wasting weariness, and the terrible sense of vacuity which haunt {162} the life of one-half of the rich in the world, all flee before the talisman of active labor; nor should we be discouraged by failure, for it is better to fail in action than to do nothing. After all, what is commonly called failure we shall find to be not altogether such if we examine more closely. We set out upon some action or engagement, and after infinite toil we miss the object of that action or engagement, and they say we have failed; but there is consolation in this incontrovertible fact, that although we may have missed the particular object toward which our efforts have been directed, yet we have not altogether failed. There are many collateral advantages attendant upon exertion which may even be of greater importance than the attainment of the immediate object of that exertion, so that it is quite possible to fail wholly in achieving a certain object and yet make a glorious success. Half the achievements of life are built up on failures, and the greater the achievement, the greater evidence it is of persistent combat with failure. The student devotes his days and nights to some intellectual investigation, and though he may utterly fail in attaining to the actual object of that search, yet he may be drawn into some narrow diverging path in the wilderness of thought which may lead him gradually away from his beaten track on to the broad open light of discovery. The navigator goes out on the broad ocean in search of unknown tracts of land, and though he may return, after long and fruitless wanderings, yet in the voyages he has made he has acquired experience, and may, perchance, have learned some fact or thing which will prove the means of saving him in the hour of danger. Those great luminaries of the intellectual firmament--men who devoted their whole lives to investigate, search, study, and think for the elevation and good of their fellows--have only succeeded after a long discipline of failure, but by that discipline their powers have been developed, their capacity of thought expanded, and the experience gradually acquired which at length brought success. There is, then, no total failure to honest exertion, for he who diligently labors must in some way reap. It is a lesson often reiterated in apostolic teaching that "whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth;" and the truth of that lesson may be more fully appreciated by a closer contemplation of life, more especially this phenomenon of life in which we see the Father's love following close upon the heels of his chastisement. The man who works lives, but he who works not lives but a dying and a hopeless life.