I stood on the bridge of one of the great liners, ploughing the ocean at 25 knots. "She is alive," said my companion, "in every plate; a huge monster with brain and nerves, an immense stomach, a wonderful heart and lungs, and a splendid system of locomotion." Just at that moment a signal sounded, and all over the ship the water-tight compartments were closed. "Our chief factor of safety," said the Captain. "In spite of the _Titanic_," I said. "Yes," he replied, "in spite of the _Titanic_." Now each one of you is a much more marvellous organization than the great liner, and bound on a longer voyage. What I urge is that you so learn to control the machinery as to live with "day-tight compartments" as the most certain way to ensure safety on the voyage. Get on the bridge, and see that at least the great bulkheads are in working order. Touch a button and hear, at every level of your life, the iron doors shutting out the Past--the dead yesterdays. Touch another and shut off, with a metal curtain, the Future--the unborn to-morrows. Then you are safe,--safe for to-day! Read the old story in the _Chambered Nautilus_, so beautifully sung by Oliver Wendell Holmes, only change one line to "Day after day beheld the silent toil." Shut off the past! Let the dead past bury its dead. So easy to say, so hard to realize! The truth is, the past haunts us like a shadow. To disregard it is not easy. Those blue eyes of your grandmother, that weak chin of your grandfather, have mental and moral counterparts in your make-up. Generations of ancestors, brooding over "Providence, Foreknowledge, Will and Fate--Fixed fate, free will, foreknowledge, absolute," may have bred a New England conscience, morbidly sensitive, to heal which some of you had rather sing the 51st Psalm than follow Christ into the slums. Shut out the yesterdays, which have lighted fools the way to dusty death, and have no concern for you personally, that is, consciously. They are there all right, working daily in us, but so are our livers and our stomachs. And the past, in its unconscious action on our lives, should bother us as little as they do. The petty annoyances, the real and fancied slights, the trivial mistakes, the disappointments, the sins, the sorrows, even the joys--bury them deep in the oblivion of each night. Ah! but it is just then that to so many of us the ghosts of the past, Night-riding Incubi Troubling the fantasy,