Slowly the heart passes out of the penumbra.  The mind, too long obscured like a sun eclipsed by clouds, searches out some rift.  Suddenly reason comes into the clear.  God rises like an untroubled sun upon the soul’s horizon.  How crystalline life looks!  The mind literally exhales fancies and pictures, and each stick and stone is as full of suggestions and ideas as the forest is full of birds.  Old problems become clear as noonday.  Difficult questions lie clearly revealed before the mind like landscapes from which the fogs are lifted.  Once the mind crawled tortoise-like through its work.  Now it soars like an eagle.  The soul seems a sweet-spiced shrub, and every leaf is perfumed.  If in dull, obscure hours the soul was like a wooden beehive drifted o’er with snow, in its vision-hours the soul is like a glass hive out of which the bees go singing into sweet clover-fields.  In these hours how unworthy the material life!  How insubstantial the things of iron, wood and stone!  Bodily things seem evanescent, as frost pictures on the window on a winter’s morn.  Then honor, integrity, kindness, generosity alone seem permanent and worth one’s while.  How easy then to do right.  All habits that fettered the faculties like iron cuffs are now felt to be but ice fetters, quickly melting.  Then the nobler self, using no whip of cords, looks upon meanness and selfishness, and by a look drives them from the heart and life.

Then years are fulfilled in a single hour.  Then from its judgment-seat the soul reviews its past career, searches out secret sins and scorns them.  How unworthy are vanity and pride and selfishness.  In what garments of beauty and attraction are truth and purity clothed.  The soul looks longingly unto the heavenly heights, as desert pilgrims long for oases and springs of water.  Unspeakably precious are these strategic hours of opportunity.  God sends them; divineness is in them; they cleanse and fertilize the soul; they are like the overflowing Nile.  Men should watch for them and lay out the life-course by them, as captains ignore the clouds and headlands and steer by the stars for a long voyage and a distant harbor.

INFLUENCE, AND THE PRINCIPLE OF REACTION IN LIFE AND CHARACTER.

“So each man gets out of the world of men the rebound, the increase and development of what he brings there.  Three men stand in the same field and look around them, and then they all cry out together.  One of them exclaims, ‘How rich!’ another cries, ‘How strange!’ another cries, ’How beautiful!’ And then the three divide the field between them, and they build their houses there, and in a year you come back and see what answer the same earth has made to each of her three questioners.  They have all talked with the ground on which they lived, and heard its answers.  They have all held out their several hands, and the same ground has put its own gift into each of them.  What