Do not grizzle over chances missed in life and "might have beens" which sprinkle your past like gravestones dotting a churchyard, inscribed "sacred to the memory of cherished griefs still hugged and spasmodically wept over." Convert the mossy tombstones into wayside shrines which loving hands garland with fresh flowers, while grateful hearts fondly linger there, recalling pleasant things and sweet companionship which gladdened your pilgrim way. Do not erect mural tablets to dead ambitions in the little sanctuary of your memory; build altars there instead whereon you can offer acceptable oblations of praise for evils escaped and for the crown of loving-kindness with which the Everlasting Arms encircle you. If we only had the gift of humour on us it would make "life more amusing than we thought." Our eyes would open to a new world wherein kinder people dwell and where brighter sunshine warms the heart’s red blood and chases down the gloom we anticipate to-morrow that may never come. *III* *THE LURE OF SELF-DENIAL* Self-denial is not the highest form of virtue, nor is it a permanent condition of life for man to live in; yet it is a lure that draws men to martyrdoms as the flame collects moths to the burning. Man was not predestinated to a life of self-abnegation. Self-denial is a compromise between misery and happiness. Human nature does not thrive on compromise; it does not develop in austerities. Self-denial has its value in the scheme of moral education. Training is good for man if he does not carry it too far. You can overtrain. The scholar trains; he discreetly withdraws from gay life and inflicts on himself long hours of lonely study that he may rank in the list of University honours. The jockey trains, and punishes himself in so doing that he may ride to win. It is the same the world over: pain is joy in the making. Where self-denial is the driving power in religious life it leads, not to happiness, but to asceticism: to the lonely cell of the misanthropic monk, the pedestal of St. Simon Stylates, or the self-torture of the Indian fakir. Deluded people these, who build up life on self-denial as the pinnacle virtue to which man can soar while on earth. None of these people set self-denial in its proper place in the human economy--viz., a means to an end. It is the end-all in their vision of life, and so their life is dismal in the living and disappointing in its purpose. Self-denial is necessary and serves a healthy purpose. It is necessary to man’s spiritual welfare as medicine or the surgeon’s knife may be necessary to his physical health.