Covenanter Witness Vol. 55 - Rparchives.org

vain."creature."Failure ThatSucceedsSermon preached at the opening of Synod by the outgoing Moderator, Rev. A. Guthrie, B.A., Ph.D."I have laboured in Isa. 49:4"Forasmuch as ye know that your labour is not invain in the Lord." I Cor. 15:58.Apparent Success May Be Real FailureWe all know how much success is coveted inevery walk and province of life, and we know alsohow very difficult it is to achieve it in a degree thatwill command the respect of our fellow-men andbring satisfaction to ourselves. We may have stoodthe test of a gruelling competition and gained theprize, but what do we grasp in our hands? Is it notoften something which has already turned to dustand ashes ? No sooner have we scaled one height thananother looms on the horizon ahead beckoning usonward and upward. The peak is never the peak andthe summit has always to be reached. In every success there is failure, how deep we may not tell, and inevery failure there is success which we may not estimate. It is given to a very few to achieve success inthe commonly accepted sense of the word, but howmany successes are among the seeming failures oflife, who shall say ? Robert Louis Stevenson has putthe case very strongly: "There is one element inhuman destiny," he writes, "that not blindness itselfcan controvert, whatever else we are intended to do,we are not intended to succeed. Failure is the fateallotted. It is so in every art and study: it is sowell."above all in the continent art of livingAn old Greek philosopher, the wisest of his race,nearly four centuries before Christ drew from hisimagination a picture of the ideal, righteous man. Itwas an essential feature in the portrait that heshould be misrepresented and misunderstood; that,though righteous, he should be considered unrighteous; that he should meet with persecution andshame; and last of all a strange instinctive prophecy he was to die on the gibbet. This old philosopher was right. It was essential that the ideal manshould fail, utterly fail, in life. Christ's perfectionscould only be manifested by entire failure. This failure is the most brilliant jewel in His heavenly crown ;the richest portion of the inheritance which He hasbequeathed to us.What is the meaning of all this ? Are we doomedto fail utterly and unreservedly ? Is our destiny simply to be beaten and baffled? The answer must be,No. We believe there is such a thing as failure thatsucceeds.Apparent Failure May Be Real SuccessTo begin with, the very fact of failure impliessuccess of some kind. It is only as man rises in thescale of being that it becomes possible for him tofail. In the non-human realm of Nature there is nosuch thing as failure. The animal does not fail, thetree does not fail, the mountain does not fail. Thesong of the birds in the trees does not speak of failure. And when we come to think of it we have to admit that it takes high qualities to fail on the grandSeptember 21, 1955scale. The little commonplace man has his little commonplace ideal and achieves it without much difficulty, and even if he misses what he aims at, hisfrustration scarcely deserves to be dignified withthe name of failure. But think now of the man whocannot and who will not be satisfied with anythingbut the best, no matter what his line may be,andthere indeed you find the failure. The thing is unavoidable. For the loftier the man's standard theless is his chance of reaching it. He is never satisfied with present attainments, ever pressing ontowards the heights, ever aspiring in that heavenlycontest of which God only and the angels are spectators. Such failure is rooted in real success. It isonly the man who by the grace of God has risen tothe loftier ranges of life and manhood who can sayhe has failed. A noble failure is a finer and a greater, and in the truest sense, a far more successfulthing than a mean success. Success at the lowerlevels of living often spells failure at the higher, andthe converse is also true that failure on the lowerlevels may be success at the higher. The acquisitionof wealth is still, alas, accepted as the greatest testof what a man is worth. And yet how often a man'ssuccess at this low level means abject failure on thehigher planes of living. How often does it mean deviation from uprightness, the destruction of thewhole spirit of charity, the degradation of the soul,the sacrifice of principle, character, convictions,truthfulness, even what the world deems honour!Shall this when brought before the Judge of all theearth be proclaimed success or failure?The Hidden Successes in Our FailuresThat fact is, few of us know whether we succeedor fail, because the greatest results of our life's workare always hidden from us. Often we think our labour is in vain when we are being most successful.This is a matter of ordinary experience. Think ofVirgil in despair directing that his immortal workshould be burned after his death. Think of Calvin,near his end, declaring to those around him: "Allthat I have done has been of no value,and I am amiserable And did not Paul himself, afterall his miraculous achievements, tremble lest in theend he should be found to have been a useless worker. It very often happens that the most useful andthe most serviceable men are found ready to echoIsaiah's complaint and to rate their wonderful accomplishments at practically nothing. One reason isa deep Christian humility which sees only the greatness of what God has done in Christ, but still we areentitled to draw the conclusion that the thing weare least capable of estimating aright is the successor failure of our own life and work. We work forsome great end, we strive for the recognition of somegreat principle ; but when the result that we expecteddoes not come in the form in which we expected it,or at the time when we expect it, we accuse ourselves of inadequacy. But if our toiling has beenfaithful, God and sometimeshistory too will pass181