thing
alone is indispensable to success--personal worth and manhood. He who
stands forth clothed with real weight of goodness can neither be
feeble in life, nor forgotten in death. Society admires its scholar,
but society reveres and loves its hero whose intellect is clothed with
goodness. For character is not of the intellect, but of the
disposition. Its qualities strike through and color the mind and heart
even as summer strikes the matured fruit through with juicy ripeness.

Of that noble Greek who governed his city by unwritten laws, the
people said: "Phocion's character is more than the constitution." The
weight of goodness in Lamartine was such that during the bloody days
in Paris his doors were unlocked. Character in him was a defense
beyond the force of rock walls or armed regiments. Emerson says there
was a certain power in Lincoln, Washington and Burke not to be
explained by their printed words. Burke the man was inexpressibly
finer than anything he said. As a spring is more than the cup it
fills, as a poet or architect is more than the songs he sings or the
temple he rears, so the man is more than the book or business he
fashions. Earth holds many wondrous scenes called temples,
battle-fields, cathedrals, but earth holds no scene comparable for
majesty and beauty to a man clothed indeed with intellect, but adorned
also with integrities and virtues. Beholding such a one, well did
Milton exclaim: "A good man is the ripe fruit our earth holds up to
God."

Character has been defined as the joint product of nature and nurture.
Nature gives the raw material, character is the carved statue. The raw
material includes the racial endowment, temperament, degree of vital
force, mentality, aptitude for tool or industry, for art or science.
These birth-gifts are quantities, fixed and unalterable. No
heart-rendings can change the two-talent nature into a ten-talent man.
No agony of effort can add a cubit to the stature. The eagle flies
over the chasm as easily as an ant crawls over the crack in the
ground. Shakespeare writes Hamlet as easily as Tupper wrote his tales.
Once an oak, always an oak. Care and culture can thicken the girth of
the tree, but no degree of culture can cause an oak bough to bring
forth figs instead of acorns. Rebellion against temperament and
circumstance is sure to end in the breaking of the heart. Happiness
and success begin with the sincere acceptance of the birth-gift and
career God hath chosen