for me, it is what I feel to be my self. This is sometimes disputed by people who do not believe that the judgments, passions, desires, and will of a man are overruled at all, by any supreme authority in his being that can bring them under control. They maintain that our state of being is a state without government a state of anarchy - in which the animating forces, as we have called them, are left struggling together until the weaker submit to the stronger, and that the outcome of conduct and character, in all persons, is just what happens to result. But this is a view which brings man into contempt, as a worthless, poor creature, endowed with nothing that differs very much from the springs and clock-wheels in such

puppets as are made for the amusement of a child. If we give attention to the working of our

We are not puppets.

own minds, we know that it is not true. We know it by proofs in our consciousness which outweigh any argument that can be brought. Whenever we choose to do so we can feel a power in ourselves to master any passion, any appetite or desire, any dread of pain, any careless habit or indolence of thinking, any indifference of will. We can feel a power to strengthen or to weaken any one of the forces in ourselves that act in producing thought, passion, desire, or will. We can feel that they are our servants if we will make them so; but feel, too, at the same time, that our mastery over them can easily be given up.

It is lost, in fact, more easily than it is kept. The government of ourselves is like the government of human societies, in which the strength and firmness of authority must never fail. But they do fail if unceasing energy and watchfulness are not exercised in maintaining them, and the state of anarchy appears, then, at once.

If, therefore, we are not by nature the kind of puppet creatures that we should be if we had no power of selfcontrol, we can easily sink ourselves to the likeness of creatures of that worthless sort. It is as easy as any indolence, or any carelessness, or But we can any yielding and drifting in uke. life; and the temptations to it, from what seem to be pleasure and com

be puppet

fort, are often hard to resist. But what pleasure can make us willing to be shamed by so discrowning and dethroning ourselves from the sovereignty of our own being, and submitting to be slaves of the sensibilities that we were appointed to rule? What can make it worth being a Man, and not an insect or a worm, if one has no mastery over the endowments of the Man?

The self-mastering of passions and dispositions of body and mind is far harder for some than for others, being made so by surrounding influences or by inherited weaknesses and traits; but Self-mastery We have no reason to believe

never impos

sible. that it was ever made impossible to any man. On the contrary, we have numberless examples to show

us that all imaginable weaknesses and all imaginable pressures of circumstance or disposition can be and have been overcome; and they leave no ground for any person to plead that self-control is beyond his power. If he acts as a puppet in life it is not because he was made so, but because he has been more willing to play the easy part of a puppet than to strive stoutly and valiantly for a freedom which proved hard to win.

No man was ever born with an evil appetite or passion too strong for him to master. It may grow to that strength if he indulges it; he may be vanquished and enslaved by it in the end, because he carelessly gave way to it in the beginning; but it overcomes him then