The Ministry of Toil. 
487 
the gods helped them. But in steam we have a greater than Her¬ 
cules, and no fairy could bring tidings with the speed and accuracy 
of electricity. If you travel nature’s way you will get many a free 
ride. Establish your work along celestial tracks and it will be ac¬ 
complished by divine magic. 
Work, to be a blessing in the fullest sense, must be good in itself, 
looking to a worthy end, something for which we are prepared, and 
then honestly done. It is not an ultimate thing; it looks to an end 
beyond itself—the improvement of human life—and can then only 
be a blessing in so far as it contributes to that end. All nefarious 
traffic and dishonorable speculation carry with them a curse, and 
cast a withering blight upon those who engage in them. 
Work good in itself becomes an evil when excessive in amount. 
It is a lamentable fact that hundreds, even in our midst, are forced 
to put forth the severest effort merely to obtain a meager material 
existence. But the overwork demanded by poverty does not equal 
that granted to ambition. The laudable desire to do well is lost in 
the ignoble one to do better than somebody else. It is not legiti- 
mate work that wears out our business men; it is friction, the wor¬ 
ry that comes from the ceaseless whirl and grind of our wild, dis¬ 
ordered life; and all because we worship money, allow it to bring 
distinction, make this artificial thing the basis of social classification, 
foolishly establishing among us an arrogant aristocracy of wealth. 
The sudden crashes that so often in our day startle the business and 
social worlds are all due to high-pressure life. We dare not run 
our engines at their greatest speed, but we venture to put to the 
fullest test these human machines, yet destruction follows no more 
surely in one case than in the other. He is the wise man who keeps 
power in reserve, and guards his strength along every avenue of 
expression. 
Much of our work is wearing and vexatious because we are not 
prepared for it. Through lack of special fitness, or oftener through 
want of patient and continuous discipline, we are deficient in the 
skill that makes labor easy and pleasant. He is not in his true 
place who, with proper exertion, finds his work too hard for him 
finds it sapping his strength and draining his vitality day by day. 
Neither is he in his true place, who with care and faithfulness, 
can not do good service in the line he has chosen. Parents should 
be warned of danger for their children when their lassons prove 
