The Revelators of Character

XIII

The Revelators of CharacterToC

In ancient times personal property bore the owner's trademark. All flocks and herds fed together upon the common. That each might know his own, the herdsman slit the ears of his sheep, or branded his oxen with the hot iron. Afterward, as wealth increased, men extended the marks of ownership. The Emperor stamped his image into the silver coin. The Prince wrought his initial into the palace porch. The peasant moulded his name into the bricks of his cottage. One form of property was slaves. Athens had 80,000 free citizens and 400,000 bondmen. As these slaves were liable to run away, their owners branded them. Sometimes a circle was burned into the palm, or a cross upon the forehead; and often the owner's name was tattooed upon the slave's shoulder. One of the gifts of antiquity to our modern life is the use of the trademark. To-day manufacturers blow their initials in the glass; they mould the trademark in steel, and weave it in tapestries.

Lying in his dungeon, everything reminded Paul of these marks of ownership. His chains bore the Emperor's initials. The slaves that brought him food carried Nero's brand. The very bricks of his dungeon floor were stamped with the tyrant's name. But, moving out from these marks of servitude, his vision swept a wider horizon. He, too, was property. A freeman, indeed, was he, yet he was not his own. Mind and heart were stamped with God's image and superscription. No hot iron had mutilated him, but trouble had wrought refinement, and love divine had left its indelible stamp. Gone indeed the fresh, bright beauty that was his when he sat a boy at Gamaliel's feet! Since the day when the mob in Lystra had lifted stones upon him; since the time of his scourging at Philippi, he had carried the marks of martyrdom. Suffering had plowed deep furrows in his face. But honorable were all his scars. They bore witness to his conquest over ease and self-indulgence. Dear to him these marks—they bound him to his Master, the Lord Jesus. They filled him with high hopes, for the same marks that made him a bond slave to God and immortality freed him from earth and earthly things. Musing, in kingly mood, the scarred hero exclaimed: "Let not hunger nor cold, let not the scourge nor the tyrant's threat trouble me, for I bear about in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus."

Now, God hath ordained that, like Paul's, every human body shall register personal history, publishing a man's deeds, and proclaiming his allegiance to good or evil. The human face and form are clothed with dignity in that the fleshly pages of to-day show forth the soul's deeds of yesterday. Experience teaches us that occupation affects the body. Calloused hands betray the artisan. The grimy face proclaims the collier. He whose garments exhale sweet odors needs not tell us that he has lingered long in the fragrant garden. But the face and form are equally sensitive to the spirit's finer workings. Mental brightness makes facial illumination. Moral obliquity dulls and deadens the features. There never was a handsome idiot. There never can be a beautiful fool. But sweetness and wisdom will glorify the plainest face.

Physicians tell us that no intensity of disease avails for expelling dignity and majesty from a good man's countenance, nor can physical suffering destroy the sweetness and purity of a noble woman's. It is said that after his forty days in the mount Moses' face shone. All the great artists paint St. Cecilia with face uplifted, listening to celestial music, and all glowing with light, as though sunbeams falling from above had transfigured the face of the sweet singer. Those who beheld Daniel Webster during his delivery of his oration on the Pilgrim Fathers say that the statesman's face made them think of a transparent bronze statue brilliantly lighted from within, with the luminosity shining out through the countenance.

But the eyes are the soul's chiefest revelators. Tennyson spoke of King Arthur's eyes as "pools of purest love." As there is sediment in the bottom of a glass of impure water, so there is mud in the bottom of a bad man's eye. Thus, in strange ways, the body tells the story of the soul. Health hangs its signals out in rosy cheeks; disease and death foretell their story in the hectic flush, even as reddening autumn leaves foretell the winter's heavy frost; anxious lines upon the mother's face betray her secret burdens; the scholar's pallor is the revelation of his life, while the closely knitted forehead of the merchant interprets the vexing problems he must solve.

Thinking of the pathetic sadness of Lincoln's face, all seamed as it was and furrowed with care and anxiety, Secretary Stanton said that the President's face was a living page, upon which the full history of the nation's battles and victories was written. We are told that when the Waldenses could no longer bear the ghastly cruelty of the inquisitors, they fled to the mountain fastnesses. There, worn out by suffering, the brave leader was stricken by death. Coming forth from their hiding-places, the fugitives gathered around the hero's bier. Stooping, one lifted the hair from the forehead of the dead youth and said: "This boy's hair, grown thin and white through heroic toil, witnesseth his heroism. These, the marks of his fidelity." Thus, for those who have skill to read the writing, every great man's face is written all over with the literature of character. His body condenses his entire history, just as the Declaration of Independence is condensed into the limits of a tiny silver coin.

Calm majesty is in the face of Washington; pathetic patience and divine dignity in that of Lincoln; unyielding granite is in John Brown's face, though sympathy hath tempered hardness into softness; intellect is in Newton's; pure imagination is in Keats' and in Milton's; heroic substance is in the face of Cromwell and in that of Luther; pathetic sorrow is found in Dante's eyes; conscience and love shine in the face of Fénelon. Verily, the body is the soul's interpreter! Like Paul, each man bears about in his body the marks, either of ignorance and sin, of fear and remorse, or the marks of heroism and virtue, of love and integrity. To the gospel of the page let us add the gospel of the face.

But let none count it a strange thing that the soul within registers its experiences in the body without. God hates secrecy and loves openness. He hath ordained that nature and man shall publish their secret lives. Each seed and germ hath an instinctive tendency toward self-revelation. Every rosebud aches with a desire to unroll its petals and exhibit its scarlet secret. Not a single piece of coal but will whisper to the microscope the full story of that far-off scene when boughs and buds and odorous blossoms were pressed together in a single piece of shining crystal. The great stone slabs with the bird's track set into the rock picture forth for us the winged creatures of the olden time. When travelers through the Rocky Mountains behold the flaming advertisements written on the rocks, the reflection comes to all that nature also uses the rock pages for keeping her private memoranda of all those events connected with her history of fire and flood and glacier. When we speak of a scientific discovery, we mean that some keen-eyed thinker has come upon a page of nature's diary and copied it for his printer. The sea shells lying upon the crest of the high hills make one chapter in the story of that age when the ocean's waves broke against the peaks of the high mountains.

Journeying in his summer vacation into the region about Hudson Bay, the traveler brings back pieces of coal containing tropic growths. These carbon notebooks of nature tell us of a time when the regions of ice and snow were covered with tropical fruits and flowers, and suggest some accident that caused our earth to tip and assume a new angle toward the sun. Indeed, our earth bears about in the body the marks of its entire history, so that the scientist is able to tell with wondrous accuracy the events of a hundred thousand years ago. Already the Roentgen ray foretells the time when "nothing shall be covered that shall not be revealed, neither hid that shall not be known; when that which was done in secret shall be proclaimed from the housetops." Professor Babbage, the mathematician, has said that the atmosphere itself is becoming one vast phonograph upon whose sensitive cylinder shall be written all that man hath said, or woman whispered. Not a word of injustice spoken, not a cry of agony uttered, not an argument for liberty urged, but it is registered indelibly, so that with a higher mathematics and a keener sight and sense, the future scientist may trace each particle of air set in motion with as much precision as an astronomer traces the pathway of a moving star or a distant planet.

Recently the story has been told of a burglar who accidently discharged a magnesium light connected with a kodak on the shelf. The hour was midnight and everyone in the house was asleep. But the kodak was awake and at work. Frightened by the sudden light, the thief fled, leaving his spoil behind. But he also left his face. The next day in the court the kodak convicted him. Thus the new science is causing each man to stand in the center of an awful photographic and telegraphic system which makes an indelible record of man's words and deeds. No breath is so faint that it can escape recording itself; no whisper so low, no plan so secret, no deed of evil so dark and silent. Memory may forget—but nature never. Upon the pages of the physical universe the story of every human life is perpetually before the judge of all the earth.

It is deeply interesting to see how each living thing bears about in its body the story of its degradation, or the history of its rise and exaltation. Even in things that creep and crawl, the whole life-history is swept together in the animal body. The ship barnacle began its career with two splendid eyes. But it used its vision to find an easy place upon the side of pier or ship. Giving up locomotion, it grew sleek and fat, and finally its big eyes grew dull through misuse, and now they are dead. When the squirrels left the forests in the west and journeyed out upon the open prairies, they began to burrow in the ground. Finally, for want of use, they lost all power of climbing. Among the birds the lazy cuckoo began by stealing the nest another bird had built. But it paid a grievous price for its theft, for now when the cuckoo is confined by man and wants a nest of its own it toils aimlessly, and has lost all power to make for itself a soft, warm nesting-place.

In northern climes the mistletoe has a healthy normal taproot. But in our rich soil it became too dainty for dirt, and chose the life of a parasite. So the little seed struck its outer roots into the bark of the oak, and lazily sucked away the tree's rich sap. Soon luxury and living upon another's life ruined the mistletoe, just as the generation of young Romans was ruined by the father's wealth; just as an active and healthy boy is wrecked when he begins to be a sluggard and goes to the aunt—some rich aunt—and waits for her to die. And since all the lower creatures bear about in the body the marks of the full life-history, it seems natural to expect that man's body, through its health and beauty, or weakness and decay, should tell the story of how the soul within has lived and wrought. A short journey through our streets will prove to us that iniquity sets its mark in the face. Dickens describes Fagin as a man who was solid bestiality and villainy done up in bone and tissue. Each feature was as eloquent of rascality as an ape's of idiocy. Contrariwise, in the kingdom of morals there are men who seem solid goodness, kindness, and virtue, bound together with fleshly bands. Even distant ancestors leave their marks in man's body.

It has recently been discovered that the handwriting of one of our presidents was almost exactly that in his grandfather's will. The Bourbon family has always been distinguished by the aquiline nose. One of the oldest New England families is known for its singular length and strength of arm. Beauty is a mark in one family, and size is a mark in the other. Because man is made in the image of God we naturally look for those divine trademarks in man's body called comeliness and complexion, just as we look for the artist's name on the corner of his picture, or the sculptor's name on the pedestal of his statue. By so much as a babe's cheek is higher than the blushing peach, it ought to be more beautiful. And because the trees of the forest go forward toward October and death arrayed in their brightest robes, we have a right to expect that man in his old age also will reach the highest beauty and perfection.

But not so. Man's history has been a history of selfishness and sin, and his body bears the marks thereof. His features are "seamed by sickness, dimmed by sensuality, convulsed by passion, pinched by poverty, shadowed by sorrow, branded by remorse." Men's bodies are consumed by sloth, broken down by labor, tortured by disease, dishonored by foul uses, until beholding the "marks" of character in the natural face in a glass multitudes would fain forget what manner of men they are. For the human face is a canvas, and nature's writing goes ever on. But as the wrong act or foul deed sets its seal of distortion on the features, so the right act or true thought sets its stamp of beauty. There is no cosmetic for homely folks like character. Even the plainest face becomes beautiful in noble and radiant moods. He who ever beholds the vision of Christ's face will at last so take on the likeness of his Master as to bear about in his body also "the marks of the Lord Jesus."

Consider the habits and the unconscious desires as marks of character. When Arnold of Rugby took his boys for a holiday to London he found the revelators of personality in the objects which they first visited. The youth who had spent each spare moment in sketching made his way immediately to the gallery. Young Stanley, even then brooding upon moral themes, turned his face toward the abbey, whose fame he was to augment. The eager aspirant for political honors rushed toward the houses of Parliament. Thus also the students of physiognomy try to catch the subject off his guard, when the unconscious and habitual lines appear in the face. The kind of books one loves to read, the amusements one seeks, the friends he chooses, are all revelators. Recently an English traveler published a volume of impressions concerning America. Finding little to praise, the traveler finds much to criticise and blame. During his two or three weeks' sojourn in our cities, he tells us that he found sights and scenes that would shame Sodom and Gomorrah, and bemoans the fact that in this young, fresh land things should be as bad as in London and Paris, whither the scum and wrecks of society have drifted.

What a revelation! not of the city, but of the critic himself. But because he was interested in other things, the editor of an English Review found here material for a fruitful discussion of "The Higher Life of American Cities." Multitudes have sojourned here during a score of years and have not so much as heard of orgies and excesses. Yet if the bee is blind to all save flowers; if the worm cares only for rotten wood; if the mole bores downward, so there are natures that cannot rest until they have ferreted out that which they lovingly seek and eagerly desire to find. Habits also reveal personality. First the river digs the channel, then the channel controls the river, and when the faculties, by repetition, have formed habits, those habits become grooves and channels for controlling the faculties. What grievous marks were in poor Coleridge! Once this scholar spent a fortnight upon an annual address. But while the audience was assembling Coleridge left his friends and stepped out the rear door of the hall to go in search of his favorite drug, leaving his audience to master its disappointment as best it could.

And here is Robert Burns, bearing about in his body also the marks of his ownership. For this matchless genius was wrecked and ruined not by the wiles of him of the cloven foot, but by temptations that have been called "godlike." This glorious youth was not beguiled from the path by a desire to be a cold and calculating villain in his treatment of Jean, or to die of drink in his prime, or to leave his widow and orphans in poverty. Burns loved upward, loved noble things and beautiful; and his very love of beauty and grace, his love of good company, of wit, laughter and song, and all the stormy splendors of youth at springtide—these are the snares and wiles that caught his beautiful genius and led it away captive.

To-day, for him who hath eyes to see, the marks of a like immoderation are upon our generation also. What a revelation of the taste of our age is found in the new love of highly spiced literature! All history holds no nobler literature than that in the English tongue. Our poetry furnishes nectar for angels! Our philosophies bread for giants! The essayists furnish food for the gods! Nevertheless, a multitude have turned from this glorious feast to the highly spiced literature of fiction.

A traveler tells of watching bees linger so long beside the vats of the distillery that they became maudlin. And the love of high stimulants in literature is one of the character marks of our generation. Excess threatens our people. Men are anxious to be scholars and hurry along a pathway that leads straight to the grave. Men are anxious to find pleasure, but they find the flowers were grown in the church-yard. Men are feverishly anxious for wealth, and, coining all time and strength into gold, they find they have no health with which to enjoy the gathered sweetness. Haste in cooking the dinner has destroyed the appetite. We are told that "moderation and poise are the secrets of all successful art," as they are of all successful life. Give the rein to appetite and passion, and satiety, disenchantment, and the grave quickly come. Health, happiness, and character are through restraint. Thus truly, habit and trait in the individual or the generation become a mark in the body that is the revelator of character.

What men call character to-day is really another one of the marks of the Lord Jesus. Now and then a man appears in society from whose very presence there emanates an atmosphere and a sense of power—power that seizes upon the imagination of the beholder and holds him breathless, even as one stands breathless when overtaken by some sense in nature of overmastering sublimity. These strangely gifted men have appeared only at intervals of centuries. If an ordinary man is attacked in a lonely spot by armed footpads, he finds himself helpless. But history tells of a man who carried such reserves that, bound and unaided, he could deliver himself from an entire band of robbers. Surprised one day by a company of bandits, he was knocked down, robbed, and bound. But when he recovered consciousness, he argued the ropes off his wrists, talked his purse and rings out of the robbers' pockets back into his, bound his enemies—not with cords, but with linked words—led them back to the city instead of away from it, and landed the waylayers in jail.

Similarly, history tells us of half a score of men during the past two thousand years who have carried this same all-commanding atmosphere. For over a century students of oratory have been endeavoring to explain the eloquence of Whitefield. Such power had this man that the statesmen and philosophers of London used to leave the metropolis on Saturday and journey far into the country to join the crowds, often numbering twenty thousand people, that followed this preacher from village to village. David Hume, the skeptic, explained Whitefield's charm by saying that the preacher spake to his audience with the same passionate abandon with which an ardent lover speaks to his sweetheart when he pleads for her hand. But Benjamin Franklin tells us that the charm in Whitefield's speech was not his musical voice, not his stream of thought running clear as crystal, not his sudden electric outbursts, when the great man seemed on fire; the something that men have tried in vain to analyze, was his character—goodness and sincerity glowing and throbbing in and through words, just as the electric current glows and throbs through the connecting wires. Another such man, but lesser, was Lamartine. During the French Revolution, when the mob poured through the streets, sweeping before it the soldiers who opposed its progress, Lamartine made his way to the middle of the street and stood before the brutal leaders. So powerful was the influence of the good man's character, that, when the leader said, "Soldiers, we are in the presence of a man who represents seventy years of noble living," the rude mob uncovered. Afterward, when the insurgents laid down their arms, it was as a tribute to the superiority of character to guns and brute force.

But when we read of these all-commanding natures, we are not to think that these inspirational beings had their influence through some strange magnetic power, nor that they cast a spell over people like unto the spell that the cat casts over the mouse with which it plays. Their might has, for the most part, been the might of goodness. The chief mark that Paul and Wesley and Wilberforce, and all the great have carried about in the body has been the mark of character. What beauty is to the statue; what ripeness is to the fruit; what strength is to the body; what wisdom is to the reason—that character is to the soul!

Great is the power of bonds and gold! Mighty the influence of customs and institutions! But the greatest force that can exist in society is the presence and power of good men. As rain and soil and sunbeams are only raw materials, to be brought together and condensed into the ripe fruit, so tools, knowledge, goods, are but raw materials, to be wrought up into the fine substance of character. Happy all who have subordinated the animal impulses and the industrial faculties to the moral sentiments. Thrice happy they who have carried all their faculties up unto harmony and symmetry. All such, like Paul, bear about in the body the marks of the Lord Jesus.

Making the Most of One's Self

XIV

Making the Most of One's SelfToC

Two great principles run through all society. First comes the principle of self-care and self-love. Each man is given charge of his own body and life. By foresight he is to guard against danger. By self-defense he is to ward off attack. By fulfilling the instincts for food, for work and rest he is to maintain the integrity of his being. Upon each individual rests the solemn obligation to make the most possible of himself, and to store up resources of knowledge and virtue, of friendship and heart treasure. But when a man has treated his reason as a granary and stored it with food, his memory as a gallery, and filled it with pictures of a beautiful past, his reason and will as armories, and stored them with weapons against the day of battle, then a second principle asserts itself. Responsible for his own growth and happiness, man is made equally responsible for the happiness and welfare of those about him. By so much as he has secured his own personal enrichment, by that much he is bound to secure the enrichment and social advantage of his fellows. To love one's self at the expense of one's fellows is for selfness to become malignancy. To love one's neighbors more than one's self is foolishness and self-destruction.

Whatever of value the individual has, comes from fidelity to the first of these principles. Self-love working toward reason makes a man a scholar; working toward his imagination, makes him artist and inventor; working toward his gift of speech, makes him an orator; working with pride makes him self-reliant and self-sufficing. And when the principle of love for others asserts itself, this love, working toward poverty, transforms man into a philanthropist; working toward iniquity, makes man a reformer; working toward freedom, makes him a patriot and a hero; working toward God, makes him a saint and a seer.

The new astronomy makes much of the three cosmic laws. Our earth, by a form of self-love called molecular attraction, ceases to be scattered dust, and takes on the shape of a rich and beautiful planet. But self-loved, our earth is also sun-loved, and drawn by invisible bands it is swept forward out of winter into summer. Then enters in a third principle, by which Neptune and Uranus, lying upon the edge of space, seek fellowship with our planet and hold it at a fixed distance from the sun's fierce heat. Thus self-love has given the earth individuality, the love of other planets secures stability, while the sun's love gives movement and wealth. Working together, these three principles secure the harmony and stability of the planetary world. Similarly, each individual is part of a great social system. Each moves forward under the embrace of three laws, called love to God, love to neighbor, and love to self. Upon obedience to these laws rests all social wealth and civilization.

We hear little of individualism, and much of the solidarity of society. A bloodless and selfish destruction of the rights of the many has threatened the very foundations of human happiness and compelled the recognition of the fact that the weakness and injury of one are the weakness and injury of all. Ours is a world in which the law of the survival of the fittest not only works, but works very rapidly. Thus the more wealth a man has the more he can achieve. To-day, it is said, the various members of the Rothschild family in the different capitals of Europe control nine billions of dollars. This sum is accumulating like a rolling snowball, and will soon surpass, and perhaps absorb the wealth of several of the smaller European nations. Similarly, in the realm of wisdom, the more a man knows the more he can know. Sir William Jones tells us that he gave five years to mastering his first language, while six weeks were sufficient for acquiring his fortieth dialect. Thus, too, in the realm of inventive skill, each tool becomes the parent of a score of other tools. The studies preparatory to Edison's first mechanism covered a long period of years; but, gaining momentum, his inventive skill increased in geometric ratio, until to-day the famous electrician holds nearly a thousand patents; but, as nothing succeeds like success, so nothing is so ruinous as failure. The weaker a man is, the weaker he must become. When a man who seeks employment is shabby and gaunt and nerveless, his poverty lessens his chances, but to-morrow he will be weaker and shabbier, and day by day the rapidity of his declension will increase.

Startled by these considerations, our generation perceives that success feeding upon its gains will soon drink up all the energies of the earth, while failure, growing more ruinous, will sweep multitudes into the abyss. Therefore, society has come to fully recognize the importance of a mutual love and mutual service. When a man falls we are less and less ready to kick him. If the poorly born drops behind in life's race, society is increasingly ready to set him upon some beast. If some man's brain is spongy, and his mental processes slow, the stronger minds are belting his faculties to their swifter energies. If a man's moral springtime is slow, says one of our social reformers, society fits up for him a little ethical conservatory, with steam heat and southern exposure, where the buds are given a little judicious stimulating and pushing.

Society is recognizing the debt of strength to weakness. The man who has skill in speech is becoming a voice for the dumb. Those who have skill toward wealth are becoming the almoners of bounty toward art, education and morals. Men who selfishly get much and give little, who have become Dead Seas of accumulated treasure, are losing their standing in society. More and more cities are bestowing their honors and esteem upon those who serve their fellows. Men are becoming magazines, sending out kindness everywhither. Men are becoming gardens, filling all the air with pungent fragrance. Men are becoming castles, in which the poor find protection. The floods of iniquity have long covered the earth, but love is the dove bringing the olive branch of peace. Love sings the dawn of a new day.

Our generation does well to emphasize the principle of social sympathy and social liability. But, because individual worth is being threatened, the time seems to have fully come for also emphasizing man's duty to love and make the most of himself. Of late, self-care and self-enrichment, as a principle of life, have been berated and harshly condemned. Yet Christ recognized selfness as a principle most proper and praiseworthy and one to be used as the basis and measure of all moral worth. By so much as man loves and secures for himself the physical benefits and social incitements of life, by that much he is to love his fellows. And the failure to love one's self wisely and passionately ends by making it impossible for man to love his fellows. Plato's thought is ever with us: "The granary must be filled before the poor are fed; knowledge must be gained before knowledge is given." Happy the philanthropist whose generosity has founded school or library. But this gift of to-day is made possible only by the industry and thrift of yesterday. Happy the surgeon whose skill in a crisis hour has saved some valuable life. But the hand that performs what seems a miracle of surgery has back of it twenty years of vigilant study and practice.

Ours is a world in which the amount of wisdom or wealth or friendship to be distributed is predetermined by the amount required. The flow of the faucet is determined by the fullness of the reservoir. The speed of the electric car is fixed by the energy stored in the power house. The power of the piston is in the push of the accumulated steam. The Nile has force to feed civilizations, because there are a thousand streams and rivers, a thousand hills and mountains lying back of the Nile's current, and crowding it forward. If we could sit down by the famous Santa Barbara vine, and speaking with it as with a familiar friend, ask how it came to give man a half-ton of purple treasure in a single summer, the reply would be that this rich treasure was grown and given in one summer because two hundred summers were given to growing a vast root and trunk, to large stems and stalks.

When Nestor stood forth before the Greek generals and counseled attack upon Troy, he said: "The secret of victory is in getting a good ready." Wendell Phillips was once asked how he acquired his skill in the oratory of the lost arts. The answer was: "By getting a hundred nights of delivery back of me." Shakespeare tells us all that the clouds give in rain what they get in mist, which is the poet's way of saying that what he gave in inspiration he got by way of perspiration. Some years ago a young man asked a distinguished scholar and writer what he thought of the higher education. "If I were twenty, and had but ten years to live," answered the publicist, "I would spend the first nine years accumulating knowledge and getting ready for the tenth." Indeed, the measure of influence in any man is the measure of his reserves. The youth who will rule to-morrow is the youth who to-day is storing up resources of knowledge and wisdom, of self-reliance and courage.

All history does but repeat the principle. Surveying the past, we note that the nations that have made great contributions to civilization have been isolated. Our historians tell us that the Hebrew gave conscience and morals, the Greek reason and culture, the Roman law and government, the Teuton liberty and the rise of woman. But, singularly enough, not one of these nations lived in an open, extended country. Each forceful race has dwelt upon some island or peninsula. The Hebrew was shut in between the desert and the sea, and there restrained until he accumulated his moral treasure. He was compelled to fall back upon his own resources. By practice he found out that it was not best to steal; that society lived more happily and peacefully when the property of each individual was respected. Similarly, God gave him the work of formulating each of the ten commandments. Slowly the moral treasure grew. The jurist gave law, the poet sang songs, the prophet poured out his rhapsody, the patriot and martyr died for principle, and the roll of the heroes lengthened. At last the pages of Jewish history were filled with names glowing and glorious as the nights with stars.

Then came Jesus Christ, filling all the land with spiritual energies. Soon the pressure of moral forces was so strong as to break through all restraints. Then these moral treasures poured forth over all the earth. Having given the two thousand years before Christ to accumulating its moral energies, the Hebrew race acquired momentum enough to continue the civilizing tide through the two thousand years after Christ. Similarly Greece, the mother of the arts and sciences, was shut in between the mountains and the sea until the intellectual tides grew deep and strong.

But not alone does history urge us to make the most of ourselves. All our great men illustrate the same principle. Of late attention has been called to the fact that our cities are being ruled by men whose childhood and youth were spent in the country. Isolated, brooding for years in the fields and forests, these boys developed a forceful individuality. A recent canvass of the prominent men in New York City showed that eighty-five per cent were reared in the villages and rural districts. Seventeen of our twenty-three presidents came from the farm. A census of the colleges and seminaries in and about Chicago showed that the country is furnishing eighty per cent of our college students. The chances of success seem one hundred to one in favor of the country boy. Many explain this by saying that there is a mathematical relation between a fine physique and a firm, intellectual tread. Good thinking rests upon fine brain-fiber. But this is only half the truth.

These giants from the country learned in youth not to depend upon books and newspapers, but upon their eyes and ears. Having no external resources, they turned their thoughts inward and led forth their own faculties. They did not wait until they opened the journal to find out what they thought about some important subject, but, unaided, they wrought out their own opinions, and through self-reliance grew great. Should any sower go forth to sow in the streets of the city, he would reap but a small harvest. The hard, beaten roadway would give the grain no lodgment; but sown on the open furrows, the seed roots and grows. Thus the mind of the city youth is a roadway beaten down by the myriad events of life. His individuality is a root having little chance to grow.

The mornings rain newspapers, the evenings increase events, the very skies rain pamphlets. Individuality is overwhelmed with many things. Soon the mind ceases to develop its own mental treasure, and is content to receive its incitements from without. Because schools and colleges are multiplied, the youth who has never gone to the bottom of a single subject imagines that he is a fine student. Because his shelves are crowded with books, the man deceives himself into thinking that he has read them all. Because our age is rich in mechanical appliances and inventions, many who cannot drive a nail straight imagine that they have been really instrumental in ushering in this magnificent epoch. Many sing peans of exultation over this wondrous civilization who are mental and industrial paupers, whose chief ground of congratulation is that they got themselves born into this particular century. But power does not come that way. Moses will control all our jurists to-morrow because he spent forty years in the desert reflecting upon the principles of justice. Paul had the honor to fashion our political institutions because he gave twelve years of general preparation and three years of special application to the study of individual rights. Milton tells us that he spent four and thirty years of solitary and unceasing study in accumulating his material for a heroic poem that the world would not willingly let die.

Homer wrote the "Iliad" because he was blind and driven in upon his own resources. Dante wrote his "Inferno" because he was exiled, and in isolation had time to store up his mental treasure. Webster and Lincoln spent years in the forests and fields, reflecting and brooding, analyzing and comparing. Many a long summer passed while they sowed and garnered their mental treasure. Pasteur gave our generation much, because for thirty years he isolated himself and got much to give. When Lowell speaks of the attar of roses, he reminds us of the whole fields of crimson blossoms that have been swept together in one tiny vial. When Starr King saw the great trees of California standing forth twenty-five feet in diameter and lifting their crowns three hundred feet into the sunshine, he was so impressed by their dignity and beauty as to be touched into tears; but the size of the trees did not explain his emotion. It was the thought of the reserve energies that had been compacted into them. The mountains had given their iron and rich stimulants, the hills had given their soil, the clouds had given their rain and snow, a thousand summers and winters had poured forth their treasure about the vast roots. Thus the authors and statesmen who will help the next generation are to-day engaged in loving themselves and making the most of their talents. Not until they have compacted within themselves a thousand knowledges and virtues will they be able to love others.

With sadness let us confess that our age is sinning grievously against this principle of self-care and self-love. Individual worth is being sorely neglected. An age is great not through a large census roll, but through a multitude of great souls, just as a book is valuable not by having many pages, but by containing great ideas. The paving-stones in our streets are very different from sapphires. The bringing together of 65,000,000 small granite blocks will not turn these stones into diamonds. It is only when each stone is a gem that the increase of number means the increase of beauty. No nation is moving forward toward supremacy merely because the weak individuals began to go in droves. In our education we are singing peans and praise about our schools and new methods of education. Meanwhile Frederic Harrison insists that in fifty years the public schools of Great Britain have turned out not one mind of the first order. Some of those who have achieved renown in literature or statecraft were self-educated. The rest enjoyed the help of some parent or friend, who very early in the child's career took the pains to search out the child's strongest faculty, and then asked some tutor or teacher to assist in nourishing the special talent toward greatness.

At home, President White is telling us that our authors and poets are dead, and have no successors. Nor could it be otherwise. When a skillful driver wishes to develop the speed of a thoroughbred colt, he specializes upon this one animal. No sensible horseman would put forty colts upon a track and try to develop their speed by driving them around in a drove. It remains for the parents of this country to adopt the method of training their children in droves, and educating them in herds. Our common-school system began in the necessity for the division of labor. Settling in the wilds of New England, the men went into the forests with axes, or to the field with their hoes. The mothers went into the garden or to the loom. Rather than that their children should have no education, many parents came together and asked some one man or woman to do the work for all. Thus our common schools were born out of poverty and emergency.

But at length has come a time when parents, in blind worship of a system, have farmed their children out to intellectual wet-nurses. Many children who possess talent of the first order in the realm of poetry or literature are compelled during the most precious period of life to spend years upon subjects that yield them no culture effect. Meanwhile their enthusiasm is wasted, and their strongest faculties starved. Only when it is too late do they discover the cruel injustice that has been wrought upon them, and recognize that they must remain unfulfilled prophecies. Our common schools have wrought most effectively for our civilization. They are the hope of society. But not until our parents become enthusiastic teachers, and our homes assist the school rooms, will men cease complaining that the nation's great men have no successors, and that genius has departed from our people.

The time has fully come for the nation also to begin to love itself. All perceive that the individual has no right to be so generous to-day as to have nothing to bestow to-morrow. Wisdom guards to-day's expenditures lest to-morrow's capital be impaired. He is a poor husbandman who so overtaxes his fields or vineyards as to exhaust the soil or destroy the vine. Yet many events seem to prove that our nation has sorely injured itself by over-kindness. It has forgotten that only God can love everybody. In trying to help the many it has threatened its power to help any. It has been like a man who on a January day opens his windows and tries to warm all out of doors, only to find that he has frozen his family within the house, and warmed no one without. If we journey into the factory towns in New England, where the youthful Whittier and Longfellow were trained, we find the school-houses with windows boarded over. The little churches also are deserted and the doors nailed up. Listening to the "reformers" in our parks on a Sunday afternoon, we are amazed by the virulent attacks upon our institutions. Conversing with the foreman of a large group of men laying water-pipes, we are astonished at his statement that he has not a single man who can write well enough to keep the time and hours of these toilers. Standing in Castle Garden, where the emigrant ship unloads its multitudes, we hear the physician exclaim: "It will take this nation a hundred years to expel this vice and scrofula from its blood."

As some railways water their stock, and for each dollar issue bonds for five, in the hope that only one of the five will ever know enough to ask for their dollar, so the intelligence of the nation has been watered and diluted. Sometimes a whole ballot-box full of voters' tickets does not contain the common sense of a single vote of the days of Hamilton. Our nation often seems like a householder who has given his night-key to an enemy who has threatened his home with firebrands. Our nation has loved—not wisely, but too well. The time has come when it must choose between loving itself and becoming bankrupt in intelligence and morality. For purposes of educating the nations of the world as to the true value of free institutions, one little New England community, where all the citizens were patriots and heroes, scholars and Christians, where vulgarity and crime were unknown, where the jail was empty and the church was full, where all young lives moved toward the school-house—one such community has a value beyond our present millions.

What the world needs is not multitudes, but examples and ideals. If one Plato can be produced, he will lift the world. Our citizens ask artists to paint their pictures—not bootblacks. We ask architects to erect our public buildings—not chimney sweeps. Loving their city, our citizens have lined the avenues with beautiful homes and streets with stores and factories. But here their self-love stops. When great men have created the city, they ask saloon-keepers to govern it. Well did the sage say, it was as if we had passed by Daniel Webster and asked an African ape to speak in his stead. Strange—passing strange—that our nation and city should forget that all love for others begins with a wise love for self.

We return from our survey with the conviction that Jesus Christ did well to make individual worth the genius of Christianity. Having moved backward along the pathway of history, we have found the streams of civilization taking rise in some one enriched mind and heart, even as mighty rivers issue from isolated springs. Looking backward we see Moses building the Hebrew temple; we see Pericles and Plato fashioning many shapes of truth and beauty for Athens; we see Dante laying the foundations of Florence; we see Carlo Zeno causing Venice to rise out of the sands of the sea; we see Bacon and Luther rearing the cathedrals of thought and worship, under which the millions find their shelter. Oppressed by a sense of human ignorance and human sin, a thousand questions arise. Can one poorly born journey toward greatness of stature? The Cremona violin of the sixteenth century is a mass of condensed melody. Each atom was soaked in a thousand songs, until the instrument reeks with sweetness. But can a human instrument, long out of tune and sadly injured, e'er be brought back to harmony of being? In the studio of the sculptor lie blocks of deserted marble. Out of one emerges a hand, another exhibits the outlines of a face. But for some reason the artist has forsaken them. It seems that as the chisel worked inward, it uncovered some crack or revealed a dark stain. Therefore the sculptor passed it by, preferring the flawless block of snowy marble. Is the soul soiled by sin, to be cast off by the divine Sculptor?

Journeying across the plains, travelers looking through the car windows behold the California trail. The wagon ruts have become ditches, and the old route is marked by human graves. But long ago men exchanged the ox cart, the deep wagon ruts, and the wearisome journey, for palace cars. Thus there are many paths of sin worn deep by pressure of human feet. Many would fain forsake them. But is there any divine power to cast up some divine highway? Is there a happiness? Nature is kind to her grains and sweeps them forward toward harvests; is kind toward her apple seeds and bids them journey unto orchards; is kind unto the March days, and bids them journey into perpetual summer.

And man would fain find some divine friend who will lead him unto great personal worth. As if to fulfill man's deepest needs, Jesus Christ enters the earthly scene. He comes to hasten man's step along that pathway that leads from littleness unto largeness. Before our admiring vision the Divine Teacher seems like some sacred husbandman, His garden our earth, good men and great earth's richest fruit. He asks each youth to love and make the most of himself, that later on he may be bread to the hungry, medicine to the wounded, shelter to the weak. He bids each love his own reason, getting wisdom with that eager passion that Hugh Miller had for knowledge. He bids each make the most of friendship, emulating Plato in his love for his noble teacher. He asks each to love industry, emulating Peabody, whose generosity gushed like rivers. He asks each to make the most of courage and self-reliance, emulating Livingstone in self-denying service. He bids each emulate and look up to Jesus Christ, as Dante, midst the pitchy night, looked up toward the star. He bids each move heaven and earth to achieve for himself a worthy manhood. For thus only can earth ever be moved back unto heaven.