sertion that "it was all luck." It happened
that I had some reliable information about the man under discussion,
and I want you to have it. Thirty years ago he was working from ten to
twelve hours in the day as just an ordinary workman. At the close of
each day's toil he had his programme of studies, which, in its range
and character of the subjects attacked, would not have disgraced a good
student at any university. Eventually his attention to business and
his marked attainments won for him the recognition of his employers,
which meant in after years a place which was ultimately a leading
place, as one of them. Yet this was the man who was said to have won
his success by a lucky turn of the wheel. I admit his advantages. I
grant you that he showed himself to have brains and will above the
average endowment of these great possessions. But let me ask you to
mark this: he might have left his gifts unused, as so many of us do.
It is probably not gifts, in eight cases out of every ten, that
determine position, but our use of them. We have infinitely more in us
than our will and determination ever bring out. How few of us know the
rich things God has put in our nature; and we verily live and die in
ignorance of rare deposits of wealth because we do not work the inward
mines. This young man was wiser. He did not wait for his opportunity
to turn up, he turned up the opportunity. Because he neither slumbered
nor slept while it tarried, he was prepared to make the most of it when
it presented itself. And I am persuaded that something like this is
the true explanation of practically the whole of what thoughtless
people set down to luck. What we call fore-ordination is verily the
present which we have made out of the past. We first make habits, and
then habits make us. In our to-day walks our to-morrow, and in a very
solemn sense there is no "dead past." As it has been well said, "the
tree that falls so disastrously is no accident; it had the fall
determined a century ago in some injury it received as a sapling." [1]

There is much less luck in human affairs than is popularly supposed;
and, if there were more than there is, it would, in the next place, be
moral insanity to put our trust in it. "Nothing walks with aimless
feet." Our life is no lottery. We may make foolish experiments with
it, but we do so at our own risk. It is no plaything of chance, it is
a stern responsibility which is determined by law that