is a severe instructor," says Edmund Burke, "set over us by
one who knows us better than we do ourselves, as he loves us better
too. He that wrestles with us strengthens our nerves and sharpens our
skill. Our antagonist is our helper. This conflict with difficulty
makes us acquainted with our object, and compels us to consider it in
all its relations. It will not suffer us to be superficial."

Men who have the right kind of material in them will assert their
personality and rise in spite of a thousand adverse circumstances. You
can not keep them down. Every obstacle seems only to add to their
ability to get on.

The greatest men will ever be those who have risen from the ranks. It
is said that there are ten thousand chances to one that genius, talent,
and virtue shall issue from a farmhouse rather than from a palace.

Adversity exasperates fools, dejects cowards, but draws out the
faculties of the wise and industrious, puts the modest to the necessity
of trying their skill, awes the opulent, and makes the idle
industrious. The storms of adversity, like those of the ocean, rouse
the faculties, and excite the invention, prudence, skill, and fortitude
of the voyager. A man upon whom continuous sunshine falls is like the
earth in August: he becomes parched and dry and hard and close-grained.
Men have drawn from adversity the elements of greatness.

Beethoven was almost totally deaf and burdened with sorrow when he
produced his greatest works. Schiller wrote his best books in great
bodily suffering. He was not free from pain for fifteen years. Milton
wrote his leading productions when blind, poor, and sick. "Who best
can suffer," said he, "best can do." Bunyan said that, if it were
lawful, he could even pray for greater trouble, for the greater
comfort's sake.

Not until the breath of the plague had blasted a hundred thousand
lives, and the great fire had licked up cheap, shabby, wicked London,
did she arise, phoenix-like, from her ashes and ruin, a grand and
mighty city.

True salamanders live best in the furnace of persecution.

Many of our best poets

"Are cradled into poetry by wrong,
And learn in suffering what they teach in song."

Byron was stung into a determination to go to the top by a scathing
criticism of his first book, "Hours of Idleness," published when he was
but nineteen years of age. Macaulay said, "There is scarce an instance
in history of so sudden a rise to so dizzy an emi