ll the rending asunder of our
affections forces us to become conscious of a need. St. Paul in his
Roman cell; John Huss led to the stake at Constance; Tyndale dying in
his prison at Amsterdam; Milton, amid the incipient earthquake throes
of revolution, teaching two little boys in Aldgate Street; David
Livingstone, worn to a shadow, dying in a negro hut in Central Africa,
alone--what failures they might all have seemed to themselves to be,
yet what mighty purposes was God working out by their apparent
humiliations!

Two highwaymen chancing once to pass a gibbet, one of them exclaimed:
"What a fine profession ours would be if there were no gibbets!" "Tut,
you blockhead," replied the other, "gibbets are the making of us; for,
if there were no gibbets, every one would be a highwayman." Just so
with every art, trade, or pursuit; it is the difficulties that scare
and keep out unworthy competitors.

"Success grows out of struggles to overcome difficulties," says Smiles.
"If there were no difficulties there would be no success. In this
necessity for exertion we find the chief source of human
advancement,--the advancement of individuals as of nations. It has led
to most of the mechanical inventions and improvements of the age."

"Stick your claws into me," said Mendelssohn to his critics when
entering the Birmingham orchestra. "Don't tell me what you like, but
what you don't like."

John Hunter said that the art of surgery would never advance until
professional men had the courage to publish their failures as well as
their successes.

"Young men need to be taught not to expect a perfectly smooth and easy
way to the objects of their endeavor or ambition," says Dr. Peabody.
"Seldom does one reach a position with which he has reason to be
satisfied without encountering difficulties and what might seem
discouragements. But if they are properly met, they are not what they
seem, and may prove to be helps, not hindrances. There is no more
helpful and profiting exercise than surmounting obstacles."

It was in the Madrid jail that Cervantes wrote "Don Quixote." He was
so poor that he could not even get paper during the last of his
writing, and had to write on scraps of leather. A rich Spaniard was
asked to help him, but replied: "Heaven forbid that his necessities
should be relieved; it is his poverty that makes the world rich."

"He has the stuff in him to make a good musician," said Beethoven of
Rossini, "if he had o