Evening Republican, Volume 15, Number 237, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 7 October 1911 — On Setbacks [ARTICLE]

On Setbacks

BROTHER, SUPPOSING YOU have been deceived, wronged,-- buncoed, flaunted; supposing your earnest plans all have gone awry; supposing your “cherished ambitions’’ have flickered and gone out for lack of •oul-fuel or the thing that glitters. Or granting that the bottom has dropped out of your exchequer, or that your business stronghold has been invaded, or that your love has been ravished—or destroyed—or petrified. Or agreeing that some reality, quite inexplicably and dramatically turns out tbbe a dream.

Well—what then? Were you not —are you not —the better for tt after all? Certainly you were —and are. For you know jf you have thought about it at all, that out of your experience has come your strength, your foresight, your discovery of yourself. Life is not to be lived for plans, or ambitions, or achievements, or love. The person who thinks it is has simply got to find out sometime or other that it Isn’t. The meaning of life is in the development of the individual, and the betterment of the race thereby. Personality and character are back of the whole procedure. The laws of nature all are for progress, growth. If you don’t” improve yourself, propel yourself forward morally, intellectaully, steadily—why, then, some force tn the universe, some law of equity, some, emanation from the God-power is going to do it for you. It may knock you over, it may •brush you aside and out of the road if you seem either stubborn, or hopeless, or too complacent to its driving justice and demand; but it will let you know of its presence and its reality. < So you see that often a “setback” Is nothing more or less than a push from behind by the propelling power of progress in nature and the God element. And there is no such thing as arversity. There is infetead a diversity of ways in which our lives are given the proper impetus to success and untimate development, readjustment, then perfection, being the aim of all the natural laws, and spiritual laws »nd God impulses as well. The water that stays in the pool, or trickles slowly over smooth, earthy courses, is usually muddy, stagnant, vile —the breeding places of a thousand pests; unfit, unclean. The water that runs over the rocks, whipped into foam, divided, whirled about, often shot backward by eddies, and thrown remorselessly over sharp ledges to dash on broken stones, becomes clear, becomes sweet, becomes aereated with the oxygen of life — generates power—is power. The personal character that meets with “setbacks" —that the economic forces and the driving powers of the iniverse. together with the urges of the spirit sense, whip into line — ;ains in purity and strength, in ability and usefulness.