| Making the Most of Life |
Chapter 6 |
Page 5 |
The word “character” in its origin is suggestive. It is from a root which signifies to scratch, to engrave, to cut into furrows. Then is comes to mean that which is engraved or cut on anything. In life, therefore, it is that which experiences cut or furrow in the skull. A baby has no character. Its life is like a piece of white paper, with nothing yet written upon it; or it is like a smooth marble tablet, on which, as yet, the sculptor has cut nothing; or the canvas, waiting for the painter’s colours. Character is formed as the years go on. It is the writing, – the song, the story, put upon the paper. It is the engraving, the sculpturing which the marble receives under the chisel. It is the picture which the artist paints on the canvas. Final character is what a man is when he has lived through all his earthly years. In the Christian it is the lines of the likeness of Christ limned, sometimes furrowed and scarred, upon his soul by the divine Spirit through the means of grace and the experiences of his own life.
I saw a beautiful vase, and asked its story. Once it was a lump of common clay lying in the darkness. Then it was rudely dug out and crushed and ground in the mill, and then put upon the wheel and shaped, then polished and tinted, and put into the furnace and burned. At last, after many processes, it stood upon the table, a gem of graceful beauty. In some way analogous to this every noble character is formed. Common clay at first, it passes through a thousand processes and experiences, many of them hard and painful, until at length it is presented before God, faultless in its beauty, bearing the features of Christ himself.
Page 5