A Key to Success Term Paper

1. Galileo Galilei
Galileo Galilei was an Italian physicist, engineer, astronomer, and linguist. Among those fields, it is the astronomy he made the most significant contribution to. Van Helden states that, in the summer of 1609, Galileo first heard about the newly invented telescope and built his own improved version in the late autumn (81-84). He started a study of the sky and became the first to claim that the Milky Way consists of billions of stars and Saturn has its rings.

According to Leveillee, his observations and calculations made him stick to the theory claiming that the Earth revolves around the Sun and not vice versa. As a consequence, he was told not to spread his teachings as they contradict to the Holy Scriptures.

Peebles states that after the church threatened Galileo with tortures, he abandoned his beliefs. Still, he was made to spend the rest of his life under house arrest, where he died in 1642.

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2. John Calvin
John Calvin was a French theologian, reformer of the church, and the founder of Calvinism. Calvin’s personality sharply differs from the other reformers: he was a scientist, a theorist, and a skillful politician at the same time. Basten and Betz define Calvinism as a branch of Protestantism and the doctrine of predestination, which means that God has chosen a small percentage of humanity for eternal life. However, this glory can only be manifested when the church conforms to the requirements of the Holy Scriptures, keeps the Word of God clean, and strictly maintains the church discipline (67-91). McKim states that Calvin was the first to voice the view called ‘total depravity’. It lies in the idea that sin dominates people so that they are unable to avoid it (71-72). Calvin’s studies have caused new branches to appear, namely: Amyraldism, Hyper-Calvinism, New Calvinism, and Neo-Calvinism, and they exist and develop together with orthodox Calvinism.

3. Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe was an American writer, poet, essayist, literary critic, editor, and a representative of American Romanticism. He is the founder of the modern detective and psychological prose. However, this exceptionally talented man encountered a number of hardships throughout his life. In his early childhood, he lost both of his parents. Later, he enrolled at the university but decided to quit when realized that his first love was getting married. He had huge debts because of gambling, and his adopter disowned him. Moreover, Poe’s first wife also died. From time to time, life problems were accumulating to an extremely high point. To escape an upcoming psychological breakdown, he started drinking, which only worsened the situation (Symons). Poe gained his worldwide fame during life, but remained poor. A few days before his death, he had met his friend. Poe was in a serious condition: he could not move on his own or talk coherently. He was wearing dirty and tattered clothes, which were not his own, and didn’t remember what had happened to him. Next day, in the hospital, Poe experienced convulsions and delirium, and before the death, he was repeatedly calling someone by name ‘Reynolds’.

4. Helen Keller
Helen Keller is an American writer, teacher, and public figure. She was born on June 27, 1880, in a loving family. Before she reached the age of two, she had been affected by an unknown illness, which had made her deaf and blind. She could not grow up like everyone else, so her family found her a tutor. It was a young teacher Anne Sullivan, who was also visually impaired (Keller). Under the guidance of Sullivan, Helen learned to understand and speak by the method of Thados. The method was performed as follows: Keller touched the lips of somebody who was speaking while Sullivan was marking the letters on her palm. Later, she also learned to read English, French, German, Greek, and Latin based on the Braille method.

In 1888, Helen began attending classes at the Perkins School for the Blind. Eighteen years later, she got a permission to study at the Radcliffe College. Keller gained worldwide fame as a lecturer and an author: she wrote a total of 12 books and several articles. What is more, she was remembered as an attorney for those who were incapacitated. All in all, she is known for her unique desire for knowledge and the strength to fight for what she deserved.

5. Margaret Higgins Sanger
Margaret Higgins Sanger was born on September 14, 1879. She is known as an American activist and the founder of the American Birth Control League. Sanger opened the first birth control clinic in the United States and founded an establishment known today as the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.

Sanger was often giving lectures for women in churches and at home. In 1914, she published the first issue of The Woman Rebel, an eight-page newspaper promoting contraception. She was asserting that every woman is “the absolute mistress of her own body” (Urger). One of the goals of the publication of the Women’s rebel was to provoke public outcry against the laws prohibiting to voice information about contraception. Consequently, her works became the reason she was brought to trial. In order to escape imprisonment and keep leading the movement, she moved to England and changed her name (Baker, 89). Today her views about contraception and abortion are not accepted by the church. Moreover, some people claim that an embryo is already a human, so that abortion equals to a murder.

A Key to Success
There is only one cause of failures, which lies in giving up too early. Everybody faces difficulties and mishaps, but those are only temporary troubles. Therefore, to stop trying always means losing a chance of success, and if one is willing to actually achieve something, he/she should never let the problems influence the decisions.

Specifically, one of the brightest examples of that type of behavior was Edgar Allan Poe. He was writing and publishing his books one after another, developing new genres, but he was not rewarded for his work and stayed poor until the end of his life. However, his hard work made him worldwide famous. It was his true passion for the literature that made him continue writing despite every problem and the tragedy he faced.

Another example is Galileo Galilei, whose passion for astronomy became a motivation to make his discoveries and voice his theories. He was the cause of many breakthroughs in this field, for example, he developed a telescope, was first to claim Saturn has its rings, and found evidence of the universe to be heliocentric. However, his works run afoul of the Church and the Holy Scriptures, so he was threatened to be tortured. From the beginning, Galileo knew he would face problems as Copernicus did, but he was risking his life for the sake of knowledge.

In some cases, on the chosen path to success, you may have to deny everything you believed before. It is psychologically difficult, but it is what John Calvin did by voicing his point of view, which led to the appearance of Calvinism. He voiced his views for the first time when he was writing a speech for the rector of his university. As an author of this controversial text, Calvin faced religious persecution. He left Paris for some period, changed his name, and hid in the south of France but never denied his beliefs.

Moreover, Margaret Sanger’s doctrine was not accepted and still remains controversial. She was fighting for the women’s rights through publishing educational material on birth control, lectured for women on contraception, and contributed a lot to today’s women’s freedom and ability to make their own decisions. However, this became the cause of her arrest. It made her escape to England and change name but did not make her betray her principles and give up work of her life.

Significantly, an absolute determination to succeed can work miracles. From the early childhood, Helen Keller lost her sight and hearing and had no way to communicate with the others. However, she developed her own signs to “talk” to her family. Right after that, with the assistance of her teacher and friend Anne Sullivan, Keller learned how to speak, understand the language, and distinguish letters. Such step-by-step learning allowed her to read various languages by the Braille techniques, to graduate from college, and to leave 12 books in a legacy.

All in all, if someone proposes a great idea or establishes an objective, there always will be those who are against it. It is the matter of choice whether to listen or to ignore them. There will be mishaps and obstacles in life. However, if it is the goal of the whole life, a person will see no obstacles.

Works Cited
Baker, Jean H. Margaret Sanger: a Life of Passion. Hill & Wang, 2011, p. 89.
Basten, Christoph, and Frank Betz. “Beyond Work Ethic: Religion, Individual, and Political Preferences”. American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, vol 5, no. 3, 2013, pp. 67-91. American Economic Association, doi:10.1257/pol.5.3.67.
Keller, Helen. “The Story of My Life”. Digital.Library.Upenn.Edu, 1903, http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/keller/life/life.html. Accessed 31 July 2018.
Leveillee, Nicholas P. “Copernicus, Galileo, and the Church: Science in a Religious World”. Inquiries Journal, 2011, http://www.inquiriesjournal.com/articles/1675/copernicus-galileo-and-the-church-science-in-a-religious-world. Accessed 1 Aug 2018.
McKim, Donald K. Introducing the Reformed Faith. Westminster John Knox Press, 2001, p. 280.
Peebles, Curtis. “Asteroids”. Google Books, 2006, https://books.google.com.ua/books?id=RbDkCwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false. Accessed 1 Aug 2018.
Symons, Julian. The Life and Works of Edgar Allen Poe. House of Stratus, 2014, p. 284.
Unger, Nancy C. “Beyond Nature’s Housekeepers”. Google Books, 2012, https://books.google.com/books/about/Beyond_Nature_s_Housekeepers.html?id=1h5sr_WdWQkC. Accessed 1 Aug 2018.
Van Helden, Albert. “Galileo, Telescopic Astronomy, and the Copernican System”. Planetary Astronomy From The Renaissance To The Rise Of Astrophysics, Part A, Tycho Brahe To Newton, Rene Taton and Curtis Wilson, 2nd ed., Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2003, pp. 81-84, https://books.google.com.ua/books?id=hMgXh8jMSGgC. Accessed 1 Aug 2018.