Life and Conduct | Page 2

are five
things to be remembered about character.
I. Character is a growth.--As the man without grows, so the man within
grows also--grows day by day either in beauty or in deformity. We are
becoming, as the days and years pass on, what we shall be in our future
earthly life, what we shall be when that life is ended. No one becomes
what he is at once, whether what he is be good or bad. You may have
seen in the winter-time an icicle forming under the eaves of a house. It
grows, one drop at a time, until it is more than a foot long. If the water
is clear, the icicle remains clear and sparkles in the sun; but if the water
is muddy, the icicle looks dirty and its beauty is spoiled. So our

characters are formed; one little thought or feeling at a time adds its
influence. If these thoughts and feelings are pure and right, the
character will be lovely and will sparkle with light; but if they are
impure and evil, the character will be wretched and deformed.
Fairy tales tell us of palaces built up in a night by unseen hands, but
those tales are not half so wonderful as what is going on in each of us.
Day and night, summer and winter, a building is going up within us,
behind the outer screen of our lives. The storeys of it are being silently
fashioned: virtue is being added to faith, and to virtue is being added
knowledge, and to knowledge is being added brotherly kindness, and to
brotherly kindness charity; or meanness is being added to selfishness,
and greed to meanness, and impurity, malice and hatred become
courses in the building. A wretched hovel, a poor, mean, squalid
structure, is rising within us; and when the screen of our outward life is
taken from us, this is what we shall be.
II. Character is independent of reputation and circumstances.--A man
may be held in very high esteem by the world, and yet may be a very
miserable creature so far as his character is concerned. The rich man of
the parable was well off and probably much thought of, but God called
him a fool. Here is a man who is greatly esteemed by the public; he is
regarded in every way as admirable. Follow him home, and you find
him in his family a mean and sordid soul. There you have the real man.
We cannot always judge a man by what he has, or by what he appears
to us; for what he is may be something very different. "These
uniforms," said the Duke of Wellington, "are great illusions. Strip them
off, and many a pretty fellow would be a coward; when in them he
passes muster with the rest." We must not confound the uniform with
the man: we are often too ready to do so. To a certain extent we can
form an idea what a man is from the outside. The horny hand tells of
the life of labor; the deep-set brow tells of the thinker. In other words
we have a right to judge a man by his habitation. If the fences are
broken down, the paths are unkept, the flower-beds full of weeds, we
may be pretty sure the inhabitants are idle, thriftless, perhaps
intemperate. So a clear eye, a firm step, an open countenance, tell of a
pure, good soul within. For example, a man of cold exterior or of

formal manner may often have a warm heart under it all; a man of
rough manners may have kindly feelings that he cannot express. We are
often long in the company of men before we really know them, and
then the discovery of what they are comes on us by surprise.
III. Character cannot be always hidden.--There are those who seem to
think that they can have one set of principles for themselves and
another for the outward world; that they can be in their heart one thing
and in society another; that they can have one character and another
reputation. They may be proud, but they can so hide their pride as to
have the reputation of being humble; they can lie, but still have the
reputation of always speaking the truth; they can be impure, and yet
have the reputation of being virtuous. But sooner or later what they
really are generally becomes manifest. Reputation and character come
to be one. That which they would keep secret cannot be concealed. The
mask which men would wear slips aside and discloses the face beneath
it. (1) Time reveals character. As the years pass along, a man generally
gets to be known for what he is. For example, if a man is a coward