weights.

This is the universal law of spiritual growth. There must be
resistance, struggle, conflict, or there can be no development of
strength. We are inclined to pity those whose lives are scenes of toil
and hardship, but God's angels do not pity them, if only they are
victorious; for in their overcoming they are climbing daily upward
toward the holy heights of sainthood. The beatitudes in the Apocalypse
are all for over-comers. Heaven's rewards and crowns lie beyond
battle-plains. Spiritual life always needs opposition. It flourishes
most luxuriantly in adverse circumstances. We grow best under weights.
We find our richest blessings in the burdens we dread to take up.

The word "character" in its origin is suggestive. It is from a root
which signifies to scratch, to engrave, to cut into furrows. Then it
comes to mean that which is engraved or cut on anything. In life,
therefore, it is that which experiences cut or furrow in the soul. A
baby has no character. Its life is like a piece of white paper, with
nothing yet written upon it; or it is like a smooth marble tablet, on
which, as yet, the sculptor has cut nothing; or the canvas, waiting for
the painter's colors. Character is formed as the years go on. It is
the writing,--the song, the story, put upon the paper. It is the
engraving, the sculpturing, which the marble receives under the chisel.
It is the picture which the artist paints on the canvas. Final
character is what a man is when he has lived through all his earthly
years. In the Christian it is the lines of the likeness of Christ
limned, sometimes furrowed and scarred, upon his soul by the divine
Spirit through the means of grace and the experiences of his own life.

I saw a beautiful vase, and asked its story. Once it was a lump of
common clay lying in the darkness. Then it was rudely dug out and
crushed and ground in the mill, and then put upon the wheel and shaped,
then polished and tinted and put into the furnace and burned. At last,
after many processes, it stood upon the table, a gem of graceful
beauty. In some way analogous to this every noble character is formed.
Common clay at first, it passes through a thousand processes and
experiences, many of them hard and painful, until at length it is
presented before God, faultless in its beauty, bearing the features of
Christ himself.

Spiritual beauty never can be reached without cost. The blessing is
always hidden away in the bur