It is evident that, whatever a man's aims may be, the attainment of them depends more upon himself than upon any agency that he can employ. If his aim be extended influence, his words and acts have simply the force which his character gives them. If his aim be usefulness, his own personality measures in part the value of his gifts, and determines entirely the worth of his services. If his aim be happiness, the more of a man he is, the larger is his capacity of enjoyment; for as a dog gets more enjoyment out of life than a zoÖphyte, and a man than a dog, so does the fully and symmetrically developed man exceed in receptivity of happiness him whose nature is imperfectly or abnormally developed. Now it is through the thorough training and faithful exercise of his moral faculties and powers that man is most capable of influence, best fitted for usefulness, and endowed with the largest capacity for happiness. History shows this. The men whose lot (if any but our own) we would be willing to assume, have been, without an exception, good men. If there are in our respective circles those whose position we deem in every respect enviable, they are men of preËminent moral excellence. We would not take—could we have it—the most desirable external position with a damaged character. Probably there are few who do not regard [pg 110] a virtuous character as so much to be desired, that in yielding to temptation and falling under the yoke of vicious habits they still mean to reform and to become what they admire. Old men who have led profligate lives always bear visible tokens of having forfeited all the valuable purposes of life, often confess that their whole past has been a mistake, and not infrequently bear faithful testimony to the transcendent worth of moral goodness. To remain satisfied without this is, therefore, a sin against one's own nature, a sacrifice of well-being and happiness which no one has a right to make, and which no prudent man will make.
Self-culture in virtue implies and demands reflection on duty and on the motives to duty, on one's own nature, capacities and liabilities, and on those great themes of thought, which by their amplitude and loftiness enlarge and exalt the minds that become familiar with them. The mere tongue-work or hand-*work, of virtue slackens and becomes deteriorated, when not sustained by profound thought and feeling. Moreover, it is the mind that acts, and it puts into its action all that it has—and no more—of moral and spiritual energy, so that the same outward act means more or less, is of greater or less worth, in proportion to the depth and vigor of feeling and purpose from which it proceeds. It is thus that religious devotion nourishes virtue, and that none are so well fitted for the duties of the earthly life as those who, in their habitual meditation, are the most intimately conversant with the heavenly life.
[pg 111] In moral self-culture great benefit is derived from example, whether of the living or the dead. Perhaps the dead are, in this respect, more useful than the living. In witnessing the worthy deeds and beneficent agency of a person of superior excellence, the tendency is to an over-exact imitation of specific acts and methods, which, precisely because they are spontaneous and fitting in his case, will not be so in the case of his copyist; while the biography of an eminently good man enlists our sympathy with his spirit rather than with the details of his life, and stimulates us to embody the same spirit in widely different forms of duty and usefulness. Thus the school-master who in Dr. Arnold's lifetime heard of his unprecedented success as an educator, would have been tempted to go to Rugby, to study the system on the ground, and then to adopt, so far as possible, the very plans which he there saw in successful operation,—plans which might have been fitted neither to his genius, the traditions of his school, nor the demands of its patrons. At the same time, the interior of Rugby School was very little known, the principles of its administration still less, to persons other than teachers. But Arnold's biography, revealing the foundation-principles of his character and his work, raised up for him a host of imitators of all classes and conditions. Price, who converted his immense candle-factory near London into a veritable Christian seminary for mutual improvement in knowledge, virtue, and piety, professed to owe his impulse to this [pg 112] enterprise solely to the “Life of Arnold,” and like instances were multiplied in very various professions throughout the English-speaking world. In fine, example is of service to us, not in pointing out the precise things to be done, but in exhibiting the beauty, loveliness, and majesty of moral goodness, the possibility of exalted moral attainments, and the varied scope for their exercise in human life. Even he whose example we, as Christians, hold in a reverence which none other shares, is to be imitated, not by slavishly copying his specific acts, which, because they were suitable in JudÆa in the first century, are for the most part unfitting in America in the nineteenth century, but by imbibing his spirit, and then incarnating it in the forms of active duty and service appropriate to our time and land.
Finally, and obviously, the practice of virtue is the most efficient means of moral self-culture. As the thought uttered or written becomes indelibly fixed in the mind, so does the principle or sentiment embodied in action become more intimately and persistently an element of the moral self-consciousness.
