Explore "The Laurel Bush" by Dinah Mulock on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
What is a "wrecked" life? One which the waves of inexorable fate have beaten to pieces, or one that, like an unseaworthy ship, is ready to go down in any waters? What most destroy us? the things we might well blame ourselves for, only we seldom do, our follies, blunders, errors, not counting actual sins? or the things for which we can blame nobody but Providence -- if we dared -- such as our losses and griefs, our sicknesses of body and mind, all those afflictions which we call "the visitation of God? " Ay, and so they are, but not sent in wrath, or for ultimate evil. No amount of sorrow need make any human life harmful to man or unholy before God, as a discontented, unhappy life must needs be unholy in the sight of Him who in the mysterious economy of the universe seems to have one absolute law -- He wastes nothing. He modifies, transmutes, substitutes, re-applies material to new uses; but apparently by Him nothing is ever really lost, nothing thrown away.
Therefore, I incline to believe, when I hear people talking of a "wrecked" existence, that whosoever is to blame, it is not Providence.