troubled, tempted,
Sustained as thou art.'"

The spiritual faith and that courage and persistence of energy which is
the fruition of faith,--and which are both results of the recognition
and acceptance of the great truth so luminously revealed by Bishop
Brooks when he says, "Jesus never treated his life as if it were a
temporary deposit of the divine life on the earth, cut off and
independent of its source; he always treated it as if it lived by its
association with the Father's life, on which it rested,"--this faith and
courage go forward to complete themselves in exhilaration, in firmness
of purpose, and in actual achievement. One finds that he not only gains
the strength of that which he overcomes, but that he gains a higher
plane of life altogether, a more exalted view and a purer atmosphere by
accepting cheerfully and lovingly the discipline of denial and
limitation, and using the experience as a stepping-stone, and not as an
obstacle to his endeavors. There are three ways of meeting the
disappointments and denials that are--for the most part--somewhat
inevitable to every human life: one of sheer despair, of the
relinquishing of every effort, and, in the extreme degree of this
feeling, resorting to the apparent extinction of life by suicide; the
second, of resignation, that is still, however, a hopeless and passive
and negative state, in which the man anchors himself to some mere
platitudes of submission to the Divine Will, misunderstanding and
misinterpreting and misapplying the great and sublime law of obedience
and translating it into conditions of spiritual and mental inactivity
that are only a degree less degrading than the cowardice and ignorance
that rushes into suicide; and the third, of learning the great lesson
involved in the disappointment. Submission to the Divine Will is all
very well; it is one of the sublimest of the divine laws; but it is not
fulfilled by a hopeless and inert evasion of all the duties and demands
of life,--it is, instead, in its integrity and its deep significance,
fulfilled by the _joyful_ acceptance of the leading, the _willing_
surrender that opens a still wider view and a still more vital faith in
the divine wisdom.

Another way in which denial and defeat and thwarted desires or plans can
be met is one still higher and greater, and is that path by which true
spiritual advancement is made. This is, not despair and hopelessness
because an apparently impassable wall arises