and in death;
Sole permissible Discoverer, Denouncer, Judge, and
Executioner of
Ostensible Hypnotists;
Fifty-handed God of Excommunication—with
a thunderbolt in every hand;
Appointer and Installer of the Pastor of all the Churches—the
Perpetual
Pastor-Universal, Science and Health, “the Comforter.”
There she stands-painted by herself. No witness
but herself has been allowed to testify. She
stands there painted by her acts, and decorated by
her words. When she talks, she has only a decorative
value as a witness, either for or against herself,
for she deals mainly in unsupported assertion; and
in the rare cases where she puts forward a verifiable
fact she gets out of it a meaning which it refuses
to furnish to anybody else. Also, when she talks,
she is unstable, she wanders, she is incurably inconsistent;
what she says to-day she contradicts tomorrow.
But her acts are consistent. They are always
faithful to her, they never misinterpret her, they
are a mirror which always reflects her exactly, precisely,
minutely, unerringly, and always the same, to date,
with only those progressive little natural changes
in stature, dress, complexion, mood, and carriage
that mark—exteriorly—the march
of the years and record the accumulations of experience,
while—interiorly—through all
this steady drift of evolution the one essential detail,
the commanding detail, the master detail of the make-up
remains as it was in the beginning, suffers no change
and can suffer none; the basis of the character; the
temperament, the disposition, that indestructible iron
framework upon which the character is built, and whose
shape it must take, and keep, throughout life.
We call it a person’s nature.
The man who is born stingy can be taught to give liberally—with
his hands; but not with his heart. The man born
kind and compassionate can have that disposition crushed
down out of sight by embittering experience; but if
it were an organ the post-mortem would find it still
in his corpse. The man born ambitious of power
and glory may live long without finding it out, but
when the opportunity comes he will know, will strike
for the largest thing within the limit of his chances
at the time-constable, perhaps—and will
be glad and proud when he gets it, and will write
home about it. But he will not stop with that
start; his appetite will come again; and by-and-by
again, and yet again; and when he has climbed to police
commissioner it will at last begin to dawn upon him
that what his Napoleon soul wants and was born for
is something away higher up—he does not
quite know what, but Circumstance and Opportunity
will indicate the direction and he will cut a road
through and find out.
