We limit our receipts. The Creator can not give us more than we will allow Him. What we get must come through our mental avenues, and, if these are closed by ourselves, even the Almighty can not reach us with abundance.
Have you not known people too contemptible to get very much out of life, anyway? It pains them to give up anything. They think every dollar they get is theirs. They do not look upon themselves as trustees for the general benefit of their fellow men.
It is the large-hearted, generous, magnanimous man that gets the blessings. He who gives out gets back; our own acts determine our harvest. If we are liberal and openhanded, our harvest will be rich and abundant.
Small souls cut off their own supply. They limit what they get by their narrowness, pinchiness.
The Good Book gives us the recipe for getting. “Give and it shall be given unto thee.” “To him that hath shall be given.”
It ought to make you feel mean to slip a nickel, or less, into the contribution box of your church, which you pretend means so much to you.
Others may not see, or know of your stingy gift. But you know that such a thing would be considered mean and contemptible between business men. And what shall we say of such a transaction between yourself and your God?
I have seen people who were well fixed in life put coppers into the contribution box, just because they thought others would not know how much they gave.
What stories of lying, of deception, the church contribution box could tell! How mortified, humiliated, disgraced many men would be if these boxes could tell the truth to the congregation!
Some people who would be liberal on a subscription paper, because other people would know what they gave, would cheat their God when the contribution box was passed.
If you can not be conscientious in your giving to your Maker, can there be any conscientiousness in your character? If you are not true to your God, will you be true to your fellow men or true to yourself?
Character: The Grandest Thing in the World
Chapter III. The Great-Hearted
Chapter IV. A North-Star Course
Chapter V. Intrepidity of Spirit
Chapter VI. “A Fragment of the Rock of Ages”
Chapter VII. The Wealth of the Commonwealth
Chapter VIII. The Apollo Belvidere and the Venus di Milo
Chapter IX. Cultivating the Growth of Man-Timber
Chapter I.
A Grand Character
If Henry Drummond was wise in calling an abstract quality, Love, the Greatest Thing in the World – then Love in the concrete, embodied in Character, is the Grandest Thing in the World. Drummond himself, in his life-story, is far grander than anything he ever wrote, for his was “the life of a radiant personality.”
“You met him,” says Dr. George Adam Smith, his biographer, “a graceful, well-dressed gentleman, tall and lithe, with a swing in his walk and a brightness in his face, who seemed to carry no cares, and to know neither presumption nor timidity. You spoke, and found him keen for any of a hundred interests. He fished, he shot, he skated, as few can; he played cricket; he would go any distance to see a fire or a football match. He had a new story or a new puzzle or a new joke every time he met you. Was it on the street? He drew you to watch two messenger-boys meet, grin, knock each other’s hat off, lay down their baskets, and enjoy a friendly chaffer at marbles. Was it on the train? He read you a fresh tale of his favorite—Bret Harte. Was it a rainy afternoon in a country house? He described a new game, and in five minutes everybody was in the thick of it. If it was a children’s party, they clamored for his sleight-of-hand.” Drummond as a boy was manly, and as a man he carried a boy’s heart in his breast.
“The Prince,” he was called by the young men who knew him. “He had a genius for friendship,” says Professor Grose. He so won the affection of workingmen that one said, after Drummond died, that he almost felt as if he must pray to him—to invoke his influence for good, from out the heavenly realms.
“His influence,” says Ian Maclaren, who first knew Drummond as a boy on the cricket field, “more than that of any other man I met, was mesmeric—which means that, while other men affect their fellows by speech and example, he seized one directly by his living personality. Quite sensible and unromantic people grew uneasy in his presence, and roused themselves to resistance,--as one might do who recognized a magician, and feared his spell. Men were at once arrested, interested, fascinated by the very sight of the man, and could not take their eyes off him. It was as if the prince of one’s imagination had dropped in among common folk.”
He was the youth who sprang to the aid of Moody and Sankey in the Scottish stronghold, who caught hold of young men and persuaded them in untechnical phrase to do what their praying mothers on earth and God Most High would have them do; the quiet, restrained evangelist, not twenty-three, about whom all men gathered as their leader when the American evangelists left Scotland. A stalwart theologian, too, was he, who detected the natural laws that were at work in the spiritual world—a thinker simple, clear, presenting truth in the concrete. He, too, was the explorer plunging into the wilds of Africa, without giving a thought to a bookmaker’s fame; and while a quarter of a million people were reading his books, he was crowding along the work of the hour at the world’s end in America or Australia.
How eagerly men sought him, clung to him, an followed him as he followed the Master!
Do we ask – What is Character? Is it not that sum of qualities which distinguishes one person from another? Do we say that Drummond’s versatility was his distinguishing characteristic? It was, rather, his unique combination of high qualities; and no man can acquire a far-reaching influence without a fair mental balance, with great strength upon many sides.
If it is no part of my intent, in this booklet, to catalogue those mental and moral traits of most value to mankind, yet it is my intent to name certain deep-rooted dispositions, which are essential in the mental make-up of those who set before themselves a high ideal in seeking for the Grandest Thing in the World.
