order that fools by his folly might be
made wise; he humbled himself to the level of those among whom his work
lay that he might raise some few among them to his own level; he was all
things to all men, if by any means he might save some. Till Alcibiades
ends the splendid eloge that Plato puts into his mouth with these words,
"All my master's vice and stupidity and worship of wealthy and great men
is counterfeit. It is all but the Silenus-mask which conceals the
features of the god within; for if you remove the covering, how shall I
describe to you, my friends and boon companions, the excellence of the
beauty you will find within! Whether any of you have seen Socrates in
his serious mood, when he has thrown aside the mask and disclosed the
divine features beneath it, is more than I know. But I have seen them,
and I can tell you that they seemed to me glorious and marvellous, and,
truly, godlike in their beauty."'

Well, now, I gather out of all that this great lesson: that it is, to
begin with, a mere matter of temperament, or what William Law would call
a mere matter of complexion and sensibility, whether, to begin with, a
man is hard, and dry, and narrow, and stiff, and proud, and scornful, and
cruel; or again, whether he is soft and tender, broad and open, and full
of sympathy and of the milk of human kindness. At first, and to begin
with, there is neither praise nor blame as yet in the matter. A man is
hard just as a stone is hard; it is his nature. Or he is soft as clay is
soft; it is again his nature. But, inheriting such a nature, and his
inherited nature beginning to appear, then is the time when the true man
really begins to be made. The bad man dwells in contentment, and,
indeed, by preference, at home in his own hard, proud, scornful,
resentful heart; or, again, in his facile, fawning, tide-waiting, time-
serving heart; and thus he chooses, accepts, and prefers his evil fate,
and never seeks the help either of God or man to enable him to rise above
it. Paul was not, when we meet him first, the sweet, humble, affable,
placable, makeable man that he made himself and came to be after a
lifetime of gospel-preaching and of adorning the gospel he preached. And
all the assistances and all the opportunities that came to Paul are still
coming to you and to me; till, whether naturally pliable and affectionate
or the opposite, we at last shall come to the temperament, the
complexion, and the exquisite sensibil