hosts of France were true, but she drove the foreign invader from the soil of her beloved France where they had held footing for nigh upon a hundred years and no one else had been able to win a victory from them.

I doubt not there were times when Grant's voice did not possess the mellow and refined quality of the drawing-room exquisite, but he won victories and made a united people possible. John Brown was rude, rough, uncouth, boorish, when compared with the refined and polished cavaliers of the South. They called him a bandit, an invader, a revolutionist, an anarchist, and they captured and hanged him, but to thousands of men his crazy dream of the invasion of the South to forcibly compel the freedom of the slave is being more and more seen by hundreds of thousands of wise men to have been one of the most practical and effective means of calling the attention of men to the moral principle involved in the question of slavery, as to whether men of one color of blood or skin had the right to hold in bondage men of a different color.

When Theodore Parker was denouncing the iniquities of any and all slavery, his voice was not as soft and gentle and sweetly modulated as that of Longfellow, yet it played as important a part in the history of the development of mankind and stirred men to higher endeavor on the part of their suffering and down-trodden fellows.

What, then, is the upshot of the whole matter? It seems to me it is this: Listen to the voice that appeals to your own soul; that lifts you from the lower to the higher; that thrills you to deeds of heroism, that stimulates you to acts of nobleness, that calls you to a life of helpful self-sacrifice; and while doing this, cease to criticise, to find fault, to censure the kind of voice to which you do not care to listen. The strong, vigorous, robust, redblooded man of the out-of-doors generally will not speak nor act with the perfect restraint and conventionality of the man born in the atmosphere of the drawing-room, but his message may be just as helpful to the world, and as divinely inspired as that of his more refined and dignified prototype.

CHAPTER XXII

ABSORPTION IN RELATION TO RADIATION

Most important factors in Living the Radiant

Life are Living the Life of Possession and Living the Absorptive Life. To radiate one must possess, and to possess one must absorb. To give largely and well, one must receive largely and well. The Absorptive Life is as essential as the Radiant Life. Out in the great silences are the eloquent voices of God ready to speak to the attentive soul; out in Nature a million voices are ready to impart knowledge to the ignorant. All one has to do to receive is to "ask"; not with the voice but with the whole being. As a sponge absorbs water up to the limit of its capacity, so should man absorb, and then, unlike the sponge, which must be squeezed from without ere it will give off that which it has received, man should radiate from within all that he has received.

There are few people in the world who are true absorbers. We are so full of prejudices, conceits, notions, that we refuse to receive from this, that, or the other source, because, forsooth, we in our

pride deem the source unworthy. The true life receives from every source. Call nothing unclean. All things are yours. God is over and in all. Prove all things. Open your heart to all good from whatever source. Stand humbly before God ready to receive. Keep your hands open; your eyes, your ears, your nostrils, your whole nature in a state of active receptivity. Be afraid of nothing. Some one comes and tells you that in this or that he has found spiritual life and help. You, however, have been taught to regard that as a dangerous thing, so you are afraid of it. Arise and be above such fears. Are you a man, a woman, a human soul, made in the image of God and given powers of thought, of discernment, of decision? Or are you a mere puppet to be worked by the string of other men's thoughts, other men's ideas, other men's opinions? Listen for yourself; think for yourself; decide for yourself; act for yourself. If a thing seems right to your own soul do it though the heavens fall and you suffer the condemnation of all mankind. True and rapid progress will never come to the race until individual men learn that they alone are the arbiters of their own destiny.

Go out into Nature, into the silences, into the workshops and the marts of trade and absorb. Listen to every good voice that speaks, and if you are not sure whether the voice is good or not, lis

ten anyhow and " prove "it by the infallible tests of purity, unselfishness, and uplift.

Every human soul may be a wireless telegraph receiver. God is flashing out messages every moment from His million and one instruments all over the universe. They are all kinds of messages but all from the one spirit, and therefore all spiritual. They appeal to the bodies, the minds, the souls of men, and all you have to do to receive them is to have your receiving apparatus of body, mind, and soul attuned to the sending apparatus of the Loving Sender. Get in tune. Cry out to God: I want all there is. I cast aside all prejudgments, all conceits, all ideas. Let me hear direct from Thee. Go out into the fields and receive from the spirit that is in, over, and about Nature. Every tree, flower, grass, bird, insect, animal, cloud, storm, rock, stream has a message for you if you will but hear it. Love alone can open your heart to receive; it is the key with which the soul and mind and body are set in tune. Get yourself into relationship with Nature. Feel your kinship. God is the Father of every tree as much as he is your Father. Go and claim your family. And claim all the good they possess as your own, for it is yours and merely awaits your taking. As a child you did this with your mother. The nourishment of her breasts, the gentle hush of her voice, the soothing touch of her fingers, the brooding