PREPARATION

Before an artist can do anything the instrument must be tuned.
One way to open a locked door is to fall at it and scratch, kick, and shove I A better way is to get the key.
In other words, pluck and force and will power are all right in their place, but they are far from being the only secret of success. They are downright silly without--preparation.
Knowing how is half the battle. Practice and study count. Skill and efficiency mean a long time getting ready. We are familiar enough with this truth in ordinary matters. We send boys to school and prentices to the shop, and would-be stenographers to night school. For we recognize that the untrained man these days has to get off the earth, there's no room for him.
But we often fail to carry this primitive common sense over into the more serious concerns. We forget that one also has to learn-how to live. One cannot go at it tooth and nail It is not to be stormed, forced, and stampeded. Jt takes science, trainin, and practice.
The learning how is hard, always; but essentia The only things one can do without practice are over-eating, over-drinking, laziness, bad temper selfishness, and general meanness, also uselessnes But the good things come hard. Take humility rarest and noblest of virtues. The only road to humility is by being humiliated, which hurts.
The only way to patience is by self-restraint under irritation. If there is nothing to gnaw an worry and heckle us, then we never learn that beautiful art of patience. The only path to belief that is, to the only kind of belief that is of any us to character, is through doubt. Faith is a
product that is ground out of the mill of dismay, confusion, despair and struggle. Intellectual assent is cheap. The confidence that is a triumph of the soul over pessimism and fatuous reasonings is worth something.
The only means toward rest 'is work. It is to tired bones the bed tastes sweet. The soul can never enjoy letting go that has never hung On Real placidity is the product of strenuosity.
So also the preparation for knowledge is love Truth is not a lump of something a man may go and pick up. Truth is not, any thing at all. It is relation, a quality, a shine, an odor. It is not perceived by the intellect; it is perceived by the heart the intellect merely criticises and classifies it.
The secret of Edison's discoveries, and of Koch's, and of Marconi1s, is love. Only love can see. It has the X-ray eye. And this is true in business, or science, or literature, or art, quite as much as in religion. Brains can amass truths and pigeonhole them and arrange them; only passion of some sort can find them out where they are hidden.
Sorrow, disappointment, heartbreak, bereavement, all such things are the anterooms of greatness. There is a state into which a man can grow where he resembles an ordinary man about as much as a fine thoroughbred horse resembles a brokendown hack horse, or as a big American beauty rose resembles a dusty weed. Nobleness of charcter, grandeur of soul, sweetness of spirit, no one can get these without being prepared.
Some of us have the ignorant notion that we could be noble if we cared to make the effort. We are like the man who, when asked if he could play the violin, said he didn't know-he'd never tried.
What a deal of getting ready to live is needed! A man never really learns how to live till he's ready to die. And if with most of us, all of us, life is a mighty getting ready, then it is a getting ready for-what?
It is this tremendous question that unlocks the door of death and gives us our surest hope of the life beyond. END.