THE IDEAL AND THE PRACTICAL: Page 10

The very fact of the ideal being present in your mind foreshadows its fulfilment. Our thoughts set up a magnetic centre within us. Like attracts like. Good thoughts draw to themselves corresponding thoughts. This fact is very emphatic. Each tree brings forth fruits of its kind. If we think well, we cannot act ill. The greatness of a man must? find its measure in the greatness of his thoughts, and not in the amount of money in his pocket or the bluster on his tongue. Our ideal is the hinge upon which our future turns. We create our own fate. The first essential is to pitch our aims high. Let us look upward and upward alone. Let us pray to ! God for strength by all means, but let us be prepared »to deserve His grace by walking a straight path. If we weave our thoughts around a grand purpose in life the ideal so formed may take material form any day. Its impulsion may stir up concretions of gross physical matter into activity and may clap spurs to the feet of even a lazy hack. So much for the ideal. If the ideal is to be cherished, it must also be nourished. If you simply sit down and desire to get a thing, you will never get it and it is good for you that you should not. For the practical side of things must never be neglected. "Practice makes perfect/' Having set currents of holy desire in motion, we must set to deepen them in intensity and volume. "Great actions are only transformed great concen-