Being taken for a man, brought him back his manhood for a moment. The visions of evil left him, and from Dickens' poem of "The Children" he repeated almost to himself these words:-- "'I know now how Jesus could liken The Kingdom of God to a child.'" The old scene came back to him. When the Master was teaching, the children crowded about him, and there were those who would send them away. But the Master said, "No, let the little children come unto me, and do not forbid them; for of such is the Kingdom of Heaven." And again he said, "The Kingdom of Heaven is within you." And again those whose services the Lord of the centuries could use, he likened to little children. And of the many ways in which this likeness can be used this is one. The child is born with brain and nervous system adequate to its many purposes in life, if it is suffered to grow naturally, to become what God meant it to be. There are not many children of sin not made so by vice, intemperance, lust, and obscenity. They are victims of their elders' folly, of our carelessness as to their environment. Half the troubles of men of our race come through self-inflicted injury to the nervous system. We are tormented by the "fool-killer." If we could revert to the child's simple purity, the free movement of its machinery of life, we should find ourselves in a new heaven on a new earth. We could understand for ourselves part of what the Master meant. We should know now how Jesus could liken the Kingdom of God to a child. All forms of subjective enjoyment, all pleasures that begin and end with self, unrelated to external things, are insane and unwholesome, destructive alike to rational enjoyment and to effectiveness in life. And this is true of spurious emotions alike, whether the pious ecstasies of a half-starved monk, the neurotic imaginings of a sentimental woman, or the riots of a debauchee. He is the wise man who for all his life can keep mind and soul and body clean. "I know of no more encouraging fact," says Thoreau, "than the ability of a man to elevate his life by conscious endeavor. It is something to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so make a few objects beautiful. It is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look. This morally we can do." If it were ever my fortune in speaking to young men to become eloquent, with the only real eloquence there is, the plain speaking of a living truth, this I would say:--