i. The Book of Character.
1. We must think, not of a modern volume, but of an ancient book. Such a book would consist of a long band of parchment, or other substance, written over usually on one side only, and rolled upon a roller, so that it would form a scroll, which on being opened out could present all that was written therein to view simultaneously. The fundamental idea of a book is a record. Things that have happened in the history of the world are chronicled in books, or the thoughts that are the history of the inner world of a man are in like manner committed to writing, the object in both cases being to transmit to those who may follow a knowledge of what has been done or thought. Books are to the race what memory is to the individual ; hence a book may well be used to signify the mind's power of recalling the past. The power in God which answers to memory in man is therefore called His "600^."
% My page in the Book of Works is to me awful : the contents are my own, the record is not my own. It is my life's record without oversights, without false entries or suppressions: any good set down accurately as good ; all evil, unless erased by Divine Compassion, set down accurately as evil. Nothing whatever is there except what I have genuinely endeavoured, compassed, done, been : I meant it all, though I meant not to meet it again face to face. It is as if all along one had walked in a world of invisible photographic cameras charged with instantaneous plates. The Book of Life may seem yet more awful, kept secret as it has been from the foundation of the world in the knowledge of God Omniscient. Yet is it really so ? It is in fact no independent statement, but appears to be essentially an index or summary of the other. I who composed although I compiled not my Book of
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Works, I myself virtually entered or entered not my name in the corresponding Book of Life : to dread this beyond the other, is to dread a sum total rather than those very items which produce the total. For whilst we read that "the dead were judged out of those things which were written in the Books," it was none the less "according to their works." ^
^ " Consider " [Emerson writes in his journal in 1838] "that always a license attends reformation. We say, Your actions are not registered in a book by a recording angel for an invisible king, — action number one, number two ; up to number one million, — but the retribution that shall be is the same retribution that now is. Base action makes you base ; holy action hallows you. Instantly the man is relieved from a terror that girded him like a belt, has lost the energy that terror gave him, and when now the temptation is strong he will taste the sin and know. Now I hate the loss of the tonic. The end is so valuable; to have escaped the degradation of a crime is in itself so pure a benefit that I should not be very scrupulous as to the means. I would thank any blunder, any sleep, any bigot, any fool, that misled me into such a good." ^
2. Each of us writes the book of his own character. Daily and hourly we are writing ourselves down. We bear about with us, in the character we have made, the whole volume of the past. In everything we do and think in the present, in the way we meet every circumstance of life, we go on forming that character. Our book is there, and it will be opened in the hour of judgment.
^ Has it ever occurred to you as one strong motive to a good and pure and useful life, that we enter the world of spirits, where more things will occur than we in this imperfect state ever dream of, with the very character which we acquire in the world of sense ? If we are selfish, cold, and unloving here, we shall be the very same there. Not an attribute of character can death change. It has no power over the immaterial mind, only over the perish- able body does its sway extend. When the spirit bursts free and happy into the blaze of eternal day, it will be the very spirit which breathes within us now ; the same feelings, longings, loves, desires, only, in the case of the Christlike, purified at last from all taint of sin.^
* Christina G. Rossetti, The Face of the Deep, 473.
2 J. E. Cabot, A Memoir of Ralph Waldo Emerson, i. 332.
» Dr. MacQregor of St. CtUhberts, 94.
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3. All that is set down in this book is thoroughly trustworthy. Autobiographies, as a rule, are not so. They are partial, pre- judiced, one-sided. They must be so, for the simple reason that no living person, however saintly, dare reveal to the world all the secrets of his own heart. There have been good and worthy men who have walked on serene heights in company with Christ, and who have told us something of the story of their own victories and defeats ; but no one has ever told us the whole story. " The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked," and there is no one who is brave enough to draw aside the covering and reveal all that is in it. We are glad that there is not, for the story of the man who did that would not make pleasant reading. The jealousies, the spites, the uncharities, to say nothing of other and darker things, would shock and appal us. But in the book of character the record is complete. Nothing is withheld, nothing misrepresented. Everything done is set down there in naked truth, and the story in its totality is to be thoroughly relied on.