seems to know that we have very important, imperative duties to self, as well as to our neighbor and to God. Either he was not familiar with these distinctions so common in ethics now, or he was so profoundly impressed with the danger of overdoing self-love that he did not deem it well to recognize this duty at all. But that surely is a mistake, and with some minds tends to become a very harmful one, leading straight on to fanaticism. He is never tired of insisting on the absolute necessity for the death of self, the destruction of self. But this phrase will not stand critical examination. The peril which always lurks in figures of speech, and the tendency to exaggerate which so frequently besets devotional writers of the intense mystic type, is very manifest here. Such writers put forward their extreme statements with a laudable desire to make a deep impression on the callous sensibilities of the average reader, and with the idea, perhaps, that large deduction will be made in the practical application of their precepts. But many find in this an excuse for throwing the whole subject impatiently aside. We are convinced that it is better in such things to state the exact truth with all carefulness and with as few misleading figures of speech as possible. There is certainly an ethical limit to our right of self-abnegation and self-impartation. Benevolence has its moral bounds in holiness. A man’s life finds its largest fulfillment, not in weakly assimilating itself to the wishes of those around it, but in giving forth some new and characteristic expression of the life of God. The notions, or even the needs, of one’s neighbors are not the highest standard of right living. Every man holds himself in trust for his Creator, and must do his best to manifest that Creator, not necessarily according to the conception most prevalent in his immediate circle, but according to the mandate which has been laid on him. It is this thought which gives the profoundest value to his existence and lifts him above too great dependence on popular standards. And it is this thought, properly carried out, which shows how much of unreason there is in the declaration that self must be totally forgotten, renounced, annihilated. No person is justified in doing anything of this sort. Self-preservation and self-protection, self-respect and self-esteem, self-defense and self-development are manifest duties. It may readily be granted that they are not in any great danger of neglect from the ordinary or average individual. But the extraordinary individual, if wrongly instructed, filled with a zeal not according to knowledge, keenly conscientious, morbidly scrupulous, keyed up to an unnatural pitch and straining after an impossible ideal, may do himself much harm and go far astray. To overdo is often as bad as to underdo, and causes undoing.