i. The Silent Building of Character. We know that in our midst are lives and characters im- mature and unshaped, but every day and every week they are adding something to themselves which will determine the quality and power of their maturity. Every father and mother, every Sunday-school and day-school teacher, has been made to feel over and over again how subtle, secret, and silent is the process by which the boy becomes the man, the girl the woman, and character takes its shape. We may do our careful utmost to bring that raw and malleable material under the best moulding influences we know, but with what result we can seldom or never see at the time. All that is given us are fleeting signs which sometimes encourage and sometimes depress, and which may be wholly illusive and unreliable; but all the time we know that the building of the house of life is going forward, and the young builders are gathering material from many quarries and incorporating it into the fabric. Silently and ceaselessly goes forward the shaping of life, as Troy in its legendary beginning —
Like a mist, rose into towers.
1. Think first of the formative years. What is it you see when you look deep into the eyes of a child ? You see the soul
^ Canon G. Body.
392 HEWING AND BUILDING
going out with an eager demand, asking of all things material for life. That is the child's demand. He asks life of thee. There is a perfect openness, a receptiveness, which will not be his in later years. This is the child mind, eager to learn, and with a vast hospitality to thoughts too great to be grasped, but which he will grapple himself to by the one fragment he can lay hold upon: an earnest pressing to the heart of things, and an unconsciousness of all human substitutes for the intimacy of personal knowledge. "Worldly considerations are nothing to him, deference to prejudice he knows nothing of. He is just a living soul, loyal to question, impulse, aspiration, with a heart and mind that want to know and possess, and are always listening and always taking. And with this receptiveness there is a huge and pathetic confidence. He takes from anybody, he takes anything, , quite unconscious that men often invent formulas only to cover ignorance, lay down dogmas only to shelter their hesitations, and set up conventions out of fear or indolence of investigation. The child knows nothing of this, and with a mighty confidence takes what is given ; for as yet he has no experience to test it by. It is the plastic time, but it is the determinative time.
^ " As the twig is bent, the tree inclines," runs the saying ; and it is truer than most proverbs. We know that its philosophy is true, and yet we do not habitually recognize how true. Some- times some accident or incident makes us realize how large a part of what makes us to-day became part of us in careless days of childhood. We gain experience and knowledge in manhood and womanhood, our estimates and standards change, our views broaden in some ways and contract in others, but when we come to regard ourselves closely, how often it appears beyond dispute that a very large and permanent part of our mental and moral furnishing became ours when we were children.^
I found a piece of plastic clay And idly fashioned it one day, And as my fingers pressed it still, It moved and yielded to my will. I came again when days had passed, The piece of clay was hard at last; The form I gave it still it bore, But I could change that form no more. 1 T. Yates.
I KINGS VI. 7 393
I took a piece of living clay And gently formed it day by day, And moulded, with my power and art, A young child's soft and yielding heart. I came again when years had gone, It was a man I looked upon; He still that early impress bore. And I could change him never more.
^ The time of suffering, when you were beaten on the anvil, is justified by the appearance of the result. Character has acquired a new power of endurance, and become tough and smooth as hammered steel. The natural man suffers, like those trees of Lebanon when the bark is peeled off, and he feels the edge of saw and chisel; but he is of no use in the spiritual temple till these have done their work. In short, the strength, the stability, the uprightness, the graces of charity, of sympathy, which form and adorn a human soul at its last and best, are ever prepared amid trial and pain, and put together in silence.^
2. Notice next the materials out of which character is made. The materials come from far. Other people have had much to do with making us what we are. " The house, when it was in building, was built of stone made ready at the quarry." To begin with, there is the ancestral quarry, the human stuff and stock out of which the child gets his first materials for the house of life. Think of the body. Happy the child who has as his birthgift a fit physical basis for the character he must build for himself, who starts with the five senses unclogged which are the gateways through which joiu'ney all earth's sights and sounds and thoughts. But think more of the mind. The mind of the child is not a blank piece of paper; its history did not begin with its first conscious impression. The " tabula rasa " idea has vanished before a larger revelation of the store of past inheritance and experience which each child carries with it into the world.