ss only as a power to check or
restrain acts that are at variance with it.

It is in this way that the practical man carries with him his ethical
principles. He does not stop to reason out the relation of duty and
virtue to reward, or of temptation and vice to penalty, before he
decides to help the unfortunate, or to be faithful to a friend, or to
vote on election day. This trained, habitual will, causing acts to be
performed in conformity to duty and virtue, yet without conscious
reference to the explicit principles that underlie them, is character.

It is chiefly in the formation of character that the explicit
recognition of ethical principles has its value. Character is a storage
battery in which the power acquired by our past acts is accumulated and
preserved for future use.

It is through this power of character, this tendency of acts of a given
nature to repeat and perpetuate themselves, that we give unity and
consistency to our lives. This also is the secret of our power of
growth. As soon as one virtue has become habitual and enters into our
character, we can leave it, trusting it in the hands of this unconscious
power of self-perpetuation; and then we can turn the energy thus freed
toward the acquisition of new virtues.

Day by day we are turning over more and more of our lives to this domain
of character. Hence it is of the utmost importance to allow nothing to
enter this almost irrevocable state of unconscious, habitual character
that has not first received the approval of conscience, the sanction of
duty, and the stamp of virtue. Character, once formed in a wrong
direction, may be corrected. But it can be done only with the greatest
difficulty, and by a process as hard to resolve upon as the amputation
of a limb or the plucking out of an eye.

The greater part of the principles of ethics we knew before we undertook
this formal study. We learned them from our parents; we picked them up
in contact with one another in the daily intercourse of life. The value
of our study will not consist so much in new truths learned, as in the
clearer and sharper outlines which it will have given to some of the
features of the moral ideal. The definite results of such a study we
cannot mark or measure. Just as sunshine and rain come to the plants and
trees, and then seem to vanish, leaving no visible or tangible trace
behind; yet the plants and trees are different from what they were
before, and have the heat and moisture