—­1 Peter, iii. 4.

Wherever people are associated together it will always be found that some are more popular and beloved than others.  Taking it for granted that all my young readers would wish to be lovely and beloved by those with whom they are associated, I wish to make a short study of some of those characteristics which always distinguish a lovely or loveable person, and also of some characteristics which tend to make people unlovely and disagreeable.

But if anyone should at the outset say, “I do not care whether people like me or not, I have no particular wish to be lovely or beloved,” what could I answer?  Nothing.  I could only express my sorrow that the better and higher nature of such an one was so undeveloped, and that the greatest source of true happiness was so unknown and unappreciated.  I could only hope that the conscience and the moral nature of such an one might be aroused and quickened by some good and faithful admonition or word of instruction.  And right here I wish to call the special attention of my young friends to this fact:  Youth is a period given up largely to the work of obtaining an education; but education is of a two-fold nature.  We have an intellectual nature and we have a spiritual or moral nature.  The intellectual powers and faculties it is possible to educate almost in spite of even the distaste or aversion of the pupil to receiving that education.  We can, in a measure, force a knowledge of the sciences upon even reluctant pupils.  We can prove to them that three angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles, or that an acid and an alkali will combine to form a salt; but we can never force an antagonistic nature to receive a spiritual truth.  Your parents or teacher may instruct you that it is wrong to be untruthful or unkind or deceitful, but your own inner natures alone can receive such truths and assimilate them.  No human being can compel another human being to be good.  Here is where one of the chief anxieties and chief sorrows of parents and teachers arises.  There is no anxiety so deep as the anxiety of the good that those they love may be good also; no sorrow so poignant as the sorrow of the heart over the willful wrong-doing of those near and dear.  If at the close of your prescribed school course you should return to your homes, skilled in all the sciences, possessed of extensive knowledge of literature, fine musicians, fine artists, and yet selfish, ungentle, proud or haughty in demeanor, wanting in thoughtfulness for the rights and feelings of others, careless of being unkind, the time spent in your education would largely have been spent in vain.