IN RELATION TO CHARACTER
Good character is the reaction upon the whole self caused by the Mystic
Sense as a habit visioning, and the will claiming, the excellent. It is
the result on personality of a sustained effort to transcend the existing
relation to life and its conditions, a state of chronic dissatisfaction
with the progress and achievement of the moment, which makes the good
mediocre by contrasting it with the superior and coveting the best
conceivable as man’s right and heritage.
The Mystic Sense is always finding a more excellent way. Excepting
when taught to play casuistical tricks, it does not look for the
conventionally proper, or rest comfortably in it.[19] It launches out
into that noble freedom which, from a group of probabilities, selects
that which is farthest removed from suspicion of selfish considerations
and promises ultimately the best social results. On the other hand it is
not disregardful of the accepted code of morals. This it takes as its
foundation, individualizing it for personal use, and boldly submitting
propositions for improvement to the social conscience for approval,
modification, or rejection. Such approval, modification, or rejection is
never a purely formal matter registered in the dictum of a tribunal but
rather the culmination of a process akin, in the moral sphere, to that
which is termed “natural selection” in the physical sphere.
Character and morality are not synonymous. Strong character may be good
or bad, the latter being the result of the active exercise of the will in
a conflict with goodness; it is the transformation of evil from a mere
negation into a positive, personal force by conscious volition. But our
study is of good character and its cultivation, so that when the word
“character” is used the determinative “good” is understood.
Character is the result of the correspondence of personality with the
best that it knows. It is measured by the faithfulness with which
it responds to opportunity. A man with small opportunity, who is
scrupulously conscientious in availing himself of all the privilege
afforded him, becomes a stronger character than another, who, with his
great opportunity, is less loyal in his use of it. Of course the greatest
character is that which knows ideal virtue and consistently aims to
bring up life to its level. Character is determined by reaction upon
environment, external and internal. There are many suitable environments
possible for every character, more than there are unsuitable ones, as the
vicissitudes of most lives testify. Character is thus bound up closely
with individual personality and is never abstract, as morality is in the
science of ethics. Character is created and disclosed by that phase of
experience in which the Mystic Sense is busied in photographing ideals on
the film monopolized by the actual to the discomfiture and obliteration
of the latter. Better to-morrows are obtruded on poor to-days, partly by
virtue of the fact that the Mystic Sense is naturally in constant contact
with the ideally best, sensing and appropriating it just as the body,
without conscious effort on our part, senses and appropriates light and
air, and partly because, either feebly or vigorously, most men claim for
themselves by deliberate volition a larger life than that which is.
The possession of character is the sole justification of self-respect.
Self-respect ensues upon the growth of character, and is to character
what perfume is to the flower. It is due to the consciousness of having
within ourselves that which is worthy—not mere moral acquiescence but
something we have made peculiarly our own by active effort. It is a
high form of the consciousness which inspires an inventor when he has
constructed a piece of mechanism. Self-respect is a witness to our
having been individualized and is indifferent to external possessions or
aught that is our own by virtue of favor and chance rather than by merit.
Self-respect runs into self-conceit and stagnation when it rests content
with that which is. It never dawdles in its movements nor loafs on the
street corners. Self-respect becomes self-contempt and self-abasement
when our attention is turned from our cherished ideals and actual
progress, and fixed upon our defects and failures. Penitence is not a bar
but a necessity to character and its fragrant effluence, self-respect.
Character calls for and expects communal respect in the same degree
that it receives self-respect. Reputation should be commensurate with
character. It is possible for men to have the unmerited respect of
their fellows without having self-respect. This is due to the practice
of deceit, conscious or unconscious, which enables them to simulate
character and have appearance without corresponding reality. To the
man of character, it is as truly a pain to be overestimated as to
be underestimated. He can afford to lose his reputation, though he
can never be exempt from the keen pain involved. In the process of
achieving character, the great frequently, if not always, have to endure
the withholding of respect on the part of the community. Seldom does
a man make a contribution to progress without being temporarily at
least discredited by those whom most of all he is aiming to benefit.
Self-respect towers at such moments. A man of character will trust
himself when all men doubt him but make allowance for their doubting,
too; he will wait and not be tired by waiting, or being lied about, won’t
deal in lies, or being hated won’t give way to hating.[20]
Ideals become tasks and tasks become character in social experience. “A
talent,” says Goethe, “shapes itself in stillness, but a character in
the tumult of the world.” “That which would have remained only a quality
in (our Lord), if He had stayed in the desert, becomes a life when He
goes forth into the world.” The ultimate test of a man’s worth is his
character and not his degree of morality—his power of volitional reaction
upon environment, objective and subjective.
Every man at some time during his career,—most men for a considerable
portion of it, and many from beginning to end,—covets character. Those
who fail to claim it for themselves seldom fail to admire it in others.
Frequently they put as much effort into pretending they have it as would
win for them the real thing. They pay the price of gold for tinsel.
Character has commercial value and sometimes men are honest according
to law solely because it is politic, or polite according to social
requirement because it pays. But the honesty and courtesy of such men
are not virtues. They are handmaidens of covetousness. They contribute
nothing to self-respect. They have no moral content, and serve only to
aid in bolstering up a vicious characteristic. However, it is a tribute
to the kingliness of character that, either for its market value or
because of its inherent worth, men clothe themselves in its appearance
when they do not seek the substance.
The substance may be had by every man. Man not only is, but also
acknowledges himself to be, responsible for what he is. He makes the
confession when he keeps his worst self from the public gaze even though
it promises him no special gain. The extreme to which the sense of
personal responsibility and accountability goes is evidenced by the fact
that, though _for others_ we find it difficult to believe in the closing
of the possibility of self-improvement and ultimate loss fixed and final,
many, perhaps most of us, think and act _in our own case_ as though _we
at least_ shall be held strictly accountable for our character and reap
as we live. If we had no responsibility for what we were and did, there
would be no room for shame, were we to be publicly known to be exactly
what we are. Rob Henley’s poem of its defiant note and we are in the
presence of sober fact:
“It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll—
I am the Master of my fate—
I am the Captain of my soul.”
Character, like fruit, gets rich flavor through living in a climate of
extremes which give robustness by threatening very existence. The story
of the transgression of Adam and his consort is illustrative rather
than singular. The temptation set was the very stiffest to which human
life, being what it is, could be subjected—a demand for self-discipline
and obedience to mysterious law. It is interesting that the first
recorded strain put upon the human will was not to do rather than to
do. Seemingly it was the limitation of freedom, the restriction of
choice, the narrowing of experience. In no other conditions could man
have had a chance to gain character. Had our first human ancestors won
their day without lapse, every succeeding generation would have had to
do the same. You cannot inherit character. You must win it. Temptation
is never eliminated from human life, as we know it. Its conquest in one
form opens the door to its appearance in another form. Our earliest
human ancestors having known the higher chose the lower. But this did
not, either in their own case or in that of their offspring through a
thousand generations, close the door to the attainment of character.
Human life begins in conditions which threaten character and therefore
becomes eligible for character. The complaint that there are those in the
world who, because of hopeless environment, never have an opportunity,
finds sympathetic echo in every heart, but it does not absolve us from
responsibility to our own opportunity.
Much is made of heredity by those who know little or nothing of the
controversies which gather about the study of its operation. The popular
interpretation presses hard upon its thorns and forgets even the
existence of its blossoms. “The sins of the fathers are visited upon
the children unto the third and fourth generation,” is the dominating
thought which, by exclusive consideration, diseases the mind of many a
man until his whole imaginative nature is employed in the service of some
congenital, or supposed congenital, weakness to make him its victim. In
this way fatalism is induced. Fatalism is a disease of the Mystic Sense
which substitutes acquiescence for reaction. It is the straw committing
itself to the river, not the oarsman using the current to his own
advantage. Acquiescence is too tame a virtue for man, if indeed it be a
virtue at all.
Whatever credit we give to heredity for endowing us with the tendencies
of our evil forbears, we must give it equal credit for endowing us with
those of our good forbears. If you are determined to be fatalistic, be so
fairly, recognizing the possible transmission of every kind of tendency.
Conscious acceptance of gifts of strength from the past is a powerful
counter-irritant to defend us against a real or imagined inheritance of
weakness.
The problem of heredity is obscured by the fog of controversy which just
now envelopes it. We must remember that the main questions in doubt are
its method, and extent, and our ability to intervene so as to modify
or improve its operations. Science very cautiously says that “heredity
suggests, though it would be rash to say it is proved, that man is almost
entirely the product of inborn factors which are hardly affected by
[physical] environment.”[21] “Given parents of certain constitution, it
can be said with confidence that _on the average_ a certain proportion
of their offspring will have such and such characters.” “Both [the
Biometrician and Mendelian] agree that what is present in the germ-cell
will be present in the individual, and that external conditions as a
rule play but a small part in determining its appearance.” “Almost
entirely,” “hardly affected,” “on the average,” “a certain proportion,”
“as a rule,” form a relatively large group of qualifying clauses in
three short sentences. When we know more certainly the mechanism by which
heredity operates we shall be better able by eugenics and physiological
or mechanical processes to combat its evils and foster its benefits. In
the meantime there is no call for us to stand idle. If man were mere
animal it would be another matter, but he is not. His Mystic Sense, which
links him to a superior order, has steadily differentiated him from all
below him. It has enabled him to transcend environment. By means of it
he can acquire character even if the laws of transmission should forbid
him to pass it on to his offspring by congenital endowment. It is a
finer and stronger thing to improve steadily the tradition of family or
race by a series of successive personal conquests and achievements than
to gain exemption from evil tendencies by the more or less mechanical
process of procreation. Release from temptation is not necessarily a
benefit, and is never as productive of character as the gift of ability
to defeat it. Frequently all that is needed is inspiration, mystical and
human, to enable a man to rise above his evil inheritance and habit.
Evil tradition is as real and destructive a phase of heredity as inborn
weakness, whereas on the other hand _noblesse oblige_. It is rather
the tradition of the family trait of intemperance than a transmitted
physical peculiarity that keeps the line of drunkards unbroken. Children
must not be allowed to suppose that they can be excused from struggle.
Being prepared for all temptations as a normal part of experience they
are least likely to become victims of any: being made expectant of all
virtues, they may perchance glean some.
Our environment is our opportunity, particularly in those spots where
it is uncongenial and threatening. To chafe and fret is to increase the
inimical possibilities of difficulty. To think of it except with the
intention of mastering it is weakening and depressing. To remove it with
our own hands rather than have another remove it, if it be moveable, or,
should it be immoveable, to weave it as material into our scheme of life,
using its rough threads to the last stand, is to achieve character. A
man must either fit his burden to his back or his back to his burden,
if he desires to remain man. They are rare exceptions in mankind who
have not capacity for so doing, if not by themselves, at any rate in
a sympathetic social setting. A burdened life by the free use of the
Mystic Sense may become a privileged life. Introduce fearlessness and
experimental curiosity into hardship, and you get romance which keeps the
wings of life moving and mounting, and makes the world of men around look
up in aspiring wonder.
“There is no storme but this
Of your owne Cowardise
That braves you out;
You are the storme that mocks
Your selves; you are the rocks
Of your owne doubt:
Besides this feare of danger, ther’s no danger here;
And he that here feares danger, does deserve his feare.”[22]
The Mystic Sense has an inner ear. Through it conscience delivers its
message by means of which we come to know and understand the meaning of
ought and ought not. Ready response to conscience is to be coveted above
all things, especially where conscience has been trained and illumined.
A friend once wrote me, a few days before his death, that he had come to
see that what pretended to be education was no education at all unless
it included the development of conscience. But mere knowledge of right
and wrong, ought and ought not, does not impart goodness. To be aware
that vice injures and virtue blesses is desirable but insufficient. There
is not less vice among those who know than there is among those who do
not know ethics, other things being equal, excepting where education is
conceived to be something more than the imparting of information.
Sometimes nations and individuals covet character without being ready
to pay the whole price for it. They give admirable facilities for the
development of certain phases of training essential to character, but
exclude that deciding factor which determines whether or not they may
be woven into character. Influences from other sources may come in to
repair wilful neglect, but, if not, the training goes for nothing so far
as character is concerned. Public schools can never give character its
best opportunity without a practical recognition of religion. Purely
secular education, the imparting of learning including the science of
ethics, without religion in church and home to supplement it, is a
doubtful blessing at best. The current idea of secular education is not
new. During the French Revolution its leaders mapped out what appeared
to be a satisfactory programme of instruction. It was desired to have
moral training, first without religion or with the “Worship of Reason,”
then with a minimum of religion. The priests were suffered to continue
as being at any rate moral policemen, but Danton planned to supplant
them by _officiers de morale_. All experiments were of no avail. “_La
morale populaire ... cherche encore_,” it was pathetically complained,
“_un point d’appui solide_.” Then came freedom to worship, and later the
Concordat reintroduced the old religious order, partially, it is true,
because the people could or would not live without it, but largely for
the sake of morals.
If religion without morality becomes superstitious sentiment, morality
without religion becomes for the average man inoperative ethics and
ultimately a pitiless judge. There is no more oppressive tyrant than
a high ethical code with a will, untrained, uninspired, and helpless
to respond. It becomes a mocking and cruel Nemesis viewing with
indifference its writhing victims. The Chinese Classics are preserved by
the wonderful nation who produced them, as a literary treasure instead of
as a practical code of conduct—the sure fate of the Bible apart from the
Christian Church.
It is too late in the day to pretend that morality and religion are
synonymous, however intimate their relationship, or that the end of
religion is to make men good. Righteousness, which is the Christian term
for morality, is to be had only in part by the practice of embracing the
excellent and bathing our mystic self in the fountain of ideals. The type
of righteousness thus created can never be aught than self-conscious,
like an overdressed woman, or a gaudy painting. The Mystic Sense must
occupy itself in still higher altitudes. Having come from God and being
partaker of His nature, it must aspire to Him. The end of life is
religion, and the end of religion is to know God. The purest type of
righteousness, experienced or conceivable, is created by our having as
our dominant ambition to know the only God and Jesus Christ whom He hath
sent. The net result is Christian Character.