"Some men move through life as a band of music moves down
the street, flinging out pleasure on every side through
the air, to every one far and near, that can
listen."--_Beecher._
"Truth tyrannizes over the unwilling members of the body.
No man need be deceived who will study the changes of
expression. When a man speaks the truth in the spirit of
truth, his eye is as clear as the heavens. When he has
base ends, and speaks falsely, the eye is muddy, and
sometimes asquint."--_Emerson._
XIII
THE REVELATORS OF CHARACTER
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 Fenelon. 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
"Till we all come unto the perfect man."--_St. Paul._
"_Every soul is a seed._ It does not yet appear what it
shall be."--_H._
"'Very early,' said Margaret Fuller, 'I perceived that
the object of life is to grow.' She herself was a
remarkable instance of the power of the human being to go
forward and upward. Of her it might be said, as Goethe
said of Schiller: 'If I did not see him for a fortnight,
I was astonished to find what progress he had made in the
interim.'"--_James Freeman Clarke._
"Persons who are to transform the world must be
themselves transformed. Life must be full of inspiration.
If education is valuable, the age must double it; if art
is sweet and high, we must double its richness and might;
if philanthropy is divine, we must double its quantity
and tenderness; if religion is valuable, double its
truths and hasten with it unto more firesides; if man's
life is great, let him count more precious all its
summers and winters. The one duty of life is, lessen
every vice and enlarge every virtue."--_David Swing._
XIV
MAKING THE MOST OF ONE'S SELF