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CHAPTER XIII.

CHARACTER.

A CHARACTER, if we use the word in its most literal sense, is a mark or sign by which we may know a thing or a person. Character in the most general sense is the sum of all the intellectual and moral qualities which make one human being different from another. We will speak here of moral qualities only. This man has a bad character, we say he will drink, steal, lie, or cheat when he has opportunity. That man, on the contrary, is a man of good character: he is truthful, temperate, honest, and industrious. The servant-girl leaving one situation for another asks her mistress to "give her a character." This illustrates another common use of the word in which we employ it as by itself equivalent to "good character: " it is the sense in which we shall speak of character in this chapter; we mean by it the collection and blending of distinctively good traits or qualities in a person.

A man's character, of course, is what he is in himself, not what he owns as something outside of himself, or something he has personal relations with, as with his family or his partner in business. Now what he is in himself largely determines both what he will own and what relations he will have with other people. Very important, indeed, is it to a man, and to all connected with him, what he owns, money, house, land, ships, warehouses full of goods, whatever it may be. But it is a great deal more important, both to himself and to others with whom he is in contact, what he is in himself, in his disposition and character. Health

has more to do with happiness than wealth, and few persons, probably, would choose a fortune if compelled. to take bad health with it. Health of mind, soundness of soul, comes from living morally, i. e., according to the laws of the life together, just as physical health is dependent on keeping the laws of the body. If we have health of mind and heart, this, again, is a still more important matter than what we own. Our welfare and the welfare of others with whom we are living depend far more on our being kind, truthful, and just, than on the number of thousands of dollars we may or may not own.

Character is, therefore, properly, an aim in itself, i. e., a thing to be desired for its own sake. This we say not because it is out of relation to actual life or the persons in it, or can be separated from these, for all things in the world are related to one another, but because it is so evidently of the highest value when logically considered apart. We say that a certain man has a strong, independent, self-reliant character. He has the qualities in him indicated by these adjectives; he is mentally and morally strong, self-contained, and able to stand alone against a number of men in the wrong. When any occasion comes for showing strength of mind and will, he will be prepared. Plainly, it is well that he should have been accumulating this strength beforehand, if there is, indeed, any way to do it. So with the kindness, the power to tell the truth or to do justly, that we are needing every day we live. If there is any way to store up in ourselves moral strength and beauty, which are demanded by the life in common, surely the knowledge of it is most desirable.

Two things we must here bear in mind, especially. I. The good character that we show in our life-actions is not like a purse having so many dollars in it, out of which we take one or ten, as the case may be, and which we must be careful to fill up again before the

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money is all drawn out. It is, on the contrary, like a muscle of the arm which grows stronger by exercise, like a faculty of the mind, such as memory, which improves by practice. Our ability to tell the truth, to do honest actions, or to conduct ourselves graciously toward others, is a power that grows with use, and the good act becomes easier to us each time that we do it. II. Consequently we are wise when we aim directly at the good quality or moral faculty in itself. In other words, it is always well to do right because it is right. It is usually a difficult thing to trace out in our minds the probable consequences of this or that act which we are purposing to do, to imagine how it will affect this or that particular person, and a whole multitude of others. But if we know that it is right, so far as we can see, and that to do it will strengthen in ourselves the power to do right again, then we have considered, in the vast majority of cases, all that we need to consider. We must bear in mind that mankind has been living many thousands of years on this earth, and that all this time men have been learning from experience, hard or pleasant, sweet or bitter, how to live the life together. The teachings of this great, this vast experience have been solidified into the common moral rules concerning truthfulness and honesty and peacefulness and industry and all the other virtues and their opposite vices. These rules are repeated, again and again, in books, in proverbs about conduct, and in the daily talk of men giving advice to one another, or praising or condemning other men's actions. We ought to profit by this experience of multitudes of men who have been before us, so as to avoid their errors and defeats, and imitate only their wisdom and their victories. Obedience to a few plain rules is all that we need most of the time. But the few strong instincts, of which the poet also speaks, are not strong enough in us to bring about complete and constant obedience.

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We wish to have our own way and do as we please, without regard to the effect on other people, who have just as much right as we - i. e., none at all to have their own way and do as they please. So we act as if we lived in a world where the most important of all affairs, the dealings of men with each other, were not subject to steadfast laws which take no account of your conceit or my selfishness, but forever determine that if men are to live in society and become civilized, they must do thus and so, as the severe and beautiful moral laws declare. Otherwise society cannot prosper: it cannot even be at all, and every individual must suffer accordingly.

When we consider how perpetually we are acting and reacting on each other, and how our human life is three fourths conduct, if not more, we see how vastly important it is to make morality easy and natural to ourselves so that we shall, indeed, seem to be acting always from those "few strong instincts." How shall we do this? In just the same way, fundamentally, that any one must follow who would acquire any other art. If a boy would learn to be a carpenter he must handle the saw and the chisel often: if a girl would become skilful on the piano-forte, she must first practise scales and other exercises by the hour. Faculty comes from practice: skill is the result of industry in doing the thing. We see about us in the world men and women who are brave and generous and capable and true and kind and noble and sweet and gracious, whose words and acts are a great power of good to all who meet them or know of them. These persons are masters in the moral art. What they have done we, perchance, can do; and we can begin to do it, in a small way and a slight degree. We gain strength and skill with practice, like the blacksmith at the anvil or the player at the piano-forte; thus we find, in time, the moral line of least resistance, and do the right easily,

naturally, and spontaneously. Until we do it so, it is not done beautifully, and no art is perfect until it comes to beauty as well as to propriety. The higher powers and graces of conduct are unattainable until the ordinary virtues have become so natural to us through habit that we do right without thought, as without difficulty. "Habit a second nature," said the great Duke of Wellington; "it is ten times nature." 1

We can remake ourselves to an indefinite extent, inside the limits of human nature, and the method is the formation of other habits. A certain good action may be very hard for us to do at first, but if we continue to do it, the difficulty diminishes and at last disappears: the action has become natural to us. But the "nature" we have in mind, in so speaking, is not the undisciplined nature we had two or ten years ago as it was, but that nature trained and cultivated by the exercise of will, aiming at a certain moral strength. We have left a lower character beneath us, and have climbed up to a higher.

We should then, each one of us, take ourselves in hand and realize that moral goodness is, least of all things, to be given by one person to another, that, beyond all other desirable possessions, it is an art to be acquired by personal practice and individual experience; that more than in any other direction, we can learn here from the errors and the excellences of others what to avoid and what to pursue; that here supremely, to be is better than to seem, and that if we aim to be like the good and the true, to enjoy their repute and wield their power, we must patiently acquire their skill in goodness, their faculty of righteousness.

We should encourage ourselves with remembering the immense aid we can derive from the record of the lives of the men and women who have made morality the finest of all human arts, not by their sublime in

1 This saying will bear a second quotation.

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