heat of the desert.  Yonder the desert and a dying traveler; here an oasis with living water.  Then the sheik arose; he bade his servants fill two leathern water-bottles and bring a basket full of figs and grapes.  The next day a caravan came to a booth protecting two water-bottles sunk in the sand.  Beside them were bunches of fruit.  On a roll were these words:  “While God gives me life each day shall a man be—­as springs of water in a desert place.”  This beautiful story interprets for us the ministry of the higher manhood, as the great heart becomes the shadow of a great rock in a weary land.

This law of human helpfulness asks each man to carry himself so as to bless and not blight men, to make and not mar them.  Besides the great ends of attaining character here and immortality hereafter, we are bound to so administer our talents as to make right living easy and smooth for others.  Happy is he whose soul automatically oils all the machinery of the home, the market and the street.  And this ambition to be universally helpful must not be a transient and occasional one—­here and there an hour’s friendship, a passing hint of sympathy, a transient gleam of kindness.  Heart helpfulness is to enter into the fundamental conceptions of our living.  With vigilant care man is to expel every element that vexes or irritates or chafes just as the husbandman expels nettles and poison ivy from fruitful gardens.

For nothing is so easily wrecked as the soul.  As mechanisms go up toward complexity, delicacy increases.  The fragile vase is ruined by a single tap.  A chance blow destroys the statue.  A bit of sand ruins the delicate mechanism.  But the soul is even more sensitive to injury.  It is marred by a word or a look.  Men are responsible for the ruin they work unthinkingly!  To-day the engine drops a spark behind it.  To-morrow that engine is a thousand miles away.  Yet the spark left behind is now a column of fire mowing down the forests.  And that devastating column belongs not to another, but to that engine that hath journeyed far.  Thus the evil man does lives after him.  The condemnation of life is that a man hath carried friction and stirred up malign elements and sowed fiery discords, so that the gods track him by the swath of destruction he hath cut through life.  The praise of life is that a man hath exhaled bounty and stimulus and joy and gladness wherever he journeys.  To-day noble examples and ten thousand precepts unite in urging every one to become a great heart.  Every individual must bring together his little group of pilgrim friends, companions, employes, using whatever he has of wisdom and skill for guiding those who follow him on their desert march.  For happiness is through helpfulness.  Every morning let us build a booth to shelter someone from life’s fierce heat.  Every noon let us dig some life-spring for thirsty lips.  Every night let us be food for the hungry and shelter for the cold and naked.  The law of the higher manhood asks man to be a great heart, the shadow of a rock in a weary land.