overcometh is more given. What I am born with may soon slip from my fingers unless I do something to deserve it and render it secure. Appreciation is a product of toil, and to evaluate I must make a thing my own. Riches may be heaped upon me, but I really possess only what I have won. No one can make me a gift out of relation to my character, no one can really coerce me, whatever appearances may say. What becomes mine I react upon and assimilate by degrees.

It is natural to man to go forth into productivity in response to a creative instinct. This self activity once in exercise, there is opportunity to observe it to see whither it is tending and thereby discover its implied ideal. Mere activity, that is, the mere expression of elemental power counts for little. But a man must express his powers before he can select and organise them. One may put life into the most trivial expression and transfigure it by the nobility of his motive. The man who seeks pleasure or happiness as an end in itself inevitably fails, but the worker who puts himself into his occupation finds that happiness is beneficently added. If there be pent-up life within me I should not expect to be at peace until I find a satisfactory channel for its expression. Half the misery of certain classes of people is due to uneasiness which demands release through work. Nature refuses not only to give us something for