The gospel of work is a true gospel, though not the only one, or the highest, and has been preached in our day by great teachers. Listen, for instance, to the ring of it in the rugged and incisive words of one of our strongest poets: “That low man seeks a little thing to do, Sees it and does it. This high man, with a great thing to pursue, Dies ere he knows it. That low man goes on adding one to one, His hundreds soon hit. This high man aiming at a million, Misses a unit.” This sounds like a deliberate attack on the idealist, a direct preference of low to high aims and standards, of the seen to the unseen. It is in reality only a wholesome warning against aiming at any ideal by wrong methods, though the use of the words “low” and “high” is no doubt likely to mislead. The true idealist has no quarrel with the lesson of these lines; indeed, he would be glad to see them written on one of the door-posts of every great school, if only they were ballasted on the other by George Herbert’s quaint and deeper wisdom: “Pitch thy behavior low, thy projects high, So shalt thou humble and magnanimous be. Sink not in spirit: who aimeth at the sky Shoots higher much than he that means a tree.” Both sayings are true, and worth carrying in your minds as part of their permanent furniture, and you will find that they will live there very peaceably side by side. LXVII. The consciousness of the darkness in one and around one brings the longing for light. And then the light dawns; through mist and fog, perhaps, but enough to pick one’s way by. LXVIII. It is a strange, blind sort of world we are in, with lots of blind alleys, down which we go blundering in the fog after some seedy gaslight, which we take for the sun till we run against the wall at the end, and find out that the light is a gaslight, and that there’s no thoroughfare. But for all that, one does get on. You get to know the sun’s light better and better, and to keep out of the blind alleys; and I am surer and surer every day that there’s always sunlight enough for every honest fellow, and a good sound road under his feet, if he will only step out on it. LXIX. We all have to learn, in one way or another, that neither men nor boys get _second_ chances in this world. We all get _new_ chances till the end of our lives, but not second chances in the same set of circumstances; and the great difference between one person and another is, how he takes hold of and uses his first chance, and how he takes his fall if it is scored against him. LXX.