The first step in this way of life is taken when one becomes discontented with life as it is and longs for something better. One’s reason seeks an outlet from the labyrinth of the world and at last from sheer weariness resolves, at any cost, to forsake the world’s ways and to seek peace. When one has come to this resolution, then he is on the way to salvation, and experiences that inner happiness which one gains who has found at last the way he ought to go. And, indeed, this man is essentially saved; for he is now open to the unhindered influences of new spiritual forces, against which in his early life his will had set itself. Yet, as a matter of fact, he is only ready for his second step. It is the long conflict for supremacy between what the Apostle calls “the old and the new man.” Both of them are in him still and his problem is to realize the “new man” and bring it to fulness of life. Many people who are striving for the better life come to this second step and stay there all their days; and this is the reason why so many lives which are rightly directed still give the impression of imperfection, and why they do not seem to contribute much--though often more than we think--to the ennobling of human relationships. There remains the third step of spiritual growth, which, once fairly taken, leads to the complete interpretation of life. It is the stage of practical activity, the participating in the creation of a spiritual kingdom. Sometimes it has been likened to the taking part in a great work of architecture, sometimes to the enlistment in an active war. Nothing less than this life of unselfish service can bring to the individual true content. So long as one lives for himself and is considering, even in the highest and noblest way, his own self-culture, there lingers in him some taint of his original selfishness, or, at best, he but half sees his way. As Goethe has expressed it: “While one strives, he errs.” This self-directed effort must, at last, cease. Nothing is more untrue, nothing is more fundamentally disheartening, than the maxim of Lessing which so many have admired, according to which endless effort after truth is to be preferred to the possession of the truth. One might as well say that endless thirst, or endless cold, was more acceptable than the finding of a refreshing fountain or the warmth of the quickening sun.