Page:Path of Vision; pocket essays of East and West.djvu/22

 swimmer, as Thoreau says, and go our way;—this is the practical workaday spirituality which either points to us the path of vision or unfolds before us, according to our degree of enlightenment, one or more of its hidden secrets. Which is a reward greater and more enduring than anything the world can give. It is the harmony we achieve within us; the satisfaction we feel in a healthy, strength-giving reaction; the knowledge and power that every noble, unselfish deed affords; the only reward, after all, in our triumphs and our only consolation in defeat. Nay, there is no such thing as defeat for those who achieve harmony within. There is no such thing as disappointment for those who continue to cherish the selflessness of which is born the noblest inner self. There is no such thing as failure for those who invest in the potentialities of the Ideal of the Soul. And no matter how humble and obscure, how poor or how rich in the material things of the earth, the spiritually-bound and spiritually-directed of men,