brooks no
interference and excuses no indifference. The proverb tells us that
"our lot is cast into the lap, but the whole disposing is of the Lord."
And just as the dark forces that sweep through our life are not
necessarily hostile forces but form part of the order of the world, so
things that we regard as haphazard, merely cast into the lap of chance,
may be divine agents working out a marvellous equality of opportunity
throughout our human life. I affirm it without a shadow of
qualification, that chance has no place whatever in the responsible
formation of character, and the formation of character is the decision
of destiny. Beware, then, lest in playing with this _ignis fatuus_ of
chance you are trifling with law, for law will not spare you.

You young men cannot make up your mind too soon that there can be no
sure success apart from uprightness and integrity. You cannot too
early in this life settle it as an immovable truth for you, that
unswerving rectitude is not only a great and desirable ideal, it is the
only practical course you can afford to follow. Goodness, I say again,
is the only success, and I shall not try to save this statement by
fencing the word "success" with any arbitrary definition of my own. I
just mean by it what any man means by it who has a healthy moral
perception of things. Success, like honesty, has but one degree, and
as nothing is worthy to be called life which cannot be affirmed of God,
so nothing can be called success which is not the resultant of
right-doing. Every advantage which you would try to scheme or sneak or
coerce in face of the protest of conscience, has in it its own curse
and its certain defeat. Understand me: right-doing will not
necessarily help you to make a fortune or achieve some great position.
You may not have the special gifts to do either. Such gifts are
something not ourselves which we might easily have been without.
Neither religion nor morality promises to bestow these gifts, any more
than religion or morality claims to regulate the colour of our hair or
the inches of our stature. But when said, there is yet a wonderful
power in right-doing. The man who does the right because he believes
in it and loves it, whether it is called successful or not, is always
bringing out far more than he thought was in him. The faithful doing
of daily duty continually reveals opportunities which, used with
readiness and a good conscience, act upon life with a perpet