are to exist throughout eternity, the world processes must continue or be replaced with other processes, in complexity probably far beyond human ken.

Life is like the game of chess and the business of our will is to play the game in the right way and in accordance with the rules, using the pieces, many or few, with which the board is originally set; discerning the quality, value and possible moves of each piece, King, Queen, Knight, Bishop, Rook and Pawns, and using them according to their nature in order that the greatest results may be achieved. The great creative power of all life may have given us many pieces, or few; we may have valuable pieces or almost all pawns; probably none of us is furnished with the complete sixteen pieces, but our duty is to make the most of what we have and play the game. When our initial equipment is so variable, we surely cannot be judged in life by our relative and apparent failure or success. "Life is not the holding of a good hand but the playing of a poor hand well." Whether we win or lose by worldly standards, what does it matter, provided we have played the game every minute to win and made the most of our hereditary endowment? It is our play that tells and not the score that we happen to make. Victory is with the man who fights best and not necessarily with him who happens to win the world's laurel wreath; no one is the worse for being beaten if his faith remains firm and his courage undaunted. "To set the cause above renown,

To love the game beyond the prize."

The successful man is he who expresses himself, and all his innate powers and possibilities, most

fully and completely to the world. Fate may seem to clear the board and stun the player, but if the game is played fairly, earnestly and enthusiastically, our souls are developed. Our three score years and ten are but as a flash in the sky compared with the eternity of Cosmic Effort and the progress of the spirit of man.

"Suppose," said Huxley, "it were perfectly certain that the life and fortune of every one of us would, one day or other, depend upon his winning or losing a game of chess. Don't you think that we should all consider it to be a primary duty to learn at least the names and the moves of the pieces? Do you not think that we should look with disapprobation, amounting to scorn, upon the one who allowed himself to grow up without knowing a Pawn from a Knight? Yet it is a very plain and elementary truth that the life, the fortune and the happiness of every one of us, and more or less of those who are connected with us, do depend upon our knowing something of the rules of a game infinitely more difficult and complicated than chess. It is a game which has been played for untold ages, every man and woman of us being one of the two players in a game of his or her own. The chess board is the world, the pieces are the phenomena of the Universe, the rules of the game are what we call the laws of nature. The player on the other side is hidden from us. We know that His play is always fair, just and patient. But we also know, to our cost, that He never overlooks a mistake or makes the smallest allowance for ignorance. To the man who plays well, the highest stakes are paid, with that

sort of overflowing generosity which, with the strong, shows delight in strength. And the one who plays ill is checkmated-without haste, but without

Are we playing the game of life or is it playing us? If a man's mind continually wanders to the reward of the game, and if he works merely for money here and a heaven beyond, then life is playing him, but if he works for love and the joy of doing, he plays the game well. Playing the game for its own sake that is happiness. All other rewards are but pleasant by-products. Emerson said, "The reward of a thing well done, is to have done it." A man who dodges work and not only neglects but declines to see opportunities, who functions with his spinal cord instead of his brain, is a Pawn upon the board in the great game of life. Such a man does no more than he has to and never all that he can; he, therefore, automatically functions and blindly participates in the nothingness of a sterile occupation. He voluntarily brands himself as a Pawn, the world takes him at his own valuation, and a Pawn he remains until he is swept as a failure into oblivion.

Life can be likened to any game that requires skill and encounters resistance. James Tyson, the Australian Bushman Millionaire, when asked about his remarkable career and accumulation of wealth, said that his life had been a game with the great desert for his adversary. "I have been fighting the desert all my life and I have won. Water has been put where there was no water, beef where there was no beef, fences where there were no fences, and

roads where there were no roads. Nothing can undo what has been done and millions of people will be happier for it after I am long dead and forgotten.

Epictetus said that if a man enters into the game of life, he should train for the resistance which will be inevitably experienced in the encounter and be prepared for all events and set-backs. If a man does not bear adversity and opposition philosophically, he is "like an athlete who, after receiving a blow, should quit the combat cold, exhibiting cowardice," instead of redoubling his efforts to retrieve his position and again become aggressive. What he should say upon such an occasion is, "It was for this I exercised; it was for this that I trained myself." And in regard to the life of a reasoning being, an individual, a philosopher, he likened it to participation in the Olympic Games, saying, "Consider what precedes and what follows. You must conform to rules, submit to a diet, refrain from enervating luxuries, exercise your body, whether you choose it or not, at a stated hour, in heat or cold-in a word, you must give yourself up to your trainer as to a physician. Then in the combat you may be thrown into a ditch, dislocate your arm, turn your ankle, swallow an abundance of dust, and, after all, lose the victory. Do you think that you can act as you do and be a philosopher; that you can eat and drink intemperately, be angry, be discontented, as you now are? You must watch, you must labor, you must get the better of certain appetites-you must part with much if you have a mind to purchase serenity, freedom and tranquillity."

Life is a game with oneself, with one's fellows, and with the world. It is a game of individuals and a game between teams, all in harmony with Cosmic Purpose and nature's plan to stimulate achievement. In contests between individuals, it is a test of mental forces-not one quality or inherent faculty, but the many. A golfer goes over the course in 90, and strives to do it in 88, then in 86; he works to improve himself with his own record of achievement as the set goal. In a match at golf, or tennis singles, the object is to do better than your adversary. In football, or baseball, we fight for the team, every man doing his utmost, but self is subordinated for the good of the side on which one plays. Each type of game has its counterpart in life, and every man with red blood in his veins has the desire to succeed, to excel, to win. Confucius covered the prime thought of a desire for superiority, and particularly the praiseworthy and easily realizable desire to improve oneself, when he said, "The central idea is that every normal human being cherishes the aspiration to become a superior man-superior to his fellows, if possible, but surely superior to his own past and present self."

If Confucius had lived in this century he would have had to admit that normal beings are a woefully small part of mankind, for in these days the average man is ambitious for power and wealth, but not necessarily for inner and true superiority; he cares little for growth, improvement or achievement unless it increases his salary check, gives him more time to waste and an opportunity to acquire and worship more artificialities and those externals to