Life’s Ups and Downs by Margaret E. Sangster

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Washington, D.C. · Dec 21, 1905

Life’s Ups and Downs

By Margaret E. Sangster

If life were a uniform level, broken by no vicissitudes and no disasters, with no strange and baffling problems alternating with its seasons of tranquillity and success, it would be, perhaps, less trying than it generally is, but also much less interesting. Nothing is more tedious than monotony. Nothing wears on the nerves like a stirless calm. The wildest gusts and storms are more acceptable to the mariner than the inaction which is compulsory when the wind moves not.

I once met an old, old lady who said that her whole life had been as placid as a summer sea. At long intervals some member of her family had died, but as she had no children, the most intimate and deep of afflictions had been spared her, and her husband still survived. Strange to say, I did not feel that she was to be envied. Without pain in this world’s economy there is little reaching forward to the heights of joy; without suffering there is seldom intensity of thankfulness; without birth-throes there is little apparent growth in the spiritual realm. Life all a plain road, no hills to climb, no obstacles to surmount, no vicissitudes to endure, is not so desirable, on the whole, as life which has its struggles, its sorrows, and its losses, preliminary as they come to the final realization of its triumphs, its consolations, and its everlasting gains.—Margaret E. Sangster.