Excerpt from The Choice of a Life-Work: The Opportunities of the Ministry

What, for example, do you mean to make your supreme end and aim in your life-work, to which all other ends, within the limits of honor, are to be made to contribute? Is it' the accumulation of wealth? Then the range of choice is narrowed at once to a few especially lucrative fields of activity. Or is it power over men, so that you may make them bend to your will or execute your purposes, and perhaps reward you with position or honor? Then it is comparatively easy to say through what callings you may most readily reach your goal. Or do you incline to consult your native tastes, following along lines of least resistance to a career that shall be con genial, and possibly not too strenuous? Again the choice may seem almost to make itself. Or, finally is it your high ambition to spend your life and talents distinctly for the good of others, so that the direct result of your life-work shall be a wbrld left better than you found it, and your fellow-men hap pier? In this case also certain callings will naturally appeal to you above all others.

If I have placed last that end which seems to me to be the most worthy, it is not that I would underestimate the others. All may be not only honorably but worthily followed. While wealth is too often ignobly and sordidly pursued, it is in itself a per fectly legitimate object of human endeavor; and it may be so used as to become a means of high human service. Indeed, there has perhaps never been a time when men in command of large material re sources could employ them to better purpose than now, in_ the way of enlightened philanthropy, to the end of human betterment, nor when men were more needed to do that very thing. Nor is the ambition of being able to control the actions and destinies of men, whether through political or other organiza tions, a mean ambition, often as it is used for base and wholly selfish ends. To direct the affairs of men or of a nation is to use one of the most enviable of Opportunities for accomplishing wide good. And the world has reason enough to be grateful to those that have followed the lead of inborn tastes or genius and given their powers of fancy or of inven tion free play in the work of art or of applied science; while the opportunities of serving it in this way seem only to multiply with advancing civilization.

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