Page 17 - 102717-James Allen-Byways to Blessedness-flipbookversion_Neat

BYWAYS TO BLESSEDNESS 13

unused energy, and demanding the expression and employment of latent power and hidden
resources. It is, therefore, a good angel, albeit disguised; a friend, a teacher; and, when calmly
listened to and rightly understood, leads to larger blessedness and higher wisdom.
Without difficulties there could be no progress, no unfoldment, no evolution; universal
stagnation would prevail, and humanity would perish of ennui.
Let a man rejoice when he is confronted with obstacles, for it means that he has reached the
end of some particular line of indifference or folly, and is now called upon to summon up all his
energy and intelligence in order to extricate himself, and to find a better way; that the powers
within him are crying out for greater freedom, for enlarged exercise and scope.
No situation can be difficult of itself; it is the lack of insight into its intricacies, and the want of
wisdom in dealing with it, which give rise to the difficulty. Immeasurable, therefore, is the gain of a

difficulty transcended.
Difficulties do not spring into existence arbitrarily and accidentally; they have their causes, and
are called forth by the law of evolution itself, by the growing necessities of the man’s being. Herein
resides their blessedness.
There are ways of conduct which end inevitably in complications and perplexities, and there
are ways of conduct which lead, just as inevitably, out of troublesome complexities. Howsoever
tightly a man may have bound himself round he can always unbind himself. Into whatsoever
morasses of trouble and trackless wastes of perplexity he may have ignorantly wandered he can
always find his way out again, can always recover the lost highway of uninvolved simplicity which
leads, straight and clear, to the sunny city of wise and blessed action. But he will never do this by
sitting down and weeping in despair, nor by complaining and worrying and aimlessly wishing he
were differently situated. His dilemma calls for alertness, logical thought, and calm calculation. His
position requires that he shall strongly command himself; that he shall think and search, and
rouse himself to strenuous and unremitting exertion in order to regain himself. Worry and anxiety
only serve to heighten the gloom and exaggerate the magnitude of the difficulty. If he will but
quietly take himself to task, and retrace, in thought, the more or less intricate way by which he has
come to his present position, he will soon perceive where he made mistakes; will discover those
places where he took a false turn, and where a little more thoughtfulness, judgement, economy, or
self-denial would have saved him. He will see how, step by step, he has involved himself, and how
a riper judgement and clearer wisdom would have enabled him to take an altogether different and
truer course. Having proceeded thus far, and extracted from his past conduct this priceless grain
of golden wisdom, his difficulty will already have assumed less impregnable proportions, and he
will then be able to bring to bear upon it the searchlight of dispassionate thought, to thoroughly
anatomize it, to comprehend it in all its details, and to perceive the relation which those details
bear to the motive source of action and conduct within himself. This being done, the difficulty will
have ceased, for the straight way out of it will plainly appear, and the man will thus have learned,
for all time, his lesson; will have gained an item of wisdom and a measure of blessedness of which
he can never again be deprived.
Just as there are ways of ignorance, selfishness, folly, and blindness which end in confusion and
perplexity, so there are ways of knowledge, self-denial, wisdom, and insight which lead to pleasant