he
other fellows getting away in front of you, and to find yourself left
to the last?'

'Oh, no,' he replied, with a laugh, 'it's a bit of an honour, isn't it,
to see that they think me so much better than everybody else that they
fancy I have a sporting chance under such conditions? And, besides, it
spurs a fellow to do his best. When you are accustomed to winning
races, it doesn't feel nice to be beaten, even in a handicap, and to
avoid being beaten you've got to go for all you're worth.'

I shook hands and left him. But I felt that he had given me something
else to think about.

'It's a bit of an honour!' he had said. 'And, besides, it spurs a
fellow to do his best!'

The next time a man tells me that he cannot help me because he is so
heavily handicapped, what a tale I shall have to tell him!

IV

My Saturday afternoon experience has convinced me that, in the Church,
we have tragically misinterpreted the significance of handicaps.

'I am very heavily handicapped,' we say in the Church, 'therefore I
must not attempt this thing!'

'I am very heavily handicapped,' they say out there at their sports,
'therefore I must put all my strength into it!'

And who can doubt that the philosophy of the Churchmen is false, or
that the philosophy of the sportsmen is sound? There is a great saying
of Bacon's that every handicapped man should learn by heart.
'Whosoever,' he says, 'hath anything fixed in his person that doth
induce contempt hath also a perpetual spur in himself to rescue and
deliver himself from scorn.' Is that why so many of the world's
greatest benefactors were men who bore in their bodies the marks of
physical affliction--blindness, deafness, disease, and the like? They
felt that they were heavily handicapped, and that their handicap called
them to make a supreme effort 'to rescue and deliver themselves from
scorn.'

When speaking of the difficulty which a black boy experiences in
America in competing with his white rivals, Booker Washington tells us
that his own pathetic and desperate struggle taught him that 'success
is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in
life as by the obstacles which he has overcome while trying to
succeed.' There is a good deal in that. I was once present at a
meeting of a certain Borough Council, at which an engineer had to
report on a certain proposal which the municipal authorities were
discussing. The engineer contented himself with