absolute surrender, consecration and devotion of self to all that is better and purer and truer, is the secret of character-building. By a consuming zeal for all that is noble and excellent our love of self becomes softened and clarified. By constant contemplation of excellence we clear our selfhood of all dress and impurities. We let go all things which we cannot carry into the eternal life.
It is this sublime living that stamps the features. What is more beautiful than the face of Mrs. Oliphant, of Mr. Gladstone, and of a vast number of figures that are not printed for fashion plates?
“Let any one,” says Charles Kingsley, “set his heart to do what is right and nothing else, and it will not be long ere his brow is stamped with all that goes to make up the heroic expression, with a noble indignation, noble self-restraint, great hope, great sorrows, perhaps even with the print of the martyr’s crown of thorns.”
Where certain lines in the face of Gladstone came from we learn by such incidents as that related by Sir Francis Crossley, to whom it was told by the vicar of St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields. The vicar had recently been to see a crossing-sweeper in his parish, who was ill.
“Has anyone been to see you?” “Yes, Mr. Gladstone.”
“But how came he to visit you?” inquired the vicar, who could not understand why the Chancellor of the Ex-chequer, although then living in the parish, should call upon a sick crossing-tender.
“Well,” answered the crossing-sweeper, “he always had a nice word for me when he passed my crossing, and when I was not there he missed me. He asked my mate, who has taken my place, where I was, and when he heard that I was ill he asked for my address, and put it down on paper. So he called to see me.”
“And what did he do?” asked the vicar.
“Why, he read to me from the Bible and prayed,” was the reply.
To be loyal to the highest interests of every man, how characteristic was this of the magnanimous Gladstone! Indeed, how Christ-like was such service!
So, too, there is an anecdote of Charles N. Crittendon. When his own daughter entered into Our Father’s House he gave his entire time to carrying the divine message of peace and good-will to those who rarely heard it. And he established homes of refuge for those homeless women who sought to walk in new paths of life.
I never read the life-stories of Mrs. Judson, Mrs. Snow, Miss Brittain, Miss West, without feeling that the heroic age of our race has just begun.
And let me ask what member of a Christian church was ever more self-devoted than John, the felon? He was a man of coarse features, close- cropped hair, and of a shuffling gait. He asked for a position as a nurse in a yellow-fever epidemic at Memphis. The doctor refused him.
“I wish to nurse,” persisted the stranger. “Try me for a week. If you don’t like me, then dismiss me; if you do, pay me my wages.”
“Very well,” said the doctor, “I’ll take you; although, to be candid, I hesitate to do so.” Then he added mentally, “I’ll keep my eye on him.”
But the man soon proved that he needed nobody’s eye upon him. In a few weeks he had become one of the most valuable nurses on that heroic force. He was tireless and self-denying. Wherever the pestilence raged most fiercely he worked hardest. The suffering and the sinking adored him. To the neglected and the forgotten his rough face was the face of an angel.
He acted so strangely on pay-days, however, that he was followed through back streets to an obscure place, where he was seen to put his whole week’s earnings into a relief-box for the benefit of the yellow-fever sufferers. Not long afterwards he sickened and died of the plague; and when his body was prepared for its unnamed grave, for he never told who he was, a livid mark was found which showed that John, the nurse, had been branded as a convicted felon. How fitting his epitaph! “I was sick, and ye visited me.”
“There is but one pursuit in life,” says Colton, “which it is in the power of all to follow and all to attain: this is the pursuit of virtue.” “It is this commanding worth, this personal power,” says Emerson, “which is crowned in all companies.” Nor was there ever a more signal instance of it, dear to the heart of our English-speaking people, than occurred at Lord Stratford’s Crimean war dinner party, when the old officers were invited to write secretly upon a slip of paper the name connected with that war most likely to descend to posterity with renown; every paper bore the name, “Florence Nightingale.” “The lady with the light”—she it was who won the highest fame in that war of the Orient.
“Within a few hours only of the arrival of herself and her little band of nurses,” says the record, “many hundred wounded men were brought in from the fight at Balaklava, and a little later thousands more from the field of Inkerman. Nothing was ready, everything was to be done, and it was her task to bring order out of a chaos of misery. She sometimes stood, during her first week in charge, twenty consecutive hours issuing directions; and she made it a point, when matters were running in routine order, to give her personal attention to the worst and most appalling cases.”
“Her nerve,” said a surgeon who worked with her, “was wonderful. I have been with her at very severe operations; she was more than equal to the trial. The more awful to every sense any particular case, especially if it was that of a dying man, the more surely would her slight form be seen bending over him, administering to his ease in every way in her power, and seldom quitting his side till death released him.”
“She would speak to one and to another, and nod and smile to as many more,” said a soldier, “but she couldn’t do it to all, you know,--we lay there by hundreds; but we could kiss her shadow as it fell, and lay our heads on the pillow again content.”
Another said, “Before she come, there was such cussin’ and swearin’; and after that it was as holy as a church!”
How closely are these anecdotes related to the divine life in man, and how greatly they enhance the sacredness of his personality! It is this which sets one apart, and we instinctively maintain a reserve toward those whose princely lives are so honored by unique acts of fidelity to God and to man.
It is this rigid and unquestioning adherence to duty which Mrs. Anna Jameson calls “the cement which binds the whole moral edifice together: without which all power, goodness, intellect, truth, happiness, and love itself, can have no permanence.”
If a man’s religion is of the right sort, will it not sharpen his faculties, quicken his energies, heighten his self-respect, give solidity to his character, and enhance both his usefulness and his prospect of success? In the sublimest flights of the soul, rectitude is never surmounted, love is never outgrown.
And by it are we not akin to the highest beings in the universe, and even to the Most High? It was during our Civil war that a soldier lay long upon his dying cot, counting the days, then the hours, of his discharge; and under his pillow was found this dedication of himself which indicated his faith in the highest kinship of the soul: “I give to a patient God my patient heart.”
Chapter V.
Intrepidity of Spirit
He’s true to God who’s true to man:
Wherever wrong is done
To
