It ofttimes requires heroic courage to face fruitless effort, to take
up the broken strands of a life-work, to look bravely toward the future,
and proceed undaunted on our way. But what, to our eyes, may seem
hopeless failure is often but the dawning of a greater success. It may
contain in its débris the foundation material of a mighty purpose, or
the revelation of new and higher possibilities.
Some years ago, it was proposed to send logs from Canada to New York, by
a new method. The ingenious plan of Mr. Joggins was to bind great logs
together by cables and iron girders and to tow the cargo as a raft. When
the novel craft neared New York and success seemed assured, a terrible
storm arose. In the fury of the tempest, the iron bands snapped like
icicles and the angry water scattered the logs far and wide. The chief
of the Hydrographic Department at Washington heard of the failure of the
experiment, and at once sent word to shipmasters the world over, urging
them to watch carefully for these logs which he described; and to note
the precise location of each in latitude and longitude and the time the
observation was made. Hundreds of captains, sailing over the waters of
the earth, noted the logs, in the Atlantic Ocean, in the Mediterranean,
in the South Seas—for into all waters did these venturesome ones
travel. Hundreds of reports were made, covering a period of weeks and
months. These observations were then carefully collated, systematized
and tabulated, and discoveries were made as to the course of ocean
currents that otherwise would have been impossible. The loss of the
Joggins raft was not a real failure, for it led to one of the great
discoveries in modern marine geography and navigation.
In our superior knowledge we are disposed to speak in a patronizing tone
of the follies of the alchemists of old. But their failure to transmute
the baser metals into gold resulted in the birth of chemistry. They did
not succeed in what they attempted, but they brought into vogue the
natural processes of sublimation, filtration, distillation, and
crystallization; they invented the alembic, the retort, the sand-bag,
the water-bath and other valuable instruments. To them is due the
discovery of antimony, sulphuric ether and phosphorus, the cupellation
of gold and silver, the determining of the properties of saltpetre and
its use in gunpowder, and the discovery of the distillation of essential
oils. This was the success of failure, a wondrous process of Nature for
the highest growth,—a mighty lesson of comfort, strength, and
encouragement if man would only realize and accept it.
Many of our failures sweep us to greater heights of success than we ever
hoped for in our wildest dreams. Life is a successive unfolding of
success from failure. In discovering America Columbus failed absolutely.
His ingenious reasoning and experiment led him to believe that by
sailing westward he would reach India. Every redman in America carries
in his name “Indian,” the perpetuation of the memory of the failure of
Columbus. The Genoese navigator did not reach India; the cargo of
“souvenirs” he took back to Spain to show to Ferdinand and Isabella as
proofs of his success, really attested his failure. But the discovery of
America was a greater success than was any finding of a “back-door” to
India.
When David Livingstone had supplemented his theological education by a
medical course, he was ready to enter the missionary field. For over
three years he had studied tirelessly, with all energies concentrated on
one aim,—to spread the 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 superhuman 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 guardianship of the Infinite.
If we think of any supreme moment of our lives, any great success,
anyone who is dear to us, and then consider how we reached that moment,
that success, that friend, we will be surprised and strengthened by the
revelation. As we trace each one back, step by step, through the
genealogy of circumstances, we will see how logical has been the course
of our joy and success from sorrow and failure, and that what gives us
most happiness to-day is inextricably connected with what once caused us
sorrow. Many of the rivers of our greatest prosperity and growth have
had their source and their trickling increase into volume among the
dark, gloomy recesses of our failure.
There is no honest and true work, carried along with constant and
sincere purpose that ever really fails. If it sometimes seem to be
wasted effort, it will prove to us a new lesson of “how” to walk; the
secret of our failures will prove to us the inspiration of possible
successes. Man living with the highest aims, ever as best he can, in
continuous harmony with them, is a success, no matter what statistics of
failure a near-sighted and half-blind world of critics and commentators
may lay at his door.
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.