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 super-human 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