The British poet W. E. Henley had a leg amputated as a teenager. Yet he went on to have a career as a critic and author. As a young man Henley defiantly penned the famous “Invictus,” Latin for “unconquered.” It matters not how strait the gate, How charged with punishments the scroll, I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul. As Niebuhr points out, this is an enormous exaggeration, a view of reality distorted and “infected with the sin of pride.”87 No one wants to minimize the importance of learning to overcome obstacles in one’s life, but Henley’s success would have been
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