where now except that, red-faced and jolly like an October
sunset, he leans over a gate at Worthing after a long day of picnicking
at Chanctonbury Ring, or sits at his Woking table praising and quoting
"The Admiral Bashville," or blue-shirted and wearing that hat that
Nicholson has painted, is thrust and lugged, laughing and talking aside
in his bath-chair, along the Worthing esplanade...

And Bob Stevenson walks for ever about a garden in Chiswick, talking in
the dusk.

4.5. THE CONSOLATION OF FAILURE.

That parable of the talents I have made such free use of in this book
has one significant defect. It gives but two cases, and three are
possible. There was first the man who buried his talent, and of his
condemnation we are assured. But those others all took their talents
and used them courageously and came back with gain. Was that gain
inevitable? Does courage always ensure us victory? because if that is so
we can all be heroes and valour is the better part of discretion. Alas!
the faith in such magic dies. What of the possible case of the man who
took his two or three talents and invested them as best he could and was
deceived or heedless and lost them, interest and principal together?

There is something harder to face than death, and that is the
realization of failure and misdirected effort and wrong-doing. Faith is
no Open Sesame to right-doing, much less is it the secret of success.
The service of God on earth is no processional triumph. What if one does
wrong so extremely as to condemn one's life, to make oneself part of the
refuse and not of the building? Or what if one is misjudged, or it may
be too pitilessly judged, and one's co-operation despised and the help
one brought becomes a source of weakness? Or suppose that the fine
scheme one made lies shattered or wrecked by one's own act, or through
some hidden blemish one's offering is rejected and flung back and one is
thrust out?

So in the end it may be you or I will find we have been anvil and not
hammer in the Purpose of God.

Then indeed will come the time for Faith, for the last word of Faith, to
say still steadfastly, disgraced or dying, defeated or discredited, that
all is well:--

"This and not that was my appointed work, and this I had to be."

4.6. THE LAST CONFESSION.

So these broken confessions and statements of mood and attitude come to
an end.

But at this end, since I have, I perceive, run a little into a pietistic