Although nature often recoils from it, man was made to work, and he who will not work calls down upon himself some curse, visible or invisible, as he who works, although the toil seem wasted, wakes up one day to find the arid wilderness where he wanders strown with a manna of blessing.

This should be the prayer of all of understanding, that whatever else it may please Heaven to take away, there may be left to them the power and the will to work, through disappointment, through rebuffs, through utter failure even, still to work.

Many things for which they are or are not wholly responsible are counted to men as sins.

Surely, however, few will press more heavily upon the beam of the balance, when at length we are commanded to unfold the talents which we have been given and earned, than those fateful words: "Lord, mine lies buried in its napkin," or worse still: "Lord, I have spent mine on the idle pleasures which my body loved." Therefore it was not to the true welfare of Morris when through lack of further ambition, or rather of the sting of that spur of necessity which drives most men on, he rested upon his oars, and in practice abandoned his labours, drifting down the tide.

No man of high intelligence and acquisitive brain can toil arduously for a period of years and suddenly cease from troubling to find himself, as he expects, at rest.