The peril to happiness as well as to virtue in reliance upon the external fortunes of life justifies the counsel of religion that happiness must be founded on internal rather than external resources. The conquest of nature is really but a relative victory of personality over circumstance. Though the caprice of nature’s forces has been checked, fortune remains fickle. If men cannot learn “how to be abased and how to abound,” there is no guarantee of happiness for them. Poverty may be a curse, but voluntarily chosen or consented to without sullenness it may become the way of the soul’s emancipation. The elimination of disease is a boon to mankind, but there is little likelihood that science will be able to overcome all ills to which the human flesh is heir. No scientific advance will obviate the necessity for the discovery of faith that “God’s strength is made perfect in weakness,” that the infirmities of the flesh may become the occasion for the cultivation of spiritual graces. Even at best science cannot destroy nature’s final irrelevancy—death. There can therefore be no real victory over nature except by the strategy of transcending her fortunes. The more hostages taken from her the greater will be the disappointment in the hour of her final victory. It is man’s sublime and tragic fate that he must find happiness in the search for infinitude amidst the flux of time and he can therefore never accept the portion of mortality for himself with equanimity. Hence his final comfort must come from the counsel of religion which teaches him how he may identify himself with the eternal values of his devotion, so that “though the outward man perish yet the inward man is renewed day by day.”[19]