no escape. No man can avoid life--not even the foolish one who, when
the difficulties before him appear for the moment overwhelming, tries
to escape them by suicide. A man cannot die. He can only choose how he
will live. He may either helplessly drift through the world suffering
from all the ills and evils that make so many unhappy or he may choose
the method of conscious evolution that alone makes life truly
successful. We may be either the suffering slaves of nature or the
happy masters of her laws.

Now, all powers possessed by any human being, no matter how exalted
his position in evolution, or how sublime his spiritual power, are
latent in all human beings and can, in time, be developed and brought
into action. Of course there is no magic rule by which the ignoramus
can instantly become wise or by which a brutal man can be at once
transformed into a saint. It may require scores of incarnations to
accomplish a work so great, but when a man reaches the point in his
evolution where he begins to comprehend the purpose of life, and to
evolve the will to put forth his energies in co-operation with nature,
his rise to wisdom and power may be swift indeed. But this
transformation from the darkness of ignorance to spiritual
illumination, from helplessness "in the fell clutch of circumstance"
to power over nature, must be brought about by his own efforts, for it
is a process of evolution--of forcing the latent to become the active.
Therefore one must resolve to take oneself in hand for definite and
systematic self-development. Nobody else can do the work for us.
Certain moral qualities must be gained before there can be spiritual
illumination and genuine wisdom and such qualities, or virtues, have
to be evolved by the laws under which all growth occurs. It is just as
impossible to acquire a moral quality by reading about its
desirability as to evolve muscular strength by watching the