of life may better be measured and tested in one-hour periods of duration.
When the clock strikes nine, we know that in just sixty minutes it will
strike ten. In the space of those sixty minutes we may find a
cross-section of life. In a single hour we may experience a thousand
sensations, arrive at a thousand judgments, and make a thousand responses
to things about us. In that hour we may experience joy, sorrow, love,
hate, envy, malice, sympathy, kindliness, courage, cowardice, pettiness,
magnanimity, egoism, altruism, cruelty, mercy--a list, in fact, that
reaches on almost interminably. If we only had a spiritual cyclometer
attached to us, when the clock strikes ten we should have an interesting
moment in noting the record. Only in some such way may each one of us gain
a true notion of what his own life is. The one-hour period is quite long
enough for a determination of the spiritual attitude and disposition of
the individual.

It is no small matter to achieve life, big, full, round, abounding,
pulsating life; but it is certainly well worth striving for. Some one has
defined sin as the distance between what one is and what he might have
been; and this distance measures his decline from the sphere of life to
which he had right and title. For life is a sphere, seeing that it extends
in all directions. Its limits are conterminous with the boundaries of time
and space. The feeble-minded person has life, but only in a very
restricted sphere. He eats; he drinks; he sleeps; he wanders in narrow
areas; and that is all. His thinking is weak, meager, and fitful. To him
darkness means a time for sleeping, and light a time for eating and
waiting. He produces nothing either of thought or substance, but is a
pensioner upon the thinking and substance of others. His eyesight is
strong and his hearing unimpaired; but he neither sees nor hears as normal
persons do, because his spirit is incapable of positive reactions, and his
mind too weak to give commands to his bodily organs at the behest of the