We are expecting mastery without apprenticeship, knowledge without study, and riches by credit.
Young men and women, why stand ye here all the day idle?
Was the land all occupied before you were born?
Has the earth ceased to yield its increase?
Are the seats all taken?
the positions all filled?
the chances all gone?
Are the resources of your country fully developed?
Are the secrets of nature all mastered?
Is there no way in which you can utilize these passing moments to improve yourself or benefit others?
Is the competition of modern existence so fierce that you must be content simply to gain an honest living?
Have you received the gift of life in this progressive age, wherein all the experience of the past is garnered for your inspiration, merely that you may increase by one the sum total of purely animal existence?
Born in an age and country in which knowledge and opportunity abound as never before, how can you sit with folded hands, asking God's aid in work for which He has already given you the necessary faculties and strength?
Even when the Chosen People supposed their progress checked by the Red Sea, and their leader paused for Divine help, the Lord said, "Wherefore criest thou unto me?
Speak unto the children of Israel, _that they go forward_." With the world full of work that needs to be done; with human nature so constituted that often a pleasant word or a trifling assistance may stem the tide of disaster for some fellow man, or clear his path to success; with our own faculties so arranged that in honest, earnest, persistent endeavor we find our highest good; and with countless noble examples to encourage us to dare and to do, each moment brings us to the threshold of some new opportunity.
Don't _wait_ for your opportunity.

_Make it_,--make it as the shepherd-boy Ferguson made his when he calculated the distances of the stars with a handful of glass beads on a string.

Make it as George Stephenson made his when he mastered the rules of mathematics with a bit of chalk on the grimy sides of the coal wagons in the mines.

Make it, as Napoleon made his in a hundred "impossible" situations.

Make it, as _all leaders of men_, in war and in peace, have made their chances of success.