Unless you have applied your intellect to successfully solving some problem for those who, denied your blessings, are ignorant and superstitious, your knowledge is valueless and will be buried with you. You may be a toiler, but unless you have tugged away and lifted, with all your might, at the world’s burdens, your strength will go with you to the grave. If your investment of the æsthetic does not make the world more beautiful, it is valueless. Are you successful in business? Is that all that can be said? You may be worth many millions of dollars, but if your gold has never gleamed in true philanthropy it will crumble into dust with your body. You may be good, but unless your goodness expresses itself in sacrificial service, it is worthless. That which is enduring demands, not the investment of talents alone, but the investment of the whole life. To give your talents indifferently marks you, not as an investor, but as a spender, and anyone can spend money, especially inherited money. To make an investment demands a whole life centered upon one holy and noble purpose, for which one spares neither toil nor sacrifice, energy nor time, until the united efforts become permanent in the world and forever identify your name with that noble purpose. To invest wisely is to endow one’s name until it stands out the rich embodiment of some worthy purpose, as the name “Dante” stands for poetry, the name “Abraham Lincoln” stands for the emancipation of the slaves, the name “Garibaldi” stands for liberty, the names of Peabody and Shaftesbury stand for benevolence, and the names of Wesley and Moody stand for the redemption of a world. XXIII THOUGHT PLANTING There is nothing more common, and seemingly insignificant, than the planting of a garden. There are the simple upturning of the sod, the mellowing of the soil, and the burial of a hard-shelled seed. Let a chemist analyze the soil, and a scientist examine the seed, and they will be unable to find anything signifying relationship between the two. There is nothing, so far as the human eye can see, to suggest that the combination of seed and soil would be other than the combination of stone and stubble. But when once planted all the universe knows about the little brown seed. The earth and the seed were made for each other, and no sooner do they come in proper contact than the whole universe is set in motion about and for the development of that buried germ. There is not a cloud floating afar nor a star gleaming mildly in the distant blue that does not exist for that tiny seed until, through the ministration of sunbeam and moonlight, shower and baptismal dew, the seed arises, clothed in the glory of a resurrection, to lift itself in right royal grandeur above the clod.