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14 BYWAYS TO BLESSEDNESS

and peaceful consummations. He who knows this will meet difficulties in a courageous spirit, and,
in overcoming them, will evolve truth out of error, bliss out of pain, and peace out of perturbation.
No man can be confronted with a difficulty which he has not the strength to meet and subdue.
Worry is not merely useless, it is folly, for it defeats that power and intelligence which is otherwise
equal to the task. Every difficulty can be overcome if rightly dealt with; anxiety is, therefore,
unnecessary. The task which cannot be overcome ceases to be a difficulty, and becomes an
impossibility; and anxiety is still unnecessary, for there is only one way of dealing with an
impossibility — namely, to submit to it. The inevitable is the best.

“Heartily know,
When half-gods go,
The gods arrive.”

And just as domestic, social, and economic difficulties are born of ignorance and lead to riper
knowledge, so every religious doubt, every mental-perplexity, every heart-beclouding shadow,
presages greater spiritual gain, is prophetic of a brighter dawn of intelligence for him on whom it
falls.
It is a great day in the life of a man (though at the time he knows it not) when bewildering
perplexities concerning the mystery of life take possession of his mind, for it signifies that his era
of dead indifference, of animal sloth, of mere vegetative happiness, has come to an end, and that
henceforth he is to live as an aspiring, self-evolving being. No longer a mere human animal, he will
now begin to live as a man, exerting all his mental energies to the solution of life’s problems, to the
answering of those haunting perplexities which are the sentinels of truth, and which stand at the
gate and threshold of the Temple of Wisdom.

“He it is who, when great trials come,
Nor seeks nor shuns them, but doth calmly stay.”

Nor will he ever rest again in selfish ease and listless ignorance; nor sleekly sate himself upon
the swine’s husks of fleshly pleasures; nor find a hiding-place from the ceaseless whisperings of
his heart’s dark and indefinable interrogatories. The divine within him has awakened; a sleeping
god is shaking off the incoherent visions of the night, never again to slumber, never again to rest
until his eyes rest upon the full, broad day of Truth.
It is impossible for such a man to hush, for any length of time, the call to higher purposes and
achievements which is aroused within him, for the awakened faculties of his being will ceaselessly
urge him on to the unravelling of his perplexities; for him there is no more peace in sin, no more
rest in error, no final refuge but in Wisdom.
Great will be the blessedness of such a man when, conscious of the ignorance of which his
doubts and perplexities are born, and acknowledging and understanding that ignorance, not
striving to hide himself from it, he earnestly applies himself to its removal, seeks unremittingly,
day after day, for that pathway of light which shall enable him to dispel all the dark shadows,
dissolve his doubts, and find the solution to all his pressing problems. And as a child is glad when
it has mastered a lesson long toiled over, just so a man’s heart becomes light and free when he has