LIFE IS LIKE THE SYSTEM

upon which gamblers often stake their money.  If they lose one, they stake two; if they lose, they stake four; if they lose, they stake eight; if they still lose, they stake sixteen; now if they win, they have, of course, won one more than they have lost altogether.  The banker guards against this system by limiting their progression to a certain figure and thus breaking it down.  But in the game of life we have no limit put upon our enterprises.  We may redouble our efforts after every failure, and we find, upon the first success, that we have, in one stroke of prosperity, more than made ourselves whole for failures which may have extended behind us indefinitely.  You cannot fail in life if you will stake an effort on each succeeding attempt twice as great as the effort which lost you your last desire.

MAN

     A combination and a form, indeed,
     Where every god did seem to set his seal
     To give the world assurance of a man.

     His life was gentle, and the elements
     So mixed in him, that nature might stand up
     And say to all the world “This was a man!”—­Shakspeare.

“What a piece of worke is a man?  How Noble in Reason? how infinite in faculty? in forme and mouing how expresse and admirable? in Action how like an Angel? in apprehension how like a God? the beauty of the world, the Paragon of Animals?” This is the exalted panegyric of the greatest mind so far vouchsafed to our race—­this, then, was Shakspeare’s ideal of a true man.  Says Emerson:  “O rich and various man! thou palace of sight and sound, carrying in thy senses the morning and the night, and the unfathomable galaxy; in thy brain the geometry of the city of God; in thy heart the power of love and the realms of right and wrong.”  “Man was sent into the world to be a growing and exhaustless force,” says Chapin; “the world was spread out around him to be seized and conquered.  Realms of infinite truth burst open above him, inviting him to to tread those shining coasts along which Newton dropped his plummet, and Herschel sailed,

A COLUMBUS OF THE SKIES.”

“Man,” says Carlyle, “has reflected his two-fold nature in history.  ’He is of earth,’ but his thoughts are with the stars.  Mean and petty his wants and his desires; yet they serve a soul exalted with grand, glorious aims, with immortal longings, with thoughts which sweep the heavens and ‘wander through eternity.’  A pigmy standing on the outward crust of this small planet, his far-reaching spirit stretches outward to the infinite, and there finds rest.”  Then turning to the combined effects of individual lives, the same great writer says:  “History is a reflex of this double life.  Every epoch has two aspects—­one calm, broad and solemn—­looking towards