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alive, and this upward impulse is in every one of them. It is a part of the great cosmic, intelligent urge, which is pushing every particle of matter towards the top, for ultimately every atom will arrive at mind and think.

Did you ever ask yourself the meaning of all these great seething masses of people, who are struggling and striving for wealth, for place and power; what is back of all this buying and selling, all this manufacturing and producing, all this toil and effort, this strenuous human exertion? Whence comes the overmastering impulse which pushes human beings on, each to his individual goal? What does ambition mean? What is all the struggling and striving for? Why is it necessary for human beings to spend their lives in hard work?

There must be a profound significance, a master object back of it all. This great human current of ambition must be running toward some particular end. There certainly must be some higher meaning than making a living for the animal man, something besides food and clothing and housing human beings in the vast scheme of man's activities.

We know that God could have made bread all ready for use on trees; that He could have given us a climate which would render much of any housing unnecessary; He could have given us soil which would have produced abundantly with very little help from human toil, but the infinite plan for us was something much higher than making a living,

and that was, making a life, and so developing man to his highest power.

Activity is the law of growth; effort the only means of improvement. Wherever men have obeyed their lower nature and ceased to struggle to better their condition, they have deteriorated physically, mentally, and morally; while, just in proportion as they have striven honestly and insistently to improve their situation, they have developed a larger and nobler human type.

Ambition is usually a good deal of a mystery to its possessor. We do not know always where the following of its call will lead us, but we do know this, that when we follow, when we put ourselves in a position to give it the best and the freest scope it will lead us to the highest self-expression of which we are capable, and will give us the greatest satisfaction. We know that by being loyal to ambition and doing our best to follow it in its normal, wholesome state, when not perverted by selfishness, by love of ease or self-gratification, it will lead to our best and highest welfare. We know, too, that when our ambition is perverted to base ends our lives go all awry; when we are false to the higher voice within us, we are discontented, unhappy, inefficient, and our lives are ineffective.

If we could explain just what ambition is, we could explain the mystery of the universe. But we do know the results of striving to attain it. We know that the more regular and scientific our liv

ing, the more persistent our habits of industry, the greater our activity in doing things worth while, the greater our satisfaction, and the larger and grander human beings we become.

We have found by centuries of experiment that the only way to develop the larger, higher, finer human type is the way of toil and ceaseless activity. But for this great necessity of perpetual industry, the incessant striving to better our condition, we should be to-day a race of undeveloped pygmies. The most marked characteristic of men who have done the grandest work for humanity has been loyalty to their ambition.

No one yet knows the real meaning of electricity or what it is, but we have found that by obeying its laws we get most beneficent results. It has become the great servant of humanity and is fast emancipating man from drudgery. While we do not know the full meaning of the human struggle for existence, for human betterment, we do know that honest, persistent endeavor not only leads to better material conditions, more comforts, more luxuries, more refinement and culture, but also makes larger and better men and women.

We are beginning to realize that ambition is just as real a force as electricity. We are finding that the man who has an energetic, vigorous ambition generates an actual force which is as superior to that of the man with a weak, halting, intermittent ambition as the force of a great river is to that of

a shallow brook. It is the man who is ambitious. and determined to get on, and who has taken an oath to himself that he is going to get up in the world, stand for something, be somebody and achieve something, that does great things.

Yes, ambition is not only a real force, but it is real and powerful just in proportion to its intensity and persistency. Ambition is something more than idle dreaming; it is the substance of things expected. There is a divinity, a reality, a prophecy in our desires and longings.

Because there is no limit to human growth there is no satisfying human ambition—man's highest aspiration. When we reach the height which looks so attractive from below, we find our new position as unsatisfying as the old, and a perpetual call to go higher still rings in our ears. That mysterious urge within us never allows us to rest but is always disturbing, prodding us for our good. No matter how high we may climb in our achievement, there is something which seems to call down from a still higher eminence, "Excelsior! Excelsior!" "Come up higher."

It is true that if a man persistently, year in and year out, refuses to work out his high destiny, insists upon being a nobody, a shirk, the urge of ambition becomes less and less insistent and its voice finally grows too faint to make itself heard. On every hand we see young men who started out with brilliant prospects when they left college;

their friends predicted great things for them, but somehow or other, the enthusiasm of their school or college days has oozed out. The continual suggestion of possibility which came to them from their school environment, the contagion from the ambitious spirit all about them, seemed then to multiply their prospects, to magnify their ability and to stir up their ambition until they really thought they were going to amount to something in the world, were going to accomplish something; but after they got away from the battery charging institutions they gradually lost their enthusiasm; their ambition dwindled and they began to doubt whether they could realize the dreams which haunted them in their college days. And so, little by little, their ambitious dreams faded, and they resigned themselves to mediocrity or hopeless failure.

No matter how high our youthful ambition, it is very easy to let it wane, to allow our standards to drop. The moment we cease to brace ourselves up, to watch ourselves, we begin to deteriorate, just as a child does when its mother ceases to pay strict attention to it, lets it have its own way. The tendency of the majority at every stage of existence is to go along the line of least resistance, to take the easiest way.

The race instinct to climb is continually at war with the lower nature which would drag it down. Even the noblest beings are not free from this

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