Success Quote by Frederick William Robertson

Robertson is doing a quiet piece of rhetorical jujitsu: he keeps the hard-edged word "failure" on the table, then drains it of its usual sting by relocating the scoreboard. In a 19th-century Britain obsessed with moral self-help, industriousness, and visible "results", a clergyman had to contend with congregants trained to read their lives like ledgers. His answer is not to deny loss or disappointment but to argue that earnestness, not outcome, is the real measure of a life lived under God.

The line works because it tightens its focus with legal precision. "In God's world" is the jurisdiction shift: human institutions grade by productivity, applause, and tangible wins; the divine economy credits intention and fidelity. Robertson stacks three human-scale actions - work, word, sacrifice - to cover the major arenas where people fear futility: labor that goes unnoticed, speech that changes nothing, giving that costs too much. The repetition of "earnestly" is the hinge. It signals that sincerity is not mere sentimentality; it's a form of moral discipline, an active choosing.

Subtextually, it's pastoral triage. Robertson is consoling the exhausted do-gooder, the failed reformer, the parent watching a child drift, the believer whose prayers feel unanswered. "No... was ever made in vain" doesn't promise reward on a schedule; it offers meaning without immediate proof. That refusal is part of its power. He asks the reader to trade the brittle drama of success for a slower faith in unseen consequence - the only kind of hope that survives real life.