| The Best Things in Life |
Chapter 15 |
Page 5 |
There is no more solemn truth concerning life than this, of the individuality of each person. Each one stands alone before God in his unsharable responsibility and accountability. No one of us can lean on another in the day of stress and terror and say, “Help me!” We may want to help others. We ought to want to help others. We are not Christians if we do not have in our hearts a passion for helpfulness. But there are limits to helpfulness. There are things we cannot do for others, even for those nearest to us. A mother cannot bear her child’s pain for it. A father cannot help his boy to be a man, save through persuasion and influence – he cannot make his boy good and noble. Then when his son comes to him in great spiritual need he cannot give him divine grace. The wise virgins were right when they said, “We cannot give you of our oil.”
When we come to our times of sorrow and need, we cannot then get from our friends the help we shall require. If you would be brave and soldierly in life’s struggles and dangers, you must acquire your courage and soldierliness now for yourself, in the days of training and discipline. Too many young people do not realize what golden opportunities come to them in their school days. They make little of the privileges they enjoy. Sometimes they call them anything but privileges. They think school life wearisome. They waste the days and shirk the lessons. Then by and by the school door closes – shuts upon them. Now they must face life with its responsibilities and they are not ready for it. Through all their years they may move with limping step, with dwarfed life, with powers undisciplined, unable to accept the higher places that would have been offered to them if they had been read for them. They fail in their duties and responsibilities – all because they wasted their school days. Napoleon once said to a boy’s school, “Remember that every hour wasted at school means a chance of misfortune in future life.” Never were truer words spoken; and their application reaches through all life.
“They that were ready went in.” That is always true of blessing, of privileges, of honours. They that are ready go in; no others do. Young men must be ready for life’s places if they would enter into them when they offer themselves. The unready are barred out – and they are countless. Make yourself ready for life’s best places, and you will be wanted for them in due time. There is no such thing as chance. Men get only what they are ready for. Many young men depend upon influence – they think friends can put them into good places. Friends have their use, and do what they can. But no friend, no favouritism, no influence, can make a man ready for a place. That is his own matter. There are no good places for incompetence. The bane of life everywhere is unreadiness. Don’t be a smatterer. If you are going into business, begin at the bottom and patiently master every detail, no matter how long it may take or how much it may cost you. If you are a student, miss no lesson, for the one lesson missed today may be the key, ten, twenty years hence to open the door to a place of honour, and you cannot go in if you do not have the key.
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