that disappointment is the school of achievement, and the
balked efforts are the very agents that help us to our
purpose.

And, if life itself --life as a whole --seems to us but a
series of disappointments, is not this the very conviction we
need to work out from it, through our own experience? Do we
not need to learn that this life itself is not sufficient,
and holds no blessing that will fill us completely, and with
which we may forever rest? The baffled hopes of our mortal
state; --what are they but vain strivings of the human soul,
out of the path of its highest good? The wandering bird,
driven against the branches, and beaten by the storm,
flutters at last to the clear opening, by which it mounts
above the cloud, and finds its way to its home. This life is
not ordained in vain; --it is constituted for a grand
purpose, if through its lessons of experience we become
convinced that this life is not all. In the outset of our
existence here, and merely from the teaching of others, we
cannot comprehend the great realities of existence.

How the things that have grown familiar to our eyes, and the
lessons that have sounded trite upon our ears, become fresh
and wonderful, as life turns into experience! How this very
lesson of disappointment lets us in to the deep meanings of
Scripture, for instance! The Christ of our youth, -- a
personage standing mild and beautiful upon the Gospel-page, -
- a being to admire and love; how be develops to our later
thought! how solemnly tender, how greatly real, he becomes to
us, when we cling to him in the agony of our sorrow, and he