journey, whither are you going; what is your aim? Forget my voice and listen to the voice of God speaking inarticulately yet intelligibly in your heart and to your conscience. That voice is commanding you to a purpose and aim, and inviting you to a service which welcomed and accepted will make your life pure, beautiful, and divine. "A sacred burden is this life CHARACTER. CHARACTER is properly educated will. - NOVALIS. Character makes its own destiny. - MRS. CAMPBELL PRAED. Character is the diamond that scratches every other stone. BARTOL. What the superior man seeks is in himself; what the small man seeks is in others. - CONFUCIUS. Character is the moral order seen through the medium of an individual nature. - EMERSON. Everything that happens to us leaves some trace behind; everything contributes imperceptibly to make us what we are. GOETHE. The evil bow before the good, and the wicked at the gates of the righteous. Proverbs of Solomon. - Look, as I blow this feather from my face, CHARACTER is a very different thing from reputation, though often the two are confounded. Reputation is what a man is thought to be; character is what a man is. The one is opinion; the other is fact. Circumstances and associations, or even artful management, may give one for a time a fictitious reputation; but his character is himself, and that at last makes his real reputation. A man may be honestly indifferent to reputation; but he cannot be honestly indifferent to character. The former may affect his temporal condition; but the latter determines his destiny. The word "character" is a Greek word, as many of our best words are, and is transferred, not translated, into our English speech. The verb xapάoow, by softening the hard guttural and dropping the final vowel, becomes our English "harass," and means: (1) to make sharp or pointed, to whet, and, metaphorically used, to exasperate, to irritate; (2) to furrow or scratch; (3) to engrave, or to stamp, as in minting a coin. χαρακτήρ, which is only the Greek form of our English "character," means that which is cut in or marked, as the impress or stamp on coins, seals, etc. Thus, it comes to mean that which reveals or expresses the quality of a thing or a person. A small, round, flat piece of gold is put into the stamping machine in the mint, and that part of the machine called the "die" strikes it, leaving an impress, as, for example, the figure of an eagle with an encircling legend, - and that impress is the character of the piece; it tells what the piece is and declares its worth. Our English word "type" has a similar origin. It came from the Greek verb TÚTтw, which means to strike, whence the noun TÚTоs, type, which means first, a blow, and then, an impression or mark which is the result of a blow. This simple lesson in etymology will help you to a clear idea of what character means. Your character is the mark or impress on you that declares your real quality and worth. That is, your character is what you are in moral quality; for, because man is pre-eminently a moral being, this word," character," has taken to itself an almost exclusively moral significance. You see, then, the inseparableness of character from self. If you would have a good character you must be good. If you are bad, no matter what others think of you, your character is bad; you cannot escape from your character. A man may run away from a bad reputation, for that is something outside of himself; he can never run away from a bad character, for that is himself. A man's reputation is like his shadow, which, according as the sun is high or low, may be longer or shorter than himself, or may even disappear altogether, as when the sun is at the zenith; but his character is like the color same. of his eyes, look which way he will, that is the "No change of circumstances," says Emerson, "can repair a defect of character." If your character is evil it can be repaired only by your moral renewal. Having got now a clear idea of what character is, let us think about the ways and means by which it comes to be good or evil. 1. The first thing to fix in our minds is the truth that character is formed. It is not inherited any more than gold when it comes from the mine bears the impress of the minter's "die." You are born with a nature which has certain susceptibilities, and tendencies, or appetencies, but no character. Character is the result of forces, chief among which are your own choices and volitions; you make your own character. You did not choose the lot in which you were born; that was chosen for you. You did not create your temperament; that you inherited from your parents. But what you become is mainly the product of your own will. Wisely and most beneficently has it been ordained for man that "Himself from God he [can] not free." Deeper and more vital than the truth that Nature and human life are man's constant environment is the truth that Divinity is man's |