"Experience is for many of us a process of emptying, of bringing us to our senses, of showing us that there is but little we are permitted to do. We start gay and confident, with a strong sense of our good intentions, our refinement, our perceptiveness, our uncommonness, and we have got to learn, most of us, that it does not count for so much after all; that we cannot hope to have a great effect upon the world, but that we must be thankful to be shown our place, and be grateful for our little bit of work. We are not meant to be hopeless and despondent about ourselves, to grovel abjectly in a sense of feebleness, to welter in ineffectiveness, of course. But we are meant to know that even if we are inside the wicket-gate, we are yet a very long way from the celestial city, and that we are better occupied in minding the road, and facing goblins, than in drawing imaginary elevations of the King's palace, or in arranging who will enter and why, in anticipating our own triumph and the blowing of heavenly trumpets. 

 It is often when a man least expects it that he finds his feet are on the steps of jacinth (Rev. 21:20), and when he is most aware of his own failure to do what he might have done, most overwhelmed by the murmurs of regret and disappointment, that the music of the melodious notes breaks serenely on the misty air." Arthur Benson.