The Overcoming of Disadvantage

Wayland Hoyt with contributions from Mazzini

There is often an advantage in what looks like the disadvantage of defeat and disappointment. When the great historian, Dr. Edward Augustus Freeman, was at the University of Oxford, he earnestly competed for the prize offered for an essay on the Norman Conquest of England. He failed of getting it. Long afterward he said: "Fortunately I failed to win the prize. Had I won it, I should have flattered myself I knew all about the subject. As it was, I went on and learned something about it." The issue of that further learning is his monumental "History of the Norman Conquest," his chief service as historian and the reason of his undiminishing fame. When one will take defeat and disappointment as a spur, immediately he changes them into weal. You remember those brave lines of Robert Browning, of one who

Never turned his back, but marched breast onward;
Never dreamed though right were worsted, wrong would conquer;
Held—we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better,
Sleep to wake.

Let me tell you how you can surely bring to beauteous bloom the dry and ugly root of what you think your disadvantage. Thus you shall do it—by doing the noblest thing you can amid your disadvantage; not the thing you would like to do, but the thing you can do. Though the early Christians, being scattered, could not do the many, things their hearts yearned toward doing, they could tell, being thus scattered, the good news of God.

They were making disadvantage the minister to character. No coddled saints were they, but stalwart ones, whom loss and persecution caused to become but the more useful. And character is the goal to which God will push us, even over rough roads, if He must. Dr. Wayland Hoyt.
In the Examiner.

Nations, like individuals, must be free before they can be responsible for their actions and, by kindling in the hearts of all men the sanctuary-lamp of conscience. God has imposed upon each the duty of walking by its light; and liberty, which gives us the power of choosing between good and evil, is "not the right to choose evil, but the right of choice between the various paths that lead to good."

Mazzini.

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