Practice Secures Perfection.

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REV. GEORGE R. HEWITT, B.D.

T is a truism that forms the title of this chapter, but it is none the less important on that account. There is only

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one way to learn how to do a thing, and that is by doing it. No art, no pursuit requiring skill, is mastered at once. must be wrestled with long and patiently before it gives up its secret.

A man can learn how to saw wood in about fifteen minutes, and can then earn a dollar a day at that business the rest of his life. It is a useful occupation, but demands neither skill nor long training for its successful prosecution. Muscle with a moderate degree of intelligence is all that is necessary.

It is very different with pursuits demanding dexterity, skill, and brains. Years are required to gain the mastery over them. "How long did it take you to prepare that sermon?" asked some one of Dr. Lyman Beecher. "Forty years," was his prompt reply. Giardini, when asked how long it would take to learn the violin, replied, "Twelve hours a day for twenty years.' It would be very pleasant if we could learn to play the violin or piano by inspiration. But the great musicians did not learn in that way. Incessant practice was the price they paid for their proficiency. Not by sudden inspiration but by painstaking cultivation are dexterity, mastership, and facile power of any kind acquired. Nothing is done easily, not even walking or talking, that was not done with difficulty at first. Practice in any line of action brings to our aid the law of habit, a law which reigns in the muscular and mental no less than in the moral realms of action.

Do anything a sufficient number of times, and you acquire facility in doing it. Every action tends to repeat itself; repeated action begets habit, and habit is second nature. All the powers and possibilities within us lie subject to this law of habit. Practice puts the law in operation, evokes latent possibilities, and calls into action powers which would otherwise have lain ingloriously dormant.

A child has all the organs of speech that the consummate orator has, but he has not acquired the power of using them. That power was gained by practice. Gladstone was once a prattling, stammering boy, but by practice his vocal organs became flexible, and adapted to all the intricacies of expression, until at length listening assemblies sat charmed by the music of his resounding periods.

Listen to a great pianist like Paderewski, whose touch is marvelous, whose fingers glide over the keys as if instinct with life, and it seems as though it must always have been easy for him to play; but on inquiry you learn that it was by practice, incessant and severe, from early years to manhood, that he acquired that exquisite skill.

"Those who are resolved to excel," said Sir Joshua Reynolds, "must go to their work willing or unwilling, morning, noon, and night; they will find it no play, but very hard labor." Some one has said that no great work is ever done in a hurry. With equal truth it may be said that the power to produce a great work is never acquired in a hurry. No one ever wrote an immortal poem, painted a great picture, or delivered a famous oration without serving his apprenticeship, and doing what we may call the drudgery of his art. It may have been in secret that the drudgery was done, but done it had to be. Vasari relates in his "Lives of the Painters," that Giotto could with his hand draw a perfect circle, but he does not tell us how many imperfect ones he drew before he made a perfect one. Even Titian and Raphael had to begin by drawing straight lines; Beethoven and Mozart by picking out the notes one by one; and Shakespeare himself had to learn the alphabet before he wrote

Hamlet and King Lear. Little by little these things are learned. "There is no such thing," said Daniel Webster, "as extemporaneous acquisition." Perfection is not gained, any more than heaven, "at a single bound.” "We build the ladder by which we rise."

Charles J. Fox was a gifted man, but his gifts had to be gradually developed by practice. He made it a point to speak in Parliament every night for his own improvement. Henry Clay's advice to young lawyers was not to let a day pass without exercising their powers. His own early practice of the art of speaking is well known. At the age of twenty-seven he began and for years he continued the practice of daily reading and speaking upon the contents of some historical or scientific book. These offhand efforts, he says, were sometimes made in a cornfield, and not unfrequently in a barn with only horses and oxen for his auditors. Not sudden inspiration or illumination while speaking, but careful cultivation, he gives as the secret of his oratorical power.

Be not discouraged if progress seems slow. Time and toil will work wonders. Practice is the prelude to the song of victory. Do your best every time. Remember Beethoven's maxim, "The barriers are not erected which say to aspiring talents and industry, thus far and no farther.""

Learning is Not Wisdom.

MERRILL EDWARDS GATES, LL.D., President Amherst College, Mass.

"To what purpose should our thought be directed to various kinds of knowledge, unless room be afforded for putting it into practice, so that public advantage may be the result!" -SIR PHILIP SIDNEY.

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N certain moods you may spend an hour in turning over the leaves of a dictionary when you are not "using" it. But you will hardly call a dictionary interesting reading! Why? Not because there is too much learning in it, but because the knowledge contained in it is not alive. There is no such orderly arrangement of facts, no such systematic unfolding of principles, as marks the scientific treatise. It lacks the interest that attaches to the progress of events in a history, to the growth of character, the unfolding of plot in the novel. The dictionary is a mass of knowledge, valuable for reference; but it presupposes a man with intelligence, purpose, and will, to use this knowledge.

For the successful conduct of life, mere learning is not enough. We do not undervalue learning. All knowledge has a certain value. Probably the danger that least of all threatens your life is the danger of knowing too much! But it is possible to be very learned, and yet to be singularly destitute of the ability to make learning of any use, to one's self, to one's friends, or to the world at large. Learning is not wisdom. In order that learning may be intelligently acquired, even, there must be a wise appreciation of the ends for which it is to be attained, of the relations which the knowledge you are acquiring bears to other departments of knowledge, to the conduct of your own life, to the thought and the life of your fellow men. It is not merely a question of what

you know. To what purpose do you know it? How much do you see in it? To what use will you put it, for others or for yourself?

The knowledge that comes of itself through the mere experience of living is not enough to make one wise. How many men and women you know who have been beaten upon by all the stormy experience of fifty years, and sung to by all the beauty and joy of life for fifty years, who still seem none the wiser for it. One does not grow wiser by mere passive existence. If experience is to be of value, it must be reflected upon, it must be reacted upon, by the self within. You must learn your own lessons from experience, with conscious effort, and with the determination to learn them and to use them, or you will never be wise, even in the lowest sense of the term.

Nor is the knowledge that is strenuously worked for, that is won by severest effort, in itself enough to make one wise. It is not always true that "knowledge is power." Sometimes acquired knowledge is only the cause and the evidence of exhausted and wasted energy. Learning that is consciously labored for, as well as the knowledge that comes from experience of life, if it is to contribute to true wisdom, must be seen and used in the light of a higher vision. Knowledge must be directed to the attainment of ends higher than mere acquisition, whether of learning, or money, or fame and selfish power.

The knowledge which you have worked severely to acquire, furnishes a presumption that in thus working you have acquired power of will and the habit of the intelligent application of all your powers to the task that immediately confronts you. To this extent, the possession of knowledge creates a presumption in favor of your possessing wisdom. But it does not prove that you are wise.

Do you recall some of the elementary definitions of the science of mechanics? "Work is the production of motion against resistance." "Energy is the power a body has of doing work." "Potential energy is the power to do work which belongs to a body by virtue of its position," as, e. g., to the tightly coiled