easy to conclude the fates fight against us.

How slight is the evidence on which men base their gloomy conclusions!
The pessimist always argues from a single instance to a general law.
If he strikes a poor peach on top he throws the whole basket away--or
sells them as soon as he can. He insists on sitting square on the
cactus bunch when there is only one on the whole bench-land. He then
becomes an authority on cactus. If he can discover a few foes on the
horizon he is blind to a regiment of friends close at hand.

But the seers, our poets and teachers, have a wider vision; they seek
the glory rather than the gloom and they tell us that every man has
more friends than foes. This is the song of those who told us long ago
of Providence, the one who backs a man up and fights on his side and
furnishes him in the hour of need. This is the song of Lowell,
Tennyson, Whittier, and Browning. Life is not a lone-handed fight
against unnumbered foes; it is not a losing fight to any who will fight
it well.

Every force in this world works with the man who seeks the good. This
is a right world and only he who fights the right faces the
unconquerable. A man may meet rebuffs, battle's tides may sweep back
and forth, but in the end, as it has ever been in all the long story of
man's conflict with nature, so in the conflict with every other foe, he
is bound to win. This is as true in the individual life of every
fighter as nature and history show it to be in universal life.

On our side there is the great world of the unseen. Little do we know
of it, but still that little gives us confidence to believe it is
peopled with our allies. Our fairest hopes of good angels may be