that enables the accomplished musician to execute with precision and power the melody which is in his soul. Technical skill of every sort is the result and expression of control over one's own physical capabilities.

Self-control is, therefore, necessary to effectiveness; it is the generalship which turns a mob of raw recruits into a disciplined army. Many a man is blundering and ineffective in all his endeavors because he has never come into command of himself: his powers are untrained; he can do nothing well; he has no method; he does not possess himself. The discipline which is the main end in education is simply self-control acquired over one's mental faculties; without this discipline no man is a strong and accurate thinker.

But dispositions as well as faculties must be subdued to order. A prime quality of good character is the power to control one's moods, - his feelings and temper. Many persons are intemperate in their feelings; they are emotionally prodigal. Passionateness is intemperance; so also is caprice, and subjection to evil or unwholesome moods. There is an intemperance in melancholy and in mirth. "The laughter of fools is like the crackling of thorns under a pot." But the mirthful fool is not worse than

the melancholy fool. It is true that our moods are much affected by our circumstances; that is inevitable. But the temperate man is not mastered by his moods; he will not be driven or enticed into excess; his steadfast will conquers despondency, and is not unbalanced by transient exhilarations. Temper is subjected to reason and conscience. How many people excuse themselves for doing wrong or foolish acts by the plea that they have a quick temper? But he who is king of himself rules his temper, turning its very heat and passion into energy that works good instead of evil. Stephen Girard, when he heard of a clerk who had a strong temper, would readily take him into his employ. Girard believed that such persons, properly controlled, that is, taught selfcontrol, were the best workers. Temper is an element of strength; wisely regulated it spends itself as energy in work, just as heat in an engine is transmuted into the force that drives the wheels of industry and commerce. Cromwell, William the Silent, Washington, and Wellington were men of prodigious temper; but they were also men whose self-control was nearly perfect. The favorite emblem, Mr. Motley tells us, by which the friends of William the Silent expressed their sense of his firmness was,

"The rock in the ocean, tranquil amid raging billows." How adequate is the old familiar proverb: "He that is slow to anger is better than the mighty; and he that ruleth his spirit than he that taketh a city."

There is another sort of intemperance to which the young are prone to become addicted: it is intemperance in the exercise of the fancy or the imagination. Imagination is a marvellous and most precious endowment of the human mind; but it is susceptible of extraordinary and exceedingly harmful abuses. It glorifies life if it is pure and noble, and chastened by a strong sense of truth and righteousness; if it is impure, and unruled by conscience, it envelopes the soul in a splendid but fatal corruption. Uncontrolled by reason and the moral sense, it saps the best energies of the mind by leaving them inactive; it perverts judgment by false representations of life; it debauches the heart by the creation of unclean pictures in which vice is garnished with a powerful and baleful beauty; it becomes, in the service of lust,

"Procuress to the lords of hell."

Many a ruined life is but the manifest result of a moral deterioration which began in an

intemperate imagination; deeds were done in fancy from which as facts the soul would have shrunk in horror, until at last, by an inevitable process, fancy has become fact. What orgies of illicit pleasure are carried on in many a heart! I tell you, young men, there are few perils to youth greater than those which arise from an unchastened and ungoverned imagination. A true self-control lays a powerful constraining hand on that fertile and dangerous faculty, and subjects it as rigorously as it does conduct to the law of conscience. "Keep the imagination sane," said Hawthorne, "that is one of the truest conditions of communion with Heaven." When Goethe wrote: "Es ist nichts fürchterlicher als Einbildungskraft ohne Geschmack," there is nothing more fearful than imagination without taste, he surely was thinking of " that good taste which is the conscience of the mind, and that conscience which is the good taste of the soul."

(3) Self-control involves also command of one's practical activities. Scarcely less important than temperance in the indulgence of our appetites and passions, is temperance in speech and in work. These two, speech and work, are our prevailing forms of expression; we impress ourselves on the world about us by what we

say and what we do. Intemperance in speech is a common vice, and it is one prolific of grave evils. Words are forces in human society. An apostle said: "Be swift to hear; slow to speak; slow to wrath." Hasty, ill-considered speech is one of the most fruitful sources of suffering; gossip and slander are more powerful for mischief than robbery and arson. The intemperate tongue Saint James describes as "an unruly evil, full of deadly poison." Families, churches, and communities have been rent in pieces by the ungoverned tongue; friends have been parted or turned into foes by evil-speaking. The wise control of the tongue has a powerful influence on the whole life. Saint James says: "In many things we all offend. If any one offends not in word, this is a perfect man, able to bridle also the whole body." It is as if he had said that he who has learned how to be temperate in speech has mastered the secret of temperance in all things. The man who is intemperate in drink often harms himself more than he does any one else; but the man who is intemperate in speech harms first and most his fellow-man.

Intemperance in work is also a common vice, especially in our time and country. Though not as despicable and mischievous a vice as the former, it is nevertheless a vice, and it works