On the personal answer to that question depends all the success or the failure; all the nobleness or the unworthiness of the individual life. No one can estimate too ardently, or too earnestly, the spiritual salvation of keeping faith with the exalted moment,--
"Delayed, it may be, for more lives yet, Through worlds I shall traverse--not a few, With much to learn and much to forget"--
ere the golden hour of fulfilment shall come; but faith in the exalted moment is but another name for faith in God.
The great truth of life--that which we may well hold as its central and controlling and dominating truth--is that "our best moments are not departures from ourselves, but are really the only moments in which we have truly been ourselves." These moments flash upon the horizon of the soul and vanish; they image themselves before us as in vision, and fade; but the fact of their appearance is its own proof of their deep reality. They are the substance compared with which all the lower and lesser experiences are mere phantasmagoria.
And this fulfilment is not found, but made. It is a spiritual achievement. So let one not reject, or ignore, or be despairing before undreamed-of, unexplained, and incomprehensible forms of trial, but know that it is trial that worketh patience; know that "no chastening for the present seemeth to be joyous, but grievous; nevertheless, afterward it yieldeth the peaceable fruits of righteousness unto them which are exercised thereby."
"It was given unto me," wrote Dante in the _Vita Nuova_, "to behold a very wonderful vision; wherein I saw things that determined me."
It may be given to any one at any time to behold the vision. Circumstances are fluidic and impressionable, and take on any form that the mental power has achieved sufficient strength to stamp, and because of this--which is the explanation of the outward phenomena whose significance, on the spiritual side, is all condensed in prayer--one need never despond or despair. At any instant he can so unite his own will with the divine will that new combinations of event and circumstance will appear in his life. A writer on this line of thought has recently said:--
"There is an elemental essence--a strange living essence--which surrounds us on every side, and which is singularly susceptible to the influence of human thought.