“Not many lives, but only one, have we—
One, only one.
How sacred that one life should ever be,
That narrow a span,
Day after day filled up with blessed toil,
Hour after hour still bringing in new spoil!”
There are many people who fail. Yet there are two standards by which success and failure may be measured: there is the world’s standard, and there is God’s. Many whom men set down as having failed are successful in the higher sense, while many of earth’s vaunted successes are really complete and terrible failures.
If we are wise, we will seek to know life’s realities, and will not be fooled by its appearances. True success must be something which will not perish in earth’s wreck or decay, something which will not be torn our of our hands in the hour of death, something which will last over into the eternal years. No folly can be so great as that which gives all life’s energies to the building up of something, however beautiful it may be, which must soon be torn down, and which cannot possibly be carried beyond the grave.
The real failures in life are not those which are registered in commercial agencies and reported as bankruptcies, nor those whose marks are the decay of earthly fortune, descent in the social scale, the breaking down of worldly prosperity, or any of those signs by which men rate one another. A man may fail in these ways, and, as Heaven sees him, his path may be like the shining light, growing in brightness all the time. His heart may remain pure and his hands clean through all his earthly misfortunes. He may be growing all the while in the elements of true manhood. In the autumn days the stripping off of the leaves uncovers the nests of the birds; and for many a man the stripping away of the leaves of earthly prosperity is the disclosing to him of the soul’s true nest and home in the bosom of God. We cannot call that life a failure which, though losing money and outward show is itself growing every day nobler, stronger, Christlier. It matters little what becomes of one’s circumstances if meanwhile the man himself is prospering.
Circumstances are but the scaffolding amid which the building rises.
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