inmost fiber of our being, and the resultant of these impressions is our character. The study of books, of music, or of the fine arts is not essential to a lofty character. It rests with the workman whether a rude piece of marble shall be squared into a horse-block or carved into an Apollo, a Psyche, or a Venus di Milo. It is yours, if you choose, to develop a spiritual form more beautiful than any of these, instinct with immortal life, refulgent with all the glory of character. “The power of great thoughts and grand sentiments to refine the face and manner, to lift man above his surroundings, is marvelous. We see this illustrated in the faces of great scientists, great reformers, and great statesmen.” The body is but a servant of the mind. A well-balanced, cultured, and well- disciplined intellect reacts very powerfully upon the physique, and tends to bring it into harmony with itself. On the other hand, a weak, vacillating, one-sided, unsteady, and ignorant mind will ultimately bring the body into sympathy with it. Every pure and uplifting thought, every noble aspiration for the good and the true, every longing of the heart for a higher and better life, every lofty purpose and unselfish endeavor, reacts upon the body, makes it stronger, more harmonious, and more beautiful.
The influence of artistic work depicting character, in sculpture or painting, comes down to us from remote ages. We never weary of the antique forms of perfected beauty. Is Michael Angelo dead? Ask the hundreds of thousands who have gazed with rapt souls upon his immortal works at Rome. In how many thousands of lives has he lived and reigned!
“There is,” says Dr. J.R. Miller, “always something pouring out from our lives, like heat from a flame of perfume from a flower. Many a life has been started on a career of beauty and blessing by the influence of a noble act. Every true soul is impressed continually by the glimpses it has of loveliness, of holiness, or of nobleness in others.”
There are men and women in every country who conquer before they speak, and who exert an influence out of all proportion to their ability; and people wonder what is the secret of their power over men. It is natural for all classes to believe in and to follow character, for character is power.
“When Raphael was a boy of seventeen he went to study with the artist, Perugino. It was discovered, some time afterwards, that soon after the apprenticeship of Raphael began, the style of Perugino changed. His work was chastened by an unexpected tenderness of feeling and the candor of expression; his color acquired a brightness and sweetness of modulation unknown to him before, and this because a boy had come to be taught by him, and had thrown the influence of his life about his master’s heart.”
Every one, however humble, is daily and hourly altering and molding the character of all with whom he mingles, and exerting a power that will reproduce itself through countless generations.
Our manners, our bearing, our presence, tell the story of our lives, though we do not speak; and the influence of every act is felt in the utmost part of the globe. Has not every man that ever lived contributed something toward making me what I am? Has not the chisel of every member of society contributed a blow to the marble of my life, and influenced its destiny?
“If we work upon marble, it will perish,” said Webster; “if upon brass, time will efface it; if we rear temples, they will crumble into dust; but if we work upon immortal minds—if we imbue them with principles, with the just fear of God and love of our fellowmen—we engrave on those tablets something which will brighten through all eternity.”
Chapter IX.
Cultivating the Growth of Man-Timber
God give us men. A time like this demands
Strong minds, great hearts, true faith, and ready hands:
Men whom the lust of office does not kill;
Men whom the spoils of office cannot buy;
Men who possess opinions and a will;
Men who have honor—men who will not lie;
Men who can stand before a demagogue
And scorn his treacherous flatteries without winking;
Tall men, sun-crowned, who live above the fog
I public duty, and in private thinking.
All the world cries, “Where is the man who will save us? We want a man!” Don’t look so far for this man. You have him at hand. This man—it is you, it is I; it is each one of us! . . . How to constitute one’s self a man? Nothing harder, if one knows not how to will it; nothing easier, if one wills it.
–Alexander Dumas
As there is nothing in the world great but man, there is nothing truly great in man but character. –W.M. Evarts
Life is a leaf of paper white,
Whereon each one of us may write
His word or two, and then comes night.
Greatly begin! Though thou have time
But for a line, be that sublime,--
Not failure, but low aim, is crime. –Lowell
And I smiled to think God’s greatness
Flowed around my incompleteness;
Round my restlessness, his rest. –Mrs. Browning
“Character is everything,” said Charles Sumner, when upon his dying bed.
“First of all,” said President Garfield, when a boy, “I must make myself a man; if I do not succeed in that I can succeed in nothing.”
“According to the order of nature, men being equal, their common vocation is the profession of humanity,” says Rousseau, in his celebrated essay on Education. “And whoever is well educated to discharge the duty of a man cannot be badly prepared to fill any of those offices that have a relation to him. It matters little to me whether my pupil be designed for the army, the pulpit, or the bar. Nature has destined us to the offices of human life, antecedent to our destination concerning society. To live is the profession I would teach him. When I have done with him, it is true he will be neither a soldier, a lawyer, nor a divine. LET HIM FIRST BE A MAN. Fortune may remove him from one rank to another as she pleases; he will be always found in his place.”
We are, therefore, to remember, as Dr. Moxon has told us, that the main business of life is not to do, but to become; and that action itself has its finest and most enduring fruit in character.
John Stuart Mill has put this matter clearly: “The character itself should be to the individual a paramount end, simply because the existence of this ideal nobleness of character, or of a near approach to it, in any abundance, would go further than all things else toward making human life happy, both in the comparatively humble sense of pleasure and freedom from pain, and in the higher meaning of rendering life not what it now is, almost universally puerile and insignificant, but such as every human being with highly developed faculties would desire to have.”
And this, says Mill, every man is to work at: “Though our character is formed by circumstances, our own desires can do much to shape those circumstances; and what is really inspiriting and ennobling in the doctrine of free will is
