| Strength and Beauty |
Chapter 18 |
Page 5 |
So it is in a true life. The course is never a continuous ascent. We advance and then we must turn our faces downward for a time, when we seem to be losing – going backward. But if we are living as we should live, truly and victoriously, we are always really advancing. Each day finds us a little farther on in the things that are worthy and noble than we were yesterday. It is possible to seem to fail and yet to be victorious in the higher sense. A man may lose money and yet gain in character. His business may not be successful, yet if meanwhile he has kept himself unspotted from the world and has lived righteously and honestly before God, he has been a prosperous man.
It is not in the things one does in life that the measure of one’s advancement is infallibly registered. The true registering is within, in what takes place in one’s own heart. The final question is not, what have you done? But what has been done in you? Are you, whether in failures or in successes, in defeats or in victories, in adversity or in prosperity, ever growing truer, gentler, better, more unselfish, more loving? That should be the outcome of all life’s experiences. It is possible to be victorious in all competition and successful in all endeavor, to be rising steadily among men in the things by which the world rates men, and yet to be losing continually in the things which belong to moral and spiritual beauty. Love, joy, peace, long suffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, meekness, self control – these are the qualities in which we must grow if we would be really advancing in life as God see us. And it is possible for a man to be making progress in these qualities of his heart life even in the midst of earthly failure.
Indeed, it is true that men ofttimes learn their best lessons in the school of defeat. Nature in all of us needs to be disciplined before it reaches its best and ripest, and discipline is not achieved usually without many lessons in humility. We are naturally proud, vain, and self confident and we need nothing so much as experiences which will reveal to us our own weakness and limitation. Continuous success and victoriousness in our own life would only inflate still more our miserable self conceit and nourish in us qualities which would only mar the beauty of our character. The best school for us is the school of defeat, wherein we are made aware of our weaknesses and cured of our wretched vanity and self conceit. Peter’s terrible failure made a man of him. The self confidence with which he entered his temptation was left behind in the dust where he had fallen, and he came again, sifted indeed, a smaller man in his own estimation, but a far better man.
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