You can apply the test to yourself. Have you ever accepted some responsibility, and then, when the occasion came nearer, backed out of it for no other reason than that you were afraid? If you have, you will perhaps remember whether you felt proud of yourself, whether, beneath the undoubted relief, there was not a good deal of quiet shame and self-scorn. If the same thing were to happen again, you might feel the impulse to desert, but if you remembered your former experience, you would hardly yield to it, I imagine. The plain truth is that no proper man really likes a soft job. "In the long run," says J. A. Symonds, "we really love the sternest things in life best." And he speaks truth. There is a certain exhilaration in the endurance of hardness. Responsibility braces most men like a shock of cold water. What is arduous calls them as with a trumpet. And in the general sense of quiet contempt for the person who in a panic flings up his responsibility, we may recognise one of God’s elementary checks upon cowardice. There are those who are reading these words who are enduring hardness and making sacrifices from which they might easily escape. They do at times desire relief. But the point is that they don’t take it, when it is possible. And I say there must be some reason for this. What is it that holds men back from the easy way when it stands open before them? For one thing, I think, the sense of the place that hardness and effort and endurance play in every true life. For centuries men have climbed up to strength of character, if at all, by ways uniformly arduous and steep; and distrust of the primrose path, however alluring, has passed as an instinct into our blood. In the small unheroic affairs of life we have learned that a difficulty faced and overcome, or a duty doggedly fulfilled, add a precious something to experience that there is no other way of securing. The schoolboy on a hot summer day may look up from his task, away out wistfully to the cool shade of the trees across the playground, and wish that he were there, rather than where he is. Yet even he knows, what we all come to learn, that that is not the road to anything in life worth the gaining. Another deterring impulse is the sense of a divine vocation. Our calling and circumstances are ordained for us by God, and we must not quit the field till the day is done. It is He who has chosen our lot in life and summoned us to the sphere we fill. We may succeed or fail as seems to Him best. Sometimes he places men, for reasons of His own, in corners where success, as commonly measured, is not possible. But one thing--success or failure--we must not do. We must not shirk. We must not run away. God means us to stand fast and do our best. For failure even, if it be honourable, He may have His good word at the last. But to the man who has shirked life’s hard duties, not even God can say, "Well done!" PRAYER