Similarly, history tells us of half a score of men during the past two thousand years who have carried this same all-commanding atmosphere. For over a century students of oratory have been endeavoring to explain the eloquence of Whitefield. Such power had this man that the statesmen and philosophers of London used to leave the metropolis on Saturday and journey far into the country to join the crowds, often numbering twenty thousand people, that followed this preacher from village to village. David Hume, the skeptic, explained Whitefield's charm by saying that the preacher spake to his audience with the same passionate abandon with which an ardent lover speaks to his sweetheart when he pleads for her hand. But Benjamin Franklin tells us that the charm in Whitefield's speech was not his musical voice, not his stream of thought running clear as crystal, not his sudden electric outbursts, when the great man seemed on fire; the something that men have tried in vain to analyze, was his character—goodness and sincerity glowing and throbbing in and through words, just as the electric current glows and throbs through the connecting wires. Another such man, but lesser, was Lamartine. During the French Revolution, when the mob poured through the streets, sweeping before it the soldiers who opposed its progress, Lamartine made his way to the middle of the street and stood before the brutal leaders. So powerful was the influence of the good man's character, that, when the leader said, "Soldiers, we are in the presence of a man who represents seventy years of noble living," the rude mob uncovered. Afterward, when the insurgents laid down their arms, it was as a tribute to the superiority of character to guns and brute force.
But when we read of these all-commanding natures, we are not to think that these inspirational beings had their influence through some strange magnetic power, nor that they cast a spell over people like unto the spell that the cat casts over the mouse with which it plays. Their might has, for the most part, been the might of goodness. The chief mark that Paul and Wesley and Wilberforce, and all the great have carried about in the body has been the mark of character. What beauty is to the statue; what ripeness is to the fruit; what strength is to the body; what wisdom is to the reason—that character is to the soul!
Great is the power of bonds and gold! Mighty the influence of customs and institutions! But the greatest force that can exist in society is the presence and power of good men. As rain and soil and sunbeams are only raw materials, to be brought together and condensed into the ripe fruit, so tools, knowledge, goods, are but raw materials, to be wrought up into the fine substance of character. Happy all who have subordinated the animal impulses and the industrial faculties to the moral sentiments. Thrice happy they who have carried all their faculties up unto harmony and symmetry. All such, like Paul, bear about in the body the marks of the Lord Jesus.
Making the Most of One's Self
"Till we all come unto the perfect man."—St. Paul.
"Every soul is a seed. It does not yet appear what it shall be."—H.