The Testing of Character.
By S. S. Times
THERE are thousands of people who plume themselves upon never having committed this or that form of evil, when they ought rather to thank God that they never had either the power or the opportunity to sin in that particular way. There are thousands of men who stand to-day happy in their simple integrity, to whom the opening of new opportunities, or the enlargement of their power, would bring temptation, transgression, and disgrace. There is no testing of character like the testing which comes with the possession of power. No man knows, or shows, all that is in him, until he has the power to do with impunity whatever he pleases. Plato suggests that men are usually just from compulsion, rather than from choice. And there is a certain amount of truth in the suggestion; for human nature, fenced in as it is by social custom and by religious law, often breaks out into such wantonness of wickedness as to give us reason to ask ourselves what the result would be if there were no restraints to prevent, and no laws to regulate, the exercise of man's wild will. The truth is that we are liable to congratulate ourselves that we are above some particular form of temptation, when in reality we are before it; and often we only need to be lifted into a higher region of capability and opportunity, to find ourselves struggling for our lives with the very temptation from which we had judged ourselves to be most safe. Much of what we call virtue in ourselves and others, can be called so only by courtesy; for that which is guiltless simply because it never has had the chance or the power of transgression, may be innocence—the untried purity which has committed no wrong; but it is not virtue—the strength which knows its own weakness, and which has fought and conquered. Every increased opportunity or capability for good, brings increased opportunity and capability for evil. Nor is this peril to the character associated solely with the possession of a particular kind of power. It belongs to requirements of every class. It comes with the possession of material wealth. "Money will do anything," says the popular proverb; and one of the peculiar dangers of the wealthy is that they are tempted into forbidden places to which their wealth serves as the golden key. This peril comes with intellectual power. Who is so exposed to the temptation to turn aside from the narrow and strait path as the man whose brain is clear enough to see how, by a little unscrupulousness—by a little lowering of his standard—he may "make the most of himself," from a worldly point of view? And this peril comes with the possession of even spiritual power. Wherever the place of spiritual privilege is, there is the place of spiritual temptation. The Jewish tradition which declares that it was the highest of angels who fell from his first estate, and became Satan, receives sad confirmation when we contemplate the history of the church, and see how frequently the highest have fallen, and how the first have become the last. And we know that our Lord's sharpest rebukes were spoken to the religious leaders and the literary men of his day—the classes which best knew the revealed will of the Lord, and by whom the power which came of that knowledge had been degraded to serve personal ambition and personal greed. No man is quite free from the temptation to imagine that an increase of power and opportunity would make it easier for him to live an upright life. Few have that knowledge of self which forbids them to thrust forth their hands for the Master's cup, and to proclaim their own ability to drink of it. There is a general forgetfulness of the fact that the brighter the light in which a man stands, the deeper is the shadow that he casts; and that the more a man gains, the greater the burden which he has to carry. The man who stands at the top of the cliff sees farther and more clearly than the man at its foot; but his chances of falling are also vastly greater. No, no! what is wanted in the lives of most of us is not more power and larger opportunities, but the more faithful use of the power and the opportunities which we have, and more gratitude to God because he has not called us to the possession of powers which we could not control, and to the facing of opportunities which might be, for us, by-ways from the way of life to the gate of hell. If God has not given us great powers, he has not given us the heavier responsibilities which these bring with them; it may be that the hand of mercy is holding back from us the talents and the opportunities which we covet, but which, committed to our frail bark, would swamp our tiny vessel. The man who possesses much material wealth, the man of genius, the man who occupies a place of high spiritual responsibility, is a man to be warned, to be encouraged, to be prayed for, rather than a man to be envied. We ought not presumptuously to demand that these powers shall be ours; in this, as in aught else, we ought rather to pray, "Lead us not into temptation." And if, on the other hand, it be God's will to call us to higher possession and greater power, our duty is to accept his decision cheerfully; not shrinking from the greater perils which that implies, knowing that He who gives the greater responsibility will not refuse to give with it his all-sufficient grace; and that to his every trusting child the promise comes, "As thy days, so shall thy strength be."