Our self respect even is largely due to the love we receive in childhood and youth. Enthusiasm springs from faith in God and in the soul, which begets in us a high and heroic belief in the divine good of life. It is thus an educational force of highest value. It calms and exalts the soul like the view of the starlit heavens and the everlasting mountains. It is, in every good and noble cause, a fountain head of endurance and perseverance. It bears us on with a sense of joy and vigor, such as is felt when, mounted on a high-mettled steed, we ride in the pleasant air of a spring morning, amid the beauties and grandeurs of nature. In the front of battle and in the presence of death it throws around the soul the light of immortal things. It gives us the plenitude of existence, the full and high enjoyment of living. On its wings the poet, the lover, the orator, the hero, and the saint are borne in rapture through worlds whose celestial glory and delightfulness cold and unmoved minds do not suspect. It is not a flame from the dry wood and withered grass, but a heat and glow from the abysmal depths of being. It makes us content to follow after truth and love in dark and narrow ways, as the miner, in central deeps where sunlight has never fallen, seeks his treasure. It keeps us fresh and young; and, like the warmer sun, reclothes the world day by day with new beauty. It teaches patience, the love of work without haste and without worry. It gives strength to hear and speak truth, and to walk in the sacred way of truth, as though we but idly strolled with pleasant friends amid fragrant flowers. It gives us deeper consciousness of our own liberty, faith in human perfectibility, which lies at the root of our noblest efforts; to which the more we yield ourselves the more we feel that we are free. It knows a thousand words of truth and might, which it whispers in gentlest tones to rightly attuned ears: Since the universe is a harmony whose diapason is God, why should thy life strike a discordant note? Yield not to discouragement; thou art alive, and God is in His world. The combat and not the victory proclaims the hero. If thy success had been greater, thou hadst been less. The noisy participants in great conflicts, of whatever kind, exercise less influence upon the outcome than choice spirits, who, turning aside from the thunder and smoke of battle, gain in lonely striving and meditation view of new truth by which the world is transformed.