g that the preacher spake to his audience with the same
passionate abandon with which an ardent lover speaks to his sweetheart
when he pleads for her hand. But Benjamin Franklin tells us that the
charm in Whitefield's speech was not his musical voice, not his stream
of thought running clear as crystal, not his sudden electric
outbursts, when the great man seemed on fire; the something that men
have tried in vain to analyze, was his character--goodness and
sincerity glowing and throbbing in and through words, just as the
electric current glows and throbs through the connecting wires.
Another such man, but lesser, was Lamartine. During the French
Revolution, when the mob poured through the streets, sweeping before
it the soldiers who opposed its progress, Lamartine made his way to
the middle of the street and stood before the brutal leaders. So
powerful was the influence of the good man's character, that, when the
leader said, "Soldiers, we are in the presence of a man who represents
seventy years of noble living," the rude mob uncovered. Afterward,
when the insurgents laid down their arms, it was as a tribute to the
superiority of character to guns and brute force.

But when we read of these all-commanding natures, we are not to think
that these inspirational beings had their influence through some
strange magnetic power, nor that they cast a spell over people like
unto the spell that the cat casts over the mouse with which it plays.
Their might has, for the most part, been the might of goodness. The
chief mark that Paul and Wesley and Wilberforce, and all the great
have carried about in the body has been the mark of character. What
beauty is to the statue; what ripeness is to the fruit; what strength
is to the body; what wisdom is to the reason--that character is to the
soul!

Great is the power of bonds and gold! Mighty the influence of customs
and institutions! But the greatest force that can exist in society is
the presence and power of good men. As rain and soil and sunbeams are
only raw materials, to be brought together and condensed into the ripe
fruit, so tools, knowledge, goods, are but raw materials, to be
wrought up into the fine substance of character. Happy all who have
subordinated the animal impulses and the industrial faculties to the
moral sentiments. Thrice happy they who have carried all their
faculties up unto harmony and symmetry. All such, like Paul, bear
about in the body the marks of the Lord Je