Since no man can do his best work save as he uses his strongest faculties, the first duty of each is to search out the line of least resistance. He who has a genius for moral themes but has harnessed himself to the plow or the forge, is in danger of wrecking both happiness and character. All such misfits are fatal. No farmer harnesses a fawn to the plow, or puts an ox into the speeding-wagon. Life's problem is to make a right inventory of the gifts one carries. As no carpenter knows what tools are in the box until he lifts the lid and unwraps one shining instrument after another, so the instruments in the soul must be unfolded by education. Ours is a world where the inventor accompanies the machine with a chart, illustrating the use of each wheel and escapement. But no babe lying in the cradle ever brought with it a hand-book setting forth its mental equipment and pointing out its aptitude for this occupation, or that art or industry. The gardener plants a root with perfect certainty that a rose will come up, but no man is a prophet wise enough to tell whether this babe will unfold into quality of thinker or doer or dreamer. To each Nature whispers: "Unsight, unseen, hold fast what you have." For the soul is shadowless and mysterious. No hand can carve its outline, no brush portray its lineaments. Even the mother embosoming its infancy and carrying its weaknesses, studying it by day and night through years, sees not, she cannot see, knows not, she cannot know, into what splendor of maturity the child will unfold. Man beholds his fellows as one beholds a volume written in a foreign language; the outer binding is seen, the inner contents are unread. Within general lines phrenology and physiognomy are helpful, but it is easier to determine what kind of a man lives in the house by looking at the knob on his front door than to determine the brain and heart within by studying the bumps upon face and forehead. Nature's dictum is, "Grasp the handle of your own being." Each must fashion his own character. Nature gives trees, but not tools; forests, but not furniture. Thus nature furnishes man with the birth materials and environment; man must work up these materials into those qualities called industry, integrity, honor, truth and love, ever patterning after that ideal man, Jesus Christ. The influences shaping nature's raw material into character are many and various. Of old, the seer likened the soul unto clay. The mud falls upon the board before the potter, a rude mass, without form or comeliness. But an hour afterwards the clay stands forth adorned with all the beauty of a lovely vase. Thus the soul begins, a mere mass of mind, but hands many and powerful soon shape it into the outlines of some noble man or woman. These sculptors of character include home, friendship, occupation, travel, success, love, grief and death.