are slow; but be sure that the goal is appointed, and that God will be
there and will wait till we come.

When Jesus said: "The poor ye have always with you," he did not refer
to dollars and cents only, but to that poverty of intellect, that
barrenness of the moral nature which makes a human being a reproach and
a terror to his kind. These we shall always have to deal with, to
educate if we can, to constrain from overt acts of evil, and to protect
ourselves from in all the works and ways of life.

So painful and slow is the process of character-forming that millions
of souls pass on from this sphere of life to the spirit world so
lacking in individuality that they have no more power for any
expression of themselves upon that plane of being than they had when
they were living here. Not as much, in fact, for the physical body and
brain have always some possible function and use while they hold their
relationship to the world of material life, which function and use are
laid aside when they are put through the sifting process of physical
death, and in all cases, unless the powers of the ego as exercised here
are supplanted by a sufficient growth of the spiritual nature to
sustain the ego in its new relationship, and give to it the impetus
needed to start it forward upon lines of usefulness and growth, it
naturally fails to waken to any sort of realization of itself and its
possible career in its new life. This is specially true of those
persons who have been psychologized by those teachings which relegate
the souls of human beings to the cold clasp of the ground, until the
expected day of judgment; or of those poor, overworked men and women to
whom heaven seems only a place to sleep and rest in; or again, of still
another class of minds that has brought itself to a belief in utter
extinction after the close of this external life. These are the