CHARACTER, UNSEEN PLACES IN
The editor of the Central Presbyterian moralizes on flowers from a back yard as follows:
A lovely flower came to us last week from
the back yard of a home in the city. It was
a white hyacinth, large and full, white as the
driven snow, and sweetly perfumed. And it
came not from the florist's hothouse, nor
from the fine plot at the front of a good
home, but from the little yard at the rear.
What a thing of beauty and fragrance to
spring up in this homely place, common,
soiled and trampled! It is a happy thought,
not uncommon nowadays, to make the back
yard, not often seen by other's eyes, a place
of beauty and sweetness, turning the common
and the obscure into a source of pleasure
and all that is wholesome and inspiring.
One may do well to look after the back yard of his own life. He has sometimes a front that all men see and admire. Toward his friends and neighbors he is careful to make a fair exhibition of good morals and courteous manner. He maintains a front with which no fault can be found. But can the rear, the small and commonplace, the every-day and out-of-sight part of character and conduct, bear the same careful inspection? Are there any fair and fragrant flowers that spring up where no man ever looks, and only God's eye can see?
(349)
Character Wrought by Hardship—See Saved in Service.
CHARACTERISTIC TRAITS
A look, a touch, a word is enough, not infrequently, to betray the man back of it, the unconscious being the characteristic.
Mendelssohn once revealed his master-*hand
as a musician to the organ-keeper in
Strasburg Cathedral by the way he made
the instrument speak, just as Giotto, as an
artist, did to a stranger on one occasion by
drawing a perfect circle at a stroke.
(350)
Characteristics Revealing Authorship—See Recognition by One's Work.
Characterization, Improper—See Badness
in Boys.
CHARITY
Don't look for the flaws as you go through life,
And, even when you find them,
It's wise and kind to be somewhat blind,
And search for the light behind them.
(351)
See Other Side, The.
Charity, Inadequate—See Injustice.
CHARITY, LOGIC OF
Put a Chinaman into your hospital and he
will get treated. You may lie awake at night
drawing up reasons for doing something
different with this disgusting Chinaman—who
somehow is in the world and is thrown into
your care, your hospital, your thought—but
the machinery of your own being is so constructed
that if you take any other course
with him than that which you take with your
own people, your institution will instantly
lose its meaning; you would not have the
face to beg money for its continuance in the
following year. The logic of this, which,
if you like, is the logic of self-protection
under the illusion of self-sacrifice, is the
logic which is at the bottom of all human
progress. The utility of hospitals is not to
cure the sick. It is to teach mercy. The
veneration for hospitals is not because they
cure the sick, it is because they stand for
love, and responsibility.—John Jay Chapman.
(352)
CHARITY RESPECTED
It is reported that during the late disturbances
in southern China consequent upon
the French expedition to Tonquin, a small
Wesleyan mission station at Fatshan was at
the mercy of a riotous mob. The chapel was
wrecked. The hospital for days was menaced
and was hourly expected to fall, but here,
for the first time, the rioters appeared to
hesitate. Some of the sick were removed before
their eyes; others, they knew, could not
leave the building. They constantly threatened
assault, but the blow never came, and
amid their angry menaces the doctor was
allowed to pass freely to and from the hospital.
A finer touch than that which compelled
a kindred feeling between this rabble
and its foreign benefactors does not exist
in nature. The Chinese mob probably did
not include many acute controversialists in
theology, but it did, as a whole, recognize
