A Fleece of Gold | Page 7

at the expense of breadth, richness, and beauty, appear as

mad as the Crusades, and perhaps of a lower type of madness? Could
anything be more indicative of a slight but general insanity than the
aspect of the crowd on the streets of Chicago?" Why is it that the
poems that have lived for centuries, and the masterpieces of the world's
great painters and sculptors are not being equaled in the dawn of the
twentieth century? The answer lies in the widespread devotion to
realism instead of idealism. The immortals have joined the mortals in
search for the Fleece of Gold. And Wordsworth's oft-quoted lines were
never more applicable to us than now:
The world is too much with us; late and soon, Getting and spending we
lay waste our powers.
All the capital in the universe does not stand for success unless there is
set over against it the wealth of soul which Marcus Aurelius, that great
apostle of plain living and high thinking, ever set forth as an antidote to
the treadmill grind of commercial life. Shakespeare struck the keynote
of this lofty conception of life, and pronounced a never-dying eulogy
upon the supreme dignity of character when he said:
"Who steals my purse steals trash; ... But he that filches from me my
good name Robs me of that which not enriches him, And makes me
poor indeed."
Wealth of soul is incomparably better than all that can be obtained from
pomp and luxury. Charlemagne is said to have worn in his crown a nail
taken from the cross on which the Savior was crucified. He wore it
among the jewels of his diadem as a reminder that there existed a
tenderer relation in life than kingdoms and material splendor. Thus in
the crown of our success, if we would make it truly great, we must
place the sublimer elements of our being. As the ivy softens the
roughness of the mountain side and the unsightly ruin, so will the
aesthetic mellow and subdue the intense commercialism with which we
are surrounded. Without this quality our success becomes like the
fabled apples on the brink of the Dead Sea--fair without, but ashes
within.
If the avenue to success lay in one direction only--that of accumulating
a fortune, little incentive would be felt by those in the lower walks of
life. Moreover, if it were possible for all men to become millionaires,
the very organization of human society would become disrupted; for
who then would till the soil, run the factories, clean the streets? Nature

has been wise in the distribution of her talents. Anticipating the havoc
of endowing all mankind with equal powers, she established a wide
diversity in the range of human ability. To one she has given the gift of
sagacity to achieve success in the world of trade; to another mechanical
skill to create the ideals of inventive genius into reality; to another the
highly artistic sense, and withholding these higher attributes from still
others, she has chosen to endow them with a wealth of muscular force
that the physical requirements of organized human effort might be
made effective. So that any way we choose to look at this question we
must concede that temporal wealth does not constitute the broadest idea
of success, nor is capable in itself of producing it.
Even failure may be an element of a glorious success. The volcano that
pours its vengeance upon the fair plantation below, leaving wreck and
ruin in its path, bestows a wealth of sulphur which plays an important
part in the world of commerce. The same frost that kills the harvest of a
season also destroys the locust, preserving the harvests of a century.
The death of the cocoon is the production of the silk, and the failure of
the caterpillar the birth of the butterfly. If the boy Newton had not
failed utterly on the farm, he would never have been started in college
to become the mighty man of science. The fall of Rome meant the rise
of the German Empire. "All men," says Frederick Arnold, "need
through errors attain to truth, through struggles to victory, through
regrets to that sorrow which is a very source of life. Men must rise in
an ever-ascending scale, like the ladder of St. Augustine, by which men,
through stepping-stones of their dead selves rise to higher things; or
those steps of Alciphron, which crumbled away into nothingness as fast
as each foot-fall left them." Thus our very failures we may overrule and
convert into stepping-stones to success. Lifted to a loftier sphere, to a
nobler experience, we are apt to receive greater benefit than though we
escaped disappointment and rejoiced in easy fruition.
Success does not consist in not encountering difficulties, but in
overcoming them. If