High ideals, noble efforts will make seeming failures but trifles, they
need not dishearten us; they should prove sources of new strength. The
rocky way may prove safer than the slippery path of smoothness. Birds
cannot fly best with the wind but against it; ships do not progress in
calm, when the sails flap idly against the unstrained masts.
The alchemy of Nature, superior to that of the Paracelsians, constantly
transmutes the baser metals of failure into the later pure gold of
higher success, if the mind of the worker be kept true, constant and
untiring in the service, and he have that sublime courage that defies
fate to its worst while he does his best.
VI
Doing Our Best at All Times
Life is a wondrously complex problem for the individual, until, some
day, in a moment of illumination, he awakens to the great realization
that he can make it simple,--never quite simple, but always simpler.
There are a thousand mysteries of right and wrong that have baffled the
wise men of the ages. There are depths in the great fundamental
questions of the human race that no plummet of philosophy has ever
sounded. There are wild cries of honest hunger for truth that seek to
pierce the silence beyond the grave, but to them ever echo back,--only
a repetition of their unanswered cries.
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