victorious. We shall have added most strangely to our safety and
happiness and peace the day that our sloth and our ignorance shall
have ceased to term fatal. What should truly be looked on as human
and natural by our intelligence and our energy.

19. Let us consider one noteworthy victim of destiny, Louis XVI.
Never, it would seem, did relentless fatality clamour so loudly for
the destruction of an unfortunate man; of one who was gentle, and
good, and virtuous, and honourable. And yet, as we look more closely
into the pages of history, do we not find that fatality distils her
poison from the victim's own wavering feebleness, his own trivial
duplicity, blindness, unreason, and vanity? And if it be true that
some kind of predestination governs every circumstance of life, it
appears to be no less true that such predestination exists in our
character only; and to modify character must surely be easy to the
man of unfettered will, for is it not constantly changing in the
lives of the vast bulk of men? Is your own character, at thirty, the
same as it was when you were ten years younger? It will be better or
worse in the measure that you have believed that disloyalty,
wickedness, hatred and falsehood have triumphed in life, or
goodness, and truth, and love. And you will have thought that you
witnessed the triumph of hatred or love, of truth or of falsehood,
in exact accord with the lofty or baser idea as to the happiness and
aim of your life that will slowly have arisen within you. For it is
our most secret desire that governs and dominates all. If your eyes
look for nothing but evil, you will always see evil triumphant; but
if you have learned to let your glance rest on sincerity,
simpleness, truth, you will ever discover, deep down in all things,
the silent overpowering victory of that which you love.