stern necessity to conquer or die, rose up from this as from many another defeat and stalked forth defiantly, even menacingly, at the last, against the combined armies of Europe, and compelled them to forego their purpose to divide his little kingdom among them, and to recognize Prussia as thereafter one of the five great powers of Europe, a rank which since she has easily maintained. The will of Frederick II. made the Germany of to-day, and in it, and by it, he yet lives on earth.

Footprints of Failure.

REV. JAMES W. COLE, B.D.

HAT if you and I should make a failure of life? One of the lamentable facts about a failure is that it can never

be a blank. Always somebody or something suffers loss by it. For our failures strike two ways,-backward and forward; backward to those whose hopes for our success are blasted, and whose pain we cannot measure, and forward to one's posterity, who will never cease to be affected by it. By far the worst part of a wrong act or course of life is its effect upon the future of those who were in no wise responsible for the wrong. What burdens are laid on others by our failures! "Gather up my influence and bury it with me," cried a dying man. As well ask us to turn back the stars in their courses. Why! the influence of the first man has not yet ceased on earth, though sixty centuries have elapsed since he departed.

And, then, very many failures might be so easily avoided if we only knew, or if we gave heed when we knew! He who has gone over a road can tell its dangerous places and bypaths; and, if he has placed danger signals there to warn fellow travelers, they surely ought not to neglect such signs and deliberately court harm and loss by ignoring his kind foresight and care for them. Yet, notwithstanding the many eminent examples of successful business life that have been furnished to them, it is said that ninety-three per cent. of the merchants of this country either become bankrupt, or fail to gain a competency, and so die poor. Why is it that so many fail and so few succeed? He who will solve this problem is surely a benefactor to mankind. In the city of Boston, for instance, it has

been found that within a period of forty years nine hundred and forty-four out of a thousand business men either failed in their business, or died poor men, while again, taking the United States as a whole, not one man in four, at his death, ever leaves property enough to require a will, or an executor; and this, too, in the richest country on the earth!

Is man then made to toil in vain, or is there a cause for these failures? I know indeed that men talk of nature as being constructed and run only in accord with what they call "the survival of the fittest," and that all her rewards are to be given only to the few of mighty will or passion who rightly swallow up the substance, if they do not the person, of the many. I do not believe it. I do not believe that failure is the normal lot of man, no more than I believe that pain is his natural condition. Nature has made no provision in the human body for pain. There is no contrivance nor organ whatever for it. If pain comes, it comes as a result of violating nature's wise and beneficent laws for the well-being of the body. Man was not made for pain, and, be it noted, pain is always in the first instances caused by taking into the body an element foreign to it, and the sensation we call pain is nature's protest against its presence. Pain is not ingrained in nature, and, when it comes to us, it comes as a friend to warn us, or, at the last, as a sheriff to arrest the persistent transgressor.

You may carry the analogy if you please into business life. Man was made for success. Yet the multitudes fail. And then we say that success is the exception and failure the rule of life. Not so. The simple fact is that very many men enter upon a business career foredoomed to failure because they ignore the greatest of all laws, the law of righteousness.

Whether you believe it or not, this world was constructed according to righteousness, and the surest way to lose its gold is to forsake or ignore the God who made the gold for humanity's need. True, there are many who consider goodness as naturally and necessarily opposed to the accumulation of wealth, and who stoutly affirm that righteousness is not a factor to be con

sidered in trade,—especially in Wall street, or at a horse mart. Yet, over against such teaching stands the mighty fact that all the world's great mines and all the vast resources of her material wealth are to-day in the hands of avowedly Christian nations, while more than five-sixths of all the property and of all the great money producing enterprises in England, and in the United States, are controlled and conducted by avowedly moral if not by professedly Christian men. Hence it is rather late in the ages to attempt to teach men that the sure way to obtain wealth is to forsake the God who created that wealth.

Why, if there is one fact that stands out like a mighty mountain peak towering over all others, it is this, that virtue is the indispensable condition among men for obtaining security of person and of property, and for maintaining peace, and for securing human happiness.

All the regulations for human society among civilized peoples are made to protect virtue, and to repress vice. And the more advanced the civilization becomes, the more indispensable, both to the individual and to society, is virtue found to be. Suppose, for a moment, that the regulations governing men were now reversed so that they fostered and protected vice, and punished and suppressed virtue; what a monstrous, inhuman condition of affairs it would be! Whose purity, property, honor, or good name would be secure? Indeed, who could gain wealth or a good name under such conditions? So, then, whether experience has taught men that virtue is a necessity of civilization, or whether virtue is imbedded in the very constitution of nature, still the one great fact confronts us, that in order to gain a success at all worthy of the name, we must be virtuous, that is, righteous, for that is the same thing. And it is because they ignore this fundamental fact of nature that so many men in every decade are financially and morally ruined.

Listen to this true recital. On the fourteenth day of September, 1836, at Port Richmond, Staten Island, an old man lay dying. He was desolate, friendless, hopeless, and poor, so poor as to have been in his last years dependent on the charity of a

Scotch woman who had known him in other days. Yet, this man had been born to fortune and to fame, for his father was a man of wealth and large attainments. But few, if any, young men have ever had better opportunities for obtaining eminent success. Nature had endowed this man with all her finest gifts. He was so brilliant of intellect as to be fitted to enter Princeton College at eleven years of age. His father had been president of that institution, and was one of the foremost men of his time, whether as educator, scholar, author, or preacher. His mother was the noblest daughter of the most renowned clergyman New England ever produced. His sister had, while living, been the wife of one of the chief justices of Connecticut, and this dying, forsaken old man had himself once been vice-president of the United States, and he might easily have been its president, honored and honorable in life and in death, if he had not despised the law of righteousness, and substituted intrigue and an iron will for moral principles wherewith to guide his life.

Do you ask how came he, who had been so nobly born, to make so fearful a mistake? He had stood one time at the parting of ways where God calls men, and another man had directed him wrong. It happened on this wise: When a student in college at the age of fifteen, his soul was greatly stirred by a religious revival then sweeping over the place, and the president of the college, to whom he went for advice in the hour of his soul's need, had called the religious fervor "fanaticism"; and, when still unsatisfied, some months later, he again sought instruction of another noted divine, similar advice was given him, and he believed them, and then Aaron Burr forsook the faith of his father and mother for the then popular and loose morality of Lord Chesterfield. It was the fruits of this apostasy that led men to distrust the most brilliant lawyer of his day, and caused his own political party to forsake him; and that then led him to seek to retrieve on the "field of honor" (!) his waning political fortunes by taking the life of his rival, Alexander Hamilton, at Weehawken, N. J., on that fatal early morning of July 7th, 1804. And then came in rapid succession his flight for