One man says the present is everything, that eternity is nothing. The other man says eternity is everything, that the present is nothing. I believe the real truth is that both are man's chief concern, and neither view comprehends all truth. In this matter, the general rule I have so often pointed out will harmoniously apply. That rule is: Avoid extremes. Those who believe that the Now, the Present, is the all-important thing in man's life have the fashionable or favorite point of view. Man has much definite information about the present, he knows much about life. He is in the midst of life--it pulsates all around him and in him. We know positively that the law of compensation is inexorable in its demand for right and positive in its punishment of wrong. We know that on this earth kindness, love, occupation, help, truth, honor and sympathy are investments which bring happiness to-day. You get your pay instantly when you have done a helpful act, and you get your punishment instantly when you have done a hurtful act. [Sidenote: The Hereafter.] That there is a future most of us agree, because good sense and logic point to that sane and reasonable conclusion. So be it. With a belief in the future estate, it is reasonable to assume that our acts and lives in the present will have influence on our future estate. We know positively of to-day; we know the happiness we can get from good deeds done to-day. We come to this knowledge by experience. If we will have power in the future to look back on to-day's acts, well and good if to-day's acts are worth while. The other view, that Eternity is everything and the present is nothing, is the antiquated view, the narrow view--the, I might say, illiterate view. That view warps the present life; it calls for present self-chastisement, present gloom, present sorrow and present misery. It takes the tangible definite to-day, calls it nothing, and accepts the intangible unknown eternity as everything. [Sidenote: A Cheerless Philosophy.] It trades the definite for the indefinite. It calls life a bubble, a vapor, a shadow. In fact, it throws a pall over to-day's sunshine, and regards our earthly life as a sort of purgatory--a dismal unhappy punishment ante-chamber where man exists and waits, peeping out of his cell windows for a little imagined view of eternity. He waits and endures the unpleasant interval, steeled against the definite pleasures of to-day, his whole outlook colored by a fanatical and intoxicated belief in the expected happiness of the undefined future. He refuses to think of the definite life of to-day that we all know, and spoils the thought of those who do. He is a blockade to progress, a disagreeable part of life's picture. He gets no happiness in the to-day which is in his hands; he loses his opportunity to be of service here, and lives in the hope of a vague and nebulous future state which has no connection with the realities of every-day life.