[Helen Heffernan, as quoted in California Schools, Sacramento, California]

James Truslow Adams speaks of our present dilemma as "a crisis in character." The democratic ideal of justice can be attained only through the building of character, which establishes in each individual concepts of honesty, love, and respect for truth; which develops in each individual a sense of personal responsibility and respect for law; and which establishes in the entire social group the concept of special privilege for none.

[From the Canadian Statesman, Bowmanville, Ontario, Canada]

Asked once for his definition of a great life, a famous Frenchman said, "It is a thought in youth carried out in ripened years."

Here is a fine definition of the successful life, in significant contrast to the planless effort which reckons only from day to day and wage to wage. It means that in youth one has begun to build; there is a blueprint on the workshop table, and possibly a few bricks in the foundation. Only by this . . . does true success come about.

There are lives which are a succession of first laps, a regular turning over of new leaves; there are individuals who perpetually remain "promising"; others whose careers soar with the brilliant blaze of a rocket, only to end in the same inglorious fizzle. None of these lives are distinguished by continuity. . . .

There is rarely accomplishment without the continuous work of lifetime. We look, perhaps, at the other fellow's occupation as more attractive and less exacting than our own. But we must remember that all good work demands interest backed by trained ability. That man we envy may have submitted for years to the prolonged tests of apprenticeship . . . to appreciate the value of continuity.

If we look to the notable lives of our generation, we will find running through the majority of them this golden thread of continuity. The great musician, whose mastery we admire on the concert platform, has refined his talent through exhusting hours of practice. The great teacher or the great artist often works through years of misunderstanding, neglect, and often ridicule, yet wins through by virtue of the continuity of his purpose. The successful man, whatever his field, must work harder than others. He must be more courageous than others. He must persevere more than others. And so he achieves continuity—"the thought in youth carried out in ripened years." It is the one unbeatable quality.

[From the Evening News, Manchester, Lancashire, England]

What is true of examination education, the power to learn facts, is even more true of deeper education, the education of character. For it is now proved that, marvelously as the child mind retains long passages of strange tongues, . . . moods and attitudes of mind sink into it far more deeply, with far more significant results.

It has now been noted that among such tribes as do not practice war, such as some of the Eskimos, the children squabble with each other hardly at all. It seems that a great deal of the quarrelsomeness of children is not an instinct to fight. The child's quarrelsomeness is largely due to the quarrels he has seen and heard when he seemed far too infantile to take anything in.

Though, then, these discoveries of how easily, immediately, and decisively education begins, give us a new power, like all power it is double-edged. We see that education is a far vaster responsibility than we thought. In fact, it is not a choice between education or no education, but between a good one or an evil.

Educate we do, whether we know it or not, and if we ourselves are in our nature and behavior still largely barbarians, however much we speak of culture, our children will become what we are and not what we tell them to be.

What the outcome of this revolutionary knowledge will be no one can say. We could act on it, but shall we? Will it not cost us too much to behave so that our children will be influenced only by our highest capacity? What is clear is that no state which is really informed with contemporary knowledge would permit any of its children from the moment of birth to be exposed to any conduct except that of the kindest and wisest.

[Rev. Raymond C. Knox, as quoted in the New York Times, New York]

Because men generally are confused and uncertain, they are widely seeking for a reasonable, positive faith. For we live in a time when the whole structure of our material civilization has broken down. Everyone is thus compelled to realize his need of inner spiritual resources; how much faith and determination and purpose he has to enable him to live and not surrender in despair.

We are confronted with vast material problems: how all men shall have food and shelter and work and a reasonable security. These are not material problems only. They demand for solution, with knowledge of facts and laws, a true spiritual vision of the aim which shall direct our efforts, and also adequate spiritual power to achieve that aim.

The highest thing in religion, in all life, is to know the love of God in our hearts and to respond to it intelligently and devotedly. This is no vague feeling, merely an exalted emotion. The one evidence upon which Christ [Jesus] insisted as showing that we truly know the love of God is in the way we regard and treat our fellow men.

[Editorial in the Vancouver Daily Province, British Columbia, Canada]

The confidence of the young is easily won; birds, animals, and children are prepared to meet the world in friendliness, and not until they are hurt, or their parents warn them, do they fear the strange thing or the strange creature. We start with confidence but when our trust is broken, repairs are not readily made. Fear increases rapidly; faith is slow in recovery.

Peace is the outcome of confidence, not of conferences and agreements. There is no confidence while nation races against nation to pile up more and more efficient munitions, and having piled them up, as ships and shells, planes and poisons, to sit fearsome and afraid that they may have to use them. . . . On reflection, therefore, it seems, as the sages have said, that confidence is not in things, in weapons or defenses, but in the hearts of the people. Modern wars gain nothing, because there is nothing to gain but things, and they are all broken in the fighting. Even vaults full of gold do not make trust and faith between men—or prevent poverty in the nation holding it. It is the confidence of the farmer that keeps the world fed, putting in seed for grain and fruit. If he feared the soil and demanded guarantees of the weather all would be hungry.

"In quietness and in confidence shall be your strength," not in armaments and treaties. We trade the world over, we invest the world over. The farmer and the trader both work in confidence—faith in the buyer and seller, be he Chinese or Peruvian. The basis of this trade confidence is right dealing—business righteousness. The basis of spiritual confidence is right thinking, mental righteousness. All men can prove of God is His righteousness, that His followers deal righteously, or they are false to Him; and this is the faith that is saving and keeping the world today.

[Dr. Wayland Hoyt, in the Christian World Pulpit, London, England]

If young people only knew the value of their youth! A half hour each day steadily given to the vanquishing of some real books in history, science, literature, is three hours a week, is more than twelve hours a month, is more than six solid days of twenty-four hours each a year. What cannot the busiest man accomplish by such seizure of the fragments of his time? Oh, if the young people only knew the culture possible for them by such simple means! And forevermore it is the man who knows who gets to be the man who does, and to whom the chance for doing comes. Merely frittering newspaper and novel reading—a youthhood devoted only to that, how pitiably sad! No ship drifts into harbor. No young person drifts into an achieving manhood or womanhood.

[Editorial in the Deseret News, Salt Lake City, Utah]

The condition of the mind and the spirit must be taken into account if we are to understand the difficulty of seeing things as they really are. ... We see through a spiritual atmosphere. Love sees one thing; hate sees another. Prejudice, envy, jealousy, hope, fear—all these different feelings create an atmosphere. They transform the world as we look at it. It is easy for people to see things that do not exist. We remember the dispute between Brutus and Cassius. Brutus had been pointing out the faults of Cæsar, and Cassius replies, "A friendly eye could never see such faults;" and Brutus responds, "A flatterer would not, though they do appear as huge as high Olympus." ...

We ought, then, to train ourselves to see things as they really are, and we must make ourselves capable of seeing by personal development and growth. There are thousands of business men who are so absorbed in the daily grind of business that they have ceased to be able to see the sweetest, finest, best, and noblest things in human life. There are men who cannot see love and pity, tenderness and forgiveness. There are men who cannot see the meaning and power and beauty of the religious life. There are men who cannot see the beauty in the faces of wife and children. We need have infinite pity for those who cannot see, because they lose so much of life's joys and delights.

The difference between the pessimist and the optimist is almost entirely a difference in the ability to see, to see things as they really are; to see that there is a hand at the helm of the world, guiding it always toward the brighter and the better way.

We need to be true, to be honest, to be just, to be courageous, to be helpful; we need to live in a real world, not in a false world of fancies; we need to help on the growth of things toward a better future.

[Archdeacon of Rochester, as quoted in the Bromley and Kentish Times, London, England]

It is for us to see to it that all good work is God's work. The work of a road-sweeper can be God's work if it be done in the right spirit. It is not what we do half so much as how we do it!