THE UNIVERSITY OF HARD KNOCKS.
A great deal of useless sympathy is in this day expended upon those who start life without social or monetary help. Those are most to be congratulated who have at the beginning a rough tussle with circumstances. John Ruskin sets it down as one of his calamities that in early life he had “nothing to endure.” A petted and dandled childhood makes a weak and insipid man. You say that Ruskin, just quoted, disproves the theory. No. He is showing in a dejected, splenetic, and irritated old age the need of the early cudgelling of adversity. He seems fretting himself to death. A little experience of the hardship of life would have helped to make him gratefully happy now. There is no brawn of character without compulsory exertion. The men who sit strong in their social, financial, and political elevations are those who did their own climbing. Misfortune is a rough nurse, but she raises giants. Let our young people, instead of succumbing to the influences that would keep them back and down, take them as the parallel bars, and dumb-bells, and weights of a gymnasium, by which they are to get muscle for the strife. Consent not to beg your way to fortune, but achieve it. God is always on the side of the man who does his best. God helps the man who tries to overcome difficulties.—Christian at Work.