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exact due, but this is little more than the result of a good animal instinct. Some beasts seem to possess it. Honor, however, is peculiarly an affirmative attribute of pure and lofty manhood. Honesty in general is simply the absence of all fraud in human dealings; honor is quite that and much more besides. Honesty will unflinchingly take to itself the benefit of a doubt in its favor; honor, however, will voluntarily give up that doubt, even to its enemy. Unquestionably the two words once had a somewhat similar meaning, but as manners and ideas refine, words are used to define and describe nicer discriminations. Honesty embraces the notion of a duty of perfect obligation rigidly imposed by moral, if not positive law. Honor obeys a self-imposed obligation. A man may be thoroughly honest, yet obtuse to many of the cardinal qualifications of a gentleman. Honesty, in its purpose, looks but little outside of self; honor generously aims to deserve the good opinion of the best; finding keener anguish in a moral stain or blemish than in grievous bodily wounds. Honesty guards its own goods, and loves self-interest; honor freely scatters its own goods and ignores self-interest, while it gallantly protects the weak, relieves the oppressed from the grasp of cruel force, redresses the injuries of others, or defends its own pure dignity.

"Such power there is in clear-eyed self-restraint,
And purpose clean as light from every selfish taint."

THE TRUE GENTLEMAN

Self-Culture

By WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

[William Ellery Channing, the great Unitarian leader, was born at Newport, R. I., April 7, 1780. Coming from Harvard with high baccalaureate honors in 1798, he first thought of studying medicine, but turned from that to the ministry. After acting for a time as private tutor at Richmond, Va., he studied theology at Cambridge, was ordained in 1803, and became pastor of the Federal Street Church in Boston, with which he passed his ministerial life. In the year following he became associated with Buckminster and others in the liberal Congregational movement which ended in the establishment of Unitarianism in Boston. He was much interested in the various moral reforms, such as temperance, the Abolition cause, and the elevation of the working classes, to which he gave a large share of attention. His published work has been in the line of his professional activities-sermons, addresses, and essays. He died at Bennington, Vt., April 2, 1842.]

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ELF-CULTURE is something possible. It is not a dream. It has foundations in our nature. Without this conviction, the speaker will but declaim, and the hearer listen without profit. There are two powers of the human soul which make self-culture possible, the self-searching and the self-forming power. We have first the faculty of turning the mind on itself; of recalling its past, and watching its present operations; of learning its various capacities and susceptibilities, what it can do and bear, what it can enjoy and suffer; and of thus learning in general what our nature is, and what it was made for. It is worthy of observation that we are able to discern not only what we already are, but what we may become, to see in ourselves germs and promises of a growth to which no bounds can be set, to dart beyond what we have actually gained to the idea of perfection at the end of our being.

I am first to unfold the idea of self-culture; and this, in its most general form, may easily be seized. To cultivate anything, be it a plant, an animal, a mind, is to make grow. Growth, expansion, is the end. Nothing admits culture but that which has a principle of life, capable of being expanded. He, therefore, who does what he can to unfold all his powers and capacities, especially his nobler ones, so as to become a well-proportioned, vigorous, excellent, happy being, practices self-culture.

First, self-culture is moral, a branch of singular importance. When a man looks into himself, he discovers two distinct orders or kinds of principles, which it behooves him especially to comprehend. He discovers desires, appetites, passions, which terminate in himself, which crave and seek his own interest, gratification, distinction; and he discovers another principle, an antagonist to these, which is impartial, disinterested, universal, enjoining on him a regard to the rights and happiness of other beings, and laying on him obligations which must be discharged, cost what they may, or however they may clash with his particular pleasure or gain. No man, however narrowed to his own interest, however hardened by selfishness, can deny that there springs up within him a great idea in opposition to interest, the idea of duty, that an inward voice calls him more or less distinctly, to revere and exercise impartial justice, and universal good will.

In the next place, self-culture is religious. When we look into ourselves we discover powers which link us with this outward, visible, finite, ever-changing world. We have sight and other senses to discern, and limbs and various faculties to secure and appropriate the material creation. And we have, too, a power which cannot stop at what we see and handle, at what exists within the bounds of space and time, which seeks for the infinite, uncreated cause, which cannot rest until it ascends to the eternal, all-comprehending mind. This we call the religious principle, and its grandeur cannot be exaggerated by human language; for it marks out a being destined for higher communion than with the visible universe. To develop this is eminently to educate ourselves. The true idea of God, unfolded

clearly and livingly within us, and moving us to adore and obey Him, and to aspire after likeness to Him, is the noblest growth in human, and, I may add, in celestial natures. The religious principle, and the moral, are intimately connected, and grow together. The former is indeed the perfection and highest manifestation of the latter. They are both disinterested. It is the essence of true religion to recognize and adore in God the attributes of impartial justice and universal love, and to hear Him commanding us in the conscience to become what we adore.

Again. Self-culture is intellectual. We cannot look into ourselves without discovering the intellectual principle, the power which thinks, reasons, and judges, the power of seeking and acquiring truth. This, indeed, we are in no danger of overlooking. The intellect being the great instrument by which men compass their wishes, it draws more attention than any of our other powers. When we speak to men of improving themselves the first thought which occurs to them is, that they must cultivate their understanding, and get knowledge and skill. By education men mean almost exclusively intellectual training. For this schools and colleges are instituted, and to this the moral and religious discipline of the young is sacrificed.

Intellectual culture consists, not chiefly, as many are apt to think, in accumulating information, though this is important, but in building up a force of thought which may be turned at will on any subjects on which we are called to pass judgment. This force is manifested in the concentration of the attention, in accurate, penetrating observation, in reducing complex subjects to their elements, in diving beneath the effects to the cause, in detecting the more subtle differences and resemblances of things, in reading the future in the present, and especially in rising from particular facts to general laws or universal truths. This last exertion of the intellect, its rising to broad views and great principles, constitutes what is called the philosophical mind, and is especially worthy of culture. What it means your own observation must have taught you. You must have taken note of two classes of men, the one always employed on details, on particular facts, and the other using

these facts as foundations of higher, wider truths. The latter are philosophers.

For example, men had for ages seen pieces of wood, stones, metals falling to the ground. Newton seized on these particular facts and rose to the idea that all matter tends, or is attracted, toward all matter, and then defined the law according to which this attraction or force acts at different distances, thus giving us a grand principle, which, we have reason to think, extends to and controls the whole outward creation. One man reads a history and can tell you all its events, and there stops. Another combines these events and brings them under one view, and learns the great causes which are at work on this or another nation, and what are its great tendencies, whether to freedom or despotism, to one or another form of civilization. So, one man talks continually about the particular actions of this or another neighbor; whilst another looks beyond the acts to the inward principle from which they spring, and gathers from them larger views of human nature. In a word, one man sees all things apart and in fragments, whilst another strives to discover the harmony, connection, unity of all.

To build up that strength of mind which apprehends and cleaves to great universal truths, is the highest intellectual selfculture; and here I wish you to observe how entirely this culture agrees with that of the moral and the religious principles of our nature, of which I have previously spoken.

Again, self-culture is social, for one of its great offices is to unfold and purify the affections which spring up instinctively in the human breast, which bind together husband and wife, parent and child, brother and sister; which bind a man to friends and neighbors, to his country, and to the suffering who fall under his eye, wherever they belong. The culture of these is an important part of our work, and it consists in converting them from instincts into principles, from natural into spiritual attachments, in giving them a rational, moral, and holy character. For example, our affection for our children is at first instinctive; and if it continue such, it rises little above the brute's attachment to its young. But when a parent infuses into his natural love for his offspring moral and religious principle,

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