To parents who have passed through all the thunder of life’s battle and stand at the close of life’s day discouraged because children are unripe, thoughtless and immature; to publicists and teachers, sowing God’s precious seed, but denied its harvests; to individuals seeking to perfect their character within themselves comes this thought—­that character is a harvest so rich as to ask for long waiting and the courage of far-off results.  Nature can perfect physical processes in twenty years, but long time is asked for teaching the arm skill, the tongue its grace of speech, to clothe reason with sweetness and light, to cast error out of the judgment, to teach the will hardness and the heart hope and endurance.

Four hundred years passed by before the capstone was placed upon the Cathedral of Cologne, but no trouble requires such patient toil as the structure of manhood.  For complexity and beauty nothing is comparable to character.  Great artists spend years upon a single picture.  With a touch here and a touch there they approach it, and when a long period hath passed they bring it to completion.  Yet all the beauty of paintings, all the grace of statues, all the grandeur of cathedrals are as nothing compared to the painting of that inner picture, the chiseling of that inner manhood, the adornment of that inner temple, that is scarcely begun when the physical life ends.  How majestic the full disclosure of an ideal manhood!  With what patience must man wait for its completion!  Here lies the hope of immortality; it does not yet appear what man shall be.

THE SUPREMACY OF HEART OVER BRAIN.

“Out of the heart are the issues of life.”—­Prov.  IV. 23.

“For out of the heart man believeth unto righteousness.”—­Paul.

“Heart is a word that the Bible is full of.  Brain, I believe, is not mentioned in Scripture.  Heart, in the sense in which it is currently understood, suggests the warm center of human life or any other life.  When we say of a man that he ‘has a good deal of heart’ we mean that he is ‘summery.’  When you come near him it is like getting around to the south side of a house in midwinter and letting the sunshine feel of you, and watching the snow slide off the twigs and the tear-drops swell on the points of pendant icicles.  Brain counts for a good deal more to-day than heart does.  It will win more applause and earn a larger salary.  Thought is driven with a curb-bit lest it quicken into a pace and widen out into a swing that transcends the dictates of good form.  Exuberance is in bad odor.  Appeals to the heart are not thought to be quite in good taste.  The current demand is for ideas—­not taste.  I asked a member of my church the other day whether he thought a certain friend of his who attends a certain church and is exceptionally brainy was really entering into sympathy with religious things.  ‘Oh, no,’ he said, ’he likes to hear preaching because he has an active mind, and the way that things are spread out in front of him.’  In the old days of the church a sermon used to convert 3,000 men, now that temperature is down it takes 3,000 sermons to convert one man.”—­Charles H. Parkhurst.