To be sure--and this also must be said--these things are hard so long as the youthful man is in the full tide of his physical and mental unfolding. Such young people as have already attained to these things very early in life usually do not live very long. It appears that man, like the animal, and like the plant before it bears fruit, needs a time of self-seeking activity, in order first to obtain a sufficient growth and strength as a natural creature. In the case of man, however, there surely and naturally comes a moment when an exclusive or preëminent occupation about one’s own self becomes unnatural, and in every larger nature--and, it may perhaps be said, in every existence at all worthy of men--there comes the impulse to free oneself from oneself and to live for an idea. This is the most decisive moment of existence. It is, with some men, comparable to a sudden, violent death, and a new birth to another life. With others, it is more like the gradual and quiet sinking of the former things into slumber, and the awakening and slow fashioning of a new nature. But if this change has once taken place, in one way or the other, then all the real questions of human existence appear in another light, clear and solved. But if this change does not take place in a man who is not wholly animal in his nature, then there always stays with him a never-quieted thirst for such a change; and likewise a feeling of guilt, which clearly says to him that he could and should have become something better, a voice within him he can not drown, however great his seeming success. IV With this we have also solved the last question you will put: “What shall we get out of it? What real gain has a man from true culture?” To this is to be answered that every great inward advancement a man makes rests first upon a faith. He must forsake something he knows, and seek something toward which only a presentiment is leading him, something he can not understand yet fully, because the capacity is for the present lacking. But if he possesses the courage to will it, he attains it; and of those who have attained this goal, not one has yet found the cost too high, or the toil too hard. The reward of virtue in this world is just this, that virtue _is_, and that it can be overcome by no power of the world, but itself is the only real power and force that will completely fill life full and satisfy. Tennyson has expressed this very beautifully in his poem “Wages”: “_Glory of warrior, glory of orator, glory of song, Paid with a voice flying by to be lost on an endless sea-- Glory of Virtue, to fight, to struggle, to right the wrong-- Nay, but she aim’d not at glory, no lover of glory she: Give her the glory of going on, and still to be._