The man who has never had an ideal may hope to find one; he is in a better case than the man who allows the circumstances of life to break his ideal. To fall beneath one's ideal is to lose one's track of life, then confusion rises in the mind, and that light which one should hold high, becomes covered and obscured, so that it cannot shine out to clear one's path. The fall of Napoleon may be dated from the day that he abandoned Josephine. With the breaking of the ideal, the whole life cracks and dissolves. As soon as a man begins to think, "I have done wrong to such and such a person, or such and such a principle," he ceases to be a king within, and cannot be a king without. This does not mean that the good succeed in life, and that the evil fail, but rather that man progresses alone through sincerity to his ideals, for the good of each man is indeed peculiar to himself.

Religion is the school that has developed man; and the ideals that religion presents form a path that leads upward to perfection, that innate and yearning desire of every soul. The difficulty arises when man sees his principles as his goal and not simply as a means to his goal; for when he begins to worship his own principles he becomes a simple idolater, he destroys the essence and the life of his ideal.

Can anyone point to a date in history when man first gained wisdom? Wisdom is the property of humanity. The expressions of this wisdom differ at different times, to suit different peoples; and it is the differences that have always been noticed and not the similarity. Man is apt to insist on the external forms -- "my religion, my scripture, my custom is different," he says; and thus in endeavoring to enforce his ideal, he departs from the very spirit which produced that ideal; and acts upon some primitive impulse which he despises himself, whenever he recognizes it. He may say, "I wish to reform and to reach,' when he is simply driven by a blind and animal impulse to inflict pain perhaps, or to tyrannize, or perhaps to assert his personal power. This element of falseness and treachery in human motives proves to many truthful observers, that there is nothing in life worthy of devotion, and no cause worthy of allegiance.

But the wise of all ages have taught that it is the knowledge of the Divine Being that is life, and the only reality. Although a human activity consists of a number of complicated motives -- some of which are base and gross -- it is the aspiration towards divinity, the desire towards beauty, which is its soul, its life, its reality. And it is in proportion to the degree of the strength or weakness of his aspiration towards beauty that a man's ideal is great or small, and his religion great or small.