The elements of characterWare, Mary G. (Mary Greene)
Philosophy
The elements of character
Ware, Mary G. (Mary Greene)
Character
It may be objected, that those who are obliged to work hard through the
whole week cannot, on the Sabbath, take enough intellectual food to last
them for Thought during the week. Every person can, if he will, find
time for a chapter in the Bible every day, and therein lies wisdom, that
all humanity combined can never exhaust, and which ever opens richer
stores the more it is wrought upon. Then the human race are everywhere
around us, and every individual is a volume to be read. We are vexed,
and perhaps tormented, by the vices or foibles of those with whom we
are thrown in contact. Let us not stop in vexation, but study our own
hearts, and see if there is not some kindred vice or foible in ourselves
that perhaps troubles our friends quite as much as this disturbs us; for
it is often the case that our own vices, when we meet them in others,
are precisely those which irritate us most; and we are almost always
more irritable through our vices than through our virtues. Again, we
find persons exciting our admiration through their virtues. Let us not
stop in cold admiration, but reflect how we may engraft similar virtues
upon our own souls. It is deep and earnest Thought alone that can teach
us to know ourselves, and without this knowledge we are in constant
danger of cherishing repulsive vices such as we should abhor in others,
and of neglecting the culture of virtues such as in others we esteem
indispensable. Society at large, too, is around us, and domestic
circles, with all their complex relations, their jarring discords, or
their heavenly harmonies; and all are full of food for Thought. The true
and the false, the right and the wrong, are everywhere, and the highest
wisdom is to be able to distinguish one from the other. He who has
spent his whole life in intellectual pursuits may, in this greatest
wisdom,--the only wisdom that belongs to eternity equally with time,--be
the veriest fool; while he who has patiently and prayerfully and
obediently studied no book but the Bible may be so taught of God that he
shall possess all that man while on earth can possess of this highest
wisdom.
It is beautifully said by William von Humboldt, that "exactly those
joyful truths which are the most needful to man--the holiest and
the greatest--lie open to the simplest, plainest mind; nay, are not
unfrequently better, and even more entirely, grasped by such a one,
than by him whose greater knowledge more dissipates his thoughts. These
truths, too, have this peculiarity, that, although they want no profound
research to attain to them, but rather make their own way in the mind,
there is always something new to be found in them, because they are in
themselves inexhaustible and endless."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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