m. The
worship of success is the only one out of all possible worships of
which this is true, that its followers are foredoomed to become slaves
and cowards. A man may be a hero for the sake of Mrs. Gallup's ciphers
or for the sake of human sacrifice, but not for the sake of success.
For obviously a man may choose to fail because he loves Mrs. Gallup or
human sacrifice; but he cannot choose to fail because he loves success.
When the test of triumph is men's test of everything, they never endure
long enough to triumph at all. As long as matters are really hopeful,
hope is a mere flattery or platitude; it is only when everything is
hopeless that hope begins to be a strength at all. Like all the
Christian virtues, it is as unreasonable as it is indispensable.

It was through this fatal paradox in the nature of things that all
these modern adventurers come at last to a sort of tedium and
acquiescence. They desired strength; and to them to desire strength was
to admire strength; to admire strength was simply to admire the statu
quo. They thought that he who wished to be strong ought to respect the
strong. They did not realize the obvious verity that he who wishes to
be strong must despise the strong. They sought to be everything, to
have the whole force of the cosmos behind them, to have an energy that
would drive the stars. But they did not realize the two great
facts--first, that in the attempt to be everything the first and most
difficult step is to be something; second, that the moment a man is
something, he is essentially defying everything. The lower animals, say
the men of science, fought their way up with a blind selfishness. If
this be so, the only real moral of it is that our unselfishness, if it
is to triumph, must be equally blind. The mammoth did not put his head
on one side and wonder whether mammoths were a little out of date.
Mammoths were at least as much up to date as that individual mammoth
could make them. The great elk did not say, "Cloven hoofs are very much
worn now." He polished his own weapons for his own use. But in the
reasoning animal there has arisen a more horrible danger, that he may
fail through perceiving his own failure. When modern sociologists talk
of the necessity of accommodating one's self to the trend of the time,
they forget that the trend of the time at its best consists entirely of
people who will not accommodate themselves to anything. At its worst it
consists of many millio