AN IRON WILL

TRAINING THE WILL.
"The education of the will is the object of our existence," says Emerson.
Nor is this putting it too strongly, if we take into account the human will in its relations to
the divine. This accords with the saying of J. Stuart Mill, that "a character is a completely
fashioned will."
In respect to mere mundane relations, the development and discipline of one's will-power
is of supreme moment in relation to success in life. No man can ever estimate the power
of will. It is a part of the divine nature, all of a piece with the power of creation. We
speak of God's fiat "Fiat lux, Let light be." Man has his fiat. The achievements of history
have been the choices, the determinations, the creations, of the human will. It was the
will, quiet or pugnacious, gentle or grim, of men like Wilberforce and Garrison,
Goodyear and Cyrus Field, Bismarck and Grant, that made them indomitable. They
simply would do what they planned. Such men can no more be stopped than the sun can
be, or the tide. Most men fail, not through lack of education or agreeable personal
qualities, but from lack of dogged determination, from lack of dauntless will.
"It is impossible," says Sharman, "to look into the conditions under which the battle of
life is being fought, without perceiving how much really depends upon the extent to
which the will-power is cultivated, strengthened, and made operative in right directions."
Young people need to go into training for it. We live in an age of athletic meets. Those
who are determined to have athletic will-power must take for it the kind of exercise they
need.