of learning.

We can accomplish nothing unless we concentrate our efforts upon a comparatively narrow line of work.  But this does not necessitate that our views should be narrow or our aims low.  Teufelsdroeckh may live on a narrow lane; but his thoughts, starting along the narrow lane, lead him over the whole world.  The narrowness of our horizon is due to our near-sightedness.

But the only absolutely safe specialization is the highest possible development of our moral and religious powers.  For their cultivation only enlarges and strengthens all the other powers of body and mind.  “But,” you will object, “does religion always broaden?” Yes.  That which narrows is the base alloy of superstition.  But a religion which finds its goal and end in conformity to environment, character, and godlikeness can only broaden.

But there is the so-called “breadth” of the shallow mind which attempts to find room at the same time for things which are mutually exclusive.  God and Baal, right and wrong, honesty and lying, selfishness and love, these are mutually exclusive.  You cannot find room in your mind for both members of the pair at the same time.  You must choose.  And, when you have chosen, abide by your choice.  A ladleful of thin dough fallen on the floor is very broad.  But its breadth is due to lack of consistency.  Better narrowness than such breadth.

But while individual specialization may be safe for the individual, and beneficial to the race, the race which is to inherit the future must remain unspecialized.  It must not sacrifice future possibilities to present rapidity of advance.  And the common people are advancing safely, slowly, but surely.  Wealth and learning become of permanent prospective and real value only when they are invested in the masses.  They are the final depositaries of all wealth—­material, intellectual, moral, and religious.  Whatever, and only that which, becomes a part of their life becomes thereby endowed with immortality.  Will we invest freely or will we wait to have that which we call our own wrested from us?  If we refuse it to our own kin and nation, it will surely fall to foreigners.  “God made great men to help little ones.”

The city of God on earth is being slowly “builded by the hands of selfish men.”  But the builders are becoming continually more unselfish and righteous, and as they become better and purer its walls rise the more rapidly.