ONE AT A TIME

and crucifying it steadily, I hope in the end to extirpate all.”

To this, unfortunately, there are four objections:  For one thing, life is too short; the name of sin is legion.  For another thing, to deal with individual sins is to leave the rest of the nature for the time untouched.  In the third place, a single combat with a special sin does not affect the root and spring of the disease.  If you dam up a stream at one place, it will simply overflow higher up.  If only one of the channels of sin be obstructed, experience points to an almost certain overflow through some other part of the nature.  Partial conversion is almost always accompanied by such moral leakage, for the pent-up energies accumulate to the bursting point, and the last state of that soul may be worse than the first.  In the last place, religion does not consist in negatives, in stopping this sin and stopping that.  The perfect character can never be produced with a pruning knife.

3.  But a third protests:  “So be it.  I make no attempt to stop sins one by one.  My method is just the opposite.

          I COPY THE VIRTUES

one by one.”

The difficulty about the copying method is that it is apt to be mechanical.  One can always tell an engraving from a picture, an artificial flower from a real flower.  To copy virtues one by one has somewhat the same effect as eradicating the vices one by one; the temporary result is an overbalanced and incongruous character.  Some one defines a prig as “a creature that is over-fed for its size.”  One sometimes finds Christians of this species—­over-fed on one side of their nature, but dismally thin and starved looking on the other.  The result, for instance, of copying Humility, and adding it on to an otherwise worldly life, is simply grotesque.  A rabid temperance advocate, for the same reason, is often the poorest of creatures, flourishing on a single virtue, and quite oblivious that his Temperance is making a worse man of him and not a better.  These are examples of fine virtues spoiled by association with mean companions.  Character is a unity, and all the virtues must advance together to make the perfect man.

This method of sanctification, nevertheless, is in the true direction.  It is only in the details of execution that it fails.

4.  A fourth method I need scarcely mention, for it is a variation on those already named.  It is

          THE VERY YOUNG MAN’S METHOD;

and the pure earnestness of it makes it almost desecration to touch it.  It is to keep a private note-book with columns for the days of the week, and a list of virtues, with spaces against each for marks.  This, with many stern rules for preface, is stored away in a secret place, and from time to time, at nightfall, the soul is arraigned before it as before a private judgment bar.

This living by code was Franklin’s method; and I suppose thousands more could tell how they had hung up in their bedrooms, or hid in locked-fast drawers, the rules which one solemn day they drew up to shape their lives.