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half divine, and know that there is an infinite Perfect beyond you? Then God cannot make you such that the same things shall satisfy you forever. Nature and truth cannot improve; therefore you, who live on truth and beauty, must have more and more forever.

Then you will say, "If there is any wish in heaven that I should be happy, and if happiness lies in progression, why cannot I begin lowly, and constantly progress, without these torturing changes into wo,—every new day being higher, brighter, wiser, freer than the last?" We answer, you are reaching your own wish, by the wisest, in short, the only method; yet never can be continually happy.

When we examine our lives and consciousness, we become aware of an equator in our experience, whose name is Law, above which lies our joy, and below which lies our pain. Each man lives his own life, and no other: his highest joy is the highest joy he knows; his lowest grief is the lowest he has conceived; and between these is an average line, or an equator of consciousness, self-established, which is the tenor of his life. The time occupied will not matter; he may have grown old in an hour, or the memory of an hour's joy may have lighted years of weariness,—still his life will have its equator; and he never can know whether another man's life was happier than his own.

Though crippled or sickened from infancy or youth,—though broken or ruined in manhood, let no man judge him, for God is with him as with Croesus and Apollo. He has his good times. His life is his