with inventions to outwit or subdue Nature, and in the end dies,
utterly defeated. His civilizations, his dynasties, his laws, his
manners, his customs, are all doomed to destruction and oblivion as
completely as an ant-hill which exists one night and is trodden down
the next. Forever and forever he works and plans in vain; forever and
forever Nature, the visible and active Spirit of God, rises up and
crushes her puny rebel.

There must be good reason for this ceaseless waste of human life,--this
constant and steady obliteration of man's attempts, since there can be
no Effect without Cause. It is, as if like children at a school, we
were set a certain sum to do, and because we blunder foolishly over it
and add it up to a wrong total, it is again and again wiped off the
blackboard, and again and again rewritten for our more careful
consideration. Possibly the secret of our failure to conquer Nature
lies in ourselves, and our own obstinate tendency to work in only one
groove of what we term 'advancement,'--namely our material self-
interest. Possibly we might be victors if we would, even to the very
vanquishment of Death!

So many of us think,--and so thought one man of sovereign influence in
this world's affairs as, seated on the terrace of a Royal palace
fronting seaward, he pondered his own life's problem for perhaps the
thousandth time.

"What is the use of thinking?" asked a wit at the court of Louis XVI.
"It only intensifies the bad opinion you have of others,--or of
yourself!"

He found this saying true. Thinking is a pernicious habit in which very