changed opinions once published to the world, he answered well: "I trust I know more now than when I wrote my book." It was perhaps a struggling in the same direction when Emerson extravagantly wrote: "I hope we have heard the last of conformity and consistency. If you would be a man, speak what you think to-day in words as hard as cannon balls, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict everything you said to-day." The cannon balls, however, might be reserved for the day after to-morrow.

It is nevertheless a great and fatal mistake, this living on the past past reputation, past success, past character, past acquisition. Unless living streams run through the pond, it becomes a puddle. Old opinions. unrevised lapse into bigotry; old ways unmodified become iron grooves and mannerisms; old sermons unimproved, sere and yellow leaves. The business firm cannot trade always on its trademark, and the manufacturer must improve his machinery or shut his mill. The disgust of the British people for a man who spoke powerfully once, but never again, embodied itself in the epithet, "Single-speech Hamilton." It was the fatal mistake of the most brilliant of modern generals that he relaxed his early vigilance. On the fourteenth of June, 1815, he proclaimed to his army: "This is the anniversary of Marengo." Had his scouts but followed the defeated Prussian on the night of the sixteenth with his ancient watchfulness, Waterloo might have been a greater Marengo. But disease

and corpulency of body and transient flabbiness of will saved Europe.

An evil day it is for any man, young or old, when he rests in self-complacent satisfaction with his attainments or with himself. It and the flattery that accompanies are the secret of how many a blight of early promise! Those were wholesome if hard words of Carlyle to the young aspirant for literary fame, who sought his opinion of his poetry: "You seem to me a young man to whom nature has given a superior endowment, which you run a considerable risk of failing to unfold. There is undoubtedly a sign of talent in it, but talent in far too loose, crude, and unformed a condition. To have such accounted real finished talent, and praised and preached abroad, is precisely the fatalest failure to a youth of any merit - the sweetness in the mouth which in the belly becomes bitter as gall.” I remember years ago a young man in his second year in college, showy and able much beyond his fellows, flattered and satisfied. For more than forty years he lived on, and died at last a college sophomore.

Self-satisfaction breeds and marks stagnation. So not only through the range of art and literature, but of morals and religion. The self-applauding moralist is wont to be the shallowest of characters, and a class of religionists who claim to have reached a sinless condition attain their standard only by depressing the law of God and the rule of righteousness. On the other hand, that phenomenon which has sometimes so startled the unsympathetic, namely, the self-depreciation recorded

in the private journals of such good men as Edwards, Brainerd, and Martyn, is easily explained. Just in proportion to the height to which they rose was the clearness of vision with which they saw the heavenly light beyond, and the greatness of their sorrow over their shortcomings. Theirs was the beatitude: "Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted." And their comfort lay not behind but before. The Christian cannot live upon an old experience: it is but the desolate camp ground, where he pitched and then folded his tent on his moving pilgrimage. He counts not himself to have apprehended.

"There are sweet fountains in the wilderness

And flowers by the loneliest wayside,

And joys come often; but the holiest

Are never satisfied."

II. Another of the guaranties of a true life is a recovery from errors, faults, and failures. "Forgetting those things which are behind." Fault and failure are the common lot. Walking," says one, "is but a succession of falls." And so is moral walking. But the Psalmist says of the good man: "Though he fall, he shall not be utterly cast down." And Micah wrote: "Rejoice not against me, O mine enemy: when I fall, I shall arise."

The best of this world are not marked by perfection but by the constant rallying from imperfection. The men that make no obvious mistakes, if such there are, are the men who make no mark. The man with the

buried talent took no risks. The dead locomotive never jumps the track. Speed and power involve danger. Activity means liability. Wide usefulness carries broad exposure and shining virtues illuminate even small faults.

Rightfully, good men should not have faults; wrongfully, they do. And so certain are mankind of this universal fact that when they do not find they invent. And thus they have made Washington profane at Monmouth, Grant intoxicated at Shiloh, and John Howard uncomfortable in his family. Human captiousness and depreciation are no doubt often beyond all bounds unreasonable. Walter Savage Landor is reported by Caroline Fox to have said that Milton had one good line, and Dante perhaps six. The function of the fault finder never dies. And we may even welcome him as one of nature's scavengers. While the smiting of the righteous is always an excellent oil, the smiting of the wicked is an excellent vinegar. It was certainly a very dull affair in the old Lydian monarch to employ a servant to say to him daily: "Remember, O king, that thou must die." Poison and the dagger were abundant enough in those days to quicken a poor memory. There would have been shrewdness in keeping a keen-witted menial some ancient Wamba or Launcelot who, instead of that diurnal humdrum, should have come to him with a fresh message each day: "Remember, O king, that you are conceited and boastful;" "Remember, O king, that you are false and fickle;" "Remember, O king, that you are tyrannical

and cruel;" "Remember, O king, that you are hateful and hated." This style of remark might have put him on some useful reflection and hopeful amendment. Such an application would have been, for an indolent Oriental, not only the oil and the vinegar, but the mustard too.

Such disagreeable remedies, if we are wise, are often conducive to our best health. As a man may be his own worst enemy, so his enemies may prove to be his best friends. They will be faithful to his faults. One lively foe is a better tonic than a score of phlegmatic or enthusiastic friends. He could afford to keep one or two of them on good pay. They will show him his failings under a powerful lens-though it may be chromatic and eccentric-a burning lens, that makes a hot spot, but not a consuming fire. Doubtless the great premier of England was more helped than hurt when his dashing rival called him "a sophistical rhetorician, inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity, gifted with an egotistical imagination," and the like, or when titled and jeweled ladies of society have termed him "that wretch Gladstone." The fire of hostile criticism has burned away the dross. Sharp watchfulness has made him watchful and almost invulnerable.

The true man on the right path retrieves his errors, remedies his defects, rallies from his failures. Victory may be organized out of defeat, both in the military and the moral world. At Buena Vista, Taylor, because he did not know he was vanquished at noon, came out