But
in this be not deceived. No young man worthy of anything else ever
sold himself to the Devil. These are dummy sales. The Devil puts his
own up at auction in hope of catching others. If you fall into his
hands, you had not far to fall. You were already ripe for his clutches.
When a man steps forth from the college, he is tested once for all. It
takes but a year or two to prove his mettle. In the college high
ideals prevail, and the intellectual life is taken as a matter of
course. In the world outside it appears otherwise, though the
conditions of success are in fact just the same. It is not true,
though it seems so, that the common life is a game of "grasping and
griping, with a whine for mercy at the end of it." It is your own
fault if you find it so. It is not true that the whole of man is
occupied, with the effort "to live just asking but to live, to live
just begging but to be." The world of thought and the world of action
are one in nature. In both truth and love are strength, and folly and
selfishness are weakness. There is no confusion of right and wrong in
the mind of the Fates. It is only in our poor bewildered slave
intellects that evil passes for power.
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