One must, therefore, promptly and unhesitatingly determine to surrender the desire for wealth, honor, and luxury, and to take in their place other possessions. Without this determination, there can be no religious or philosophical basis of spiritual education. What seems to be spiritual development ends in unreality, vacillation, at last hypocrisy. It must be confessed that even the best of men are, as a rule, but half-hearted in making this fundamental resolution. They give up under compulsion one or another fragment of their desires. Few are sagacious enough to foresee the choice which sooner or later must be made, and free themselves while they are still young from their prolonged perplexity by one quick and sublime decision. A further obstacle to any worthy life is the desire for praise, or for pleasure. The man who is dominated by either of these motives is simply a slave of the opinions or tastes of others. Both of these desires must be, without compromise, expelled, and sympathy, which one has always at his command, must take their place. For, if the lower desires have been cast out and no higher impulses enter, then we have simply an unendurable emptiness in life. “When the unclean spirit,” says the Gospel, “is gone out of a man, he walketh through dry places, seeking rest, and findeth none.... Then goeth he, and taketh with himself seven other spirits more wicked than himself, and they enter in and dwell there: and the last state of that man is worse than the first.” Thus, at any cost, and even for the sake of one’s own soul, one must make it his habit to cultivate love for others, not first of all inquiring whether they deserve that love or not--a question which is often too hard to answer. For without love life is without joy, especially when one has outgrown his youth. Lacking love, we sink into indifference, and indifference passes easily into aversion, and one’s aversions so poison life that life is no better than death. Further, our dislikes must be directed, not against people, but against things. Good and evil are too much mingled in persons to be justly distinguished, and each unjust judgment reacts upon those who have permitted themselves to be unjust and embitters their lives. Therefore, permit neither your philosophy nor your experience to crowd out of your life the power to love. Dismiss the preliminary question of another’s right to be loved. Love is the only way of keeping one’s inner life in peace, and of maintaining an interest in people and in things. Without it, both people and things become by degrees an annoyance and affront. Thus love is, at the same time, the highest worldly wisdom. One who loves is always, though unconsciously, wiser than one who does not. If you incline to say with the poet: “_This is my creed and this will ever be, To love and hate as others may treat me!_”