shutting most of the infinite out that you can really embrace and keep anything. You have not yet taken to heart the great maxim of Goethe: "It is within limits that the master first shows his mastership." You are still fighting against that law of nature which fixes the pain of choice as the cost of every practical step forward.
Meanwhile you hear from men of a certain narrow intensity a disquieting summons to a self-sacrificing—life of service, a summons to precisely that form of service in which these "dreadful summoners" have themselves attained the fullest self-realization. While you are under the spell of their exhortation, the definite things at hand which you can now do well, or which you are now learning to do well, seem small and humdrum and mean. And some of you, perhaps, with a real talent for millinery or landscape gardening are considering whether you ought not to renounce these talents and go to China as medical missionaries. And some of you with a talent for chemical investigation or stockbreeding are wondering whether you ought not to renounce these talents, and, chanting the old song, "Nothing in my hands I bring," devote yourselves to spreading the gospel among
