The Majesty of Calmness | Page 9

gospel in China. The hour came when he
was ready to start out with noble enthusiasm for his chosen work, to
consecrate himself and his life to his unselfish ambition. Then word
came from China that the "opium war" would make it folly to attempt
to enter the country. Disappointment and failure did not long daunt him;
he offered himself as missionary to Africa,--and he was accepted. His
glorious failure to reach China opened a whole continent to light and
truth. His study proved an ideal preparation for his labors as physician,
explorer, teacher and evangel in the wilds of Africa.
Business reverses and the failure of his partner threw upon the broad
shoulders and the still broader honor and honesty of Sir Walter Scott a
burden of responsibility that forced him to write. The failure spurred
him to almost super-human effort. The masterpieces of Scotch historic
fiction that have thrilled, entertained and uplifted millions of his
fellow-men are a glorious monument on the field of a seeming failure.
When Millet, the painter of the "Angelus" worked on his almost divine
canvas, in which the very air seems pulsing with the regenerating
essence of spiritual reverence, he was painting against time, he was
antidoting sorrow, he was racing against death. His brush strokes, put
on in the early morning hours before going to his menial duties as a
railway porter, in the dusk like that perpetuated on his canvas,--meant
strength, food and medicine for the dying wife he adored. The art
failure that cast him into the depths of poverty unified with marvellous
intensity all the finer elements of his nature. This rare spiritual unity,
this purging of all the dross of triviality as he passed through the
furnace of poverty, trial, and sorrow gave eloquence to his brush and

enabled him to paint as never before,--as no prosperity would have
made possible.
Failure is often the turning-point, the pivot of circumstance that swings
us to higher levels. It may not be financial success, it may not be fame;
it may be new draughts of spiritual, moral or mental inspiration that
will change us for all the later years of our life. Life is not really what
comes to us, but what we get from it.
Whether man has had wealth or poverty, failure or success, counts for
little when it is past. There is but one question for him to answer, to
face boldly and honestly as an individual alone with his conscience and
his destiny:
"How will I let that poverty or wealth affect me? If that trial or
deprivation has left me better, truer, nobler, then,--poverty has been
riches, failure has been a success. If wealth has come to me and has
made me vain, arrogant, contemptuous, uncharitable, cynical, closing
from me all the tenderness of life, all the channels of higher
development, of possible good to my fellow-man, making me the mere
custodian of a money-bag, then,--wealth has lied to me, it has been
failure, not success; it has not been riches, it has been dark, treacherous
poverty that stole from me even Myself." All things become for us then
what we take from them.
Failure is one of God's educators. It is experience leading man to higher
things; it is the revelation of a way, a path hitherto unknown to us. The
best men in the world, those who have made the greatest real successes
look back with serene happiness on their failures. The turning of the
face of Time shows all things in a wondrously illuminated and
satisfying perspective.
Many a man is thankful to-day that some petty success for which he
once struggled, melted into thin air as his hand sought to clutch it.
Failure is often the rock-bottom foundation of real success. If man, in a
few instances of his life can say, "Those failures were the best things in
the world that could have happened to me," should he not face new
failures with undaunted courage and trust that the miraculous ministry
of Nature may transform these new stumbling-blocks into new
stepping-stones?
Our highest hopes, are often destroyed to prepare us for better things.
The failure of the caterpillar is the birth of the butterfly; the passing of

the bud is the becoming of the rose; the death or destruction of the seed
is the prelude to its resurrection as wheat. It is at night, in the darkest
hours, those preceding dawn, that plants grow best, that they most
increase in size. May this not be one of Nature's gentle showings to
man of the times when he grows best, of the darkness of failure that is
evolving into the sunlight of success. Let us fear only the failure of not
living the right as we see it, leaving the results to the