acter 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 sayin