• Author: Unknown
• Editor: B-7413
• Newspaper: The Umpire volume 5
• Page Number:
• Date: 2 16 1916
• Tags:
• advice

THOSE WHO TRY AGAIN Now and again we hear much discussion about the man who strides up the aisle of a mission and hesitatingly gives his confession. Perhaps he is converted on the instant; is given a bath and a new suit of clothes, and becomes a new man from that time. But of the many lapses from grace we hear comparatively little, because they are not considered to be in any way helpful as food for thought. But to the average man, who is fully aware how frequently he fails and sins against the right, is it not some comfort to know that every man can not be immediately translated from the "down and out" chap to a sincere singer of sacred song? Not long ago a man ended his life at a mission in this city, because he had stumbled and fallen in his endeavor to overcome his besetting weakness from time to time. If all men let a single smash-up or a series of disasters floor them permanently, most of the world's work would be at a stand still. Some of the foremost leaders among the captains of industry are those who went down struggling, continued to resist and then arose, fighting all the way, to regain the top rung of the ladder again. Long deferred hope takes a stout heart to bear up against. In this case the unfortunate man had been waiting many weeks for a letter from his wife, that did not come. Possibly that would have been the means of lifting him out of the slough of despond in which periodic inebriety had plunged him. Perhaps she had grown weary of his many promises to reform. Even though such might have been the case, the letter might have applied just the leverage sufficient to lift him above his lower self, away from the down-dragging clutch of his baser appetites. When one knows what strange miracles of moral regeneration are wrought, one hesitates to declare any man irredeemably "down and out." It is not for the man himself to apply that stigma' to his own being. It is not true that the real heroes in life's struggles are not those who succeed, but: those who try, ‘try again?