and just that far these imaginary lines are good.

But something far better, far manlier, is to have the firmness to draw
our own lines at our own times. It is so peculiarly a personal matter
that we can well afford to let the World have its lines and we have
our own. If you agree with me, then your own line is drawn at To-day
and Every Day. If a man cannot enter on a new life every day, he can
unquestionably enter on at least a newer life every day. It must be
a barren and unfruitful mind to which something--good or evil--is not
added every day, to make it that much newer. You know this yourself.
You have seen healthy, pure-minded boys start out in life and you have
met them later with minds so darned with vice here, and patched with
sin there, that you hardly recognized them. That transformation was
not done in a day. You have seen boys that you knew at school without
a bad habit, and when you met them again they had added to their lives
drinking, gambling, everything this side of a police court. That was
not done in a day. We do nothing in a day--not even reform in a day.
All good and evil is a matter of ascent and descent-the latter only
the faster because the grade is easier. It is not an easy experiment
in the world to be a good man. No man ever fixed a day to become a
good one. It is an uphill road, a long road, and one who proposes to
walk it must fix no later hour than now lest night-fall find him far
from the end of it.

But the young man who determines to walk it in this day, has a far
easier road than he would have had thirty years ago. It is the fashion
to say that the road grows no better. It is not true; the world's
opinion grows better every day. There were many things respectable
thirty years ago that are absolutely disreputable now. Then, a
middle-aged man might drink at a bar with a boy of twenty. If he did