swings us to higher levels. It may not be financial success, it may not
be fame; it may be new draughts of spiritual, moral or mental
inspiration that will change us for all the later years of our life.
Life is not really what comes to us, but what we get from it.

Whether man has had wealth or poverty, failure or success, counts for
little when it is past. There is but one question for him to answer, to
face boldly and honestly as an individual alone with his conscience and
his destiny:

"How will I let that poverty or wealth affect me? If that trial or
deprivation has left me better, truer, nobler, then,--poverty has been
riches, failure has been a success. If wealth has come to me and has
made me vain, arrogant, contemptuous, uncharitable, cynical, closing
from me all the tenderness of life, all the channels of higher
development, of possible good to my fellow-man, making me the mere
custodian of a money-bag, then,--wealth has lied to me, it has been
failure, not success; it has not been riches, it has been dark,
treacherous poverty that stole from me even Myself." All things become
for us then what we take from them.

Failure is one of God's educators. It is experience leading man to
higher things; it is the revelation of a way, a path hitherto unknown
to us. The best men in the world, those who have made the greatest real
successes look back with serene happiness on their failures. The
turning of the face of Time shows all things in a wondrously
illuminated and satisfying perspective.

Many a man is thankful to-day that some petty success for which he once
struggled, melted into thin air as his hand sought to clutch it.