Page:Cyclopedia of illustrations for public speakers, containing facts, incidents, stories, experiences, anecdotes, selections, etc., for illustrative purposes, with cross-references; (IA cyclopediaofillu00scotrich).pdf/97

 CHARACTER, UNSEEN PLACES IN

The editor of the Central Presbyterian moralizes on flowers from a back yard as follows:

A lovely flower came to us last week from the back yard of a home in the city. It was a white hyacinth, large and full, white as the driven snow, and sweetly perfumed. And it came not from the florist's hothouse, nor from the fine plot at the front of a good home, but from the little yard at the rear. What a thing of beauty and fragrance to spring up in this homely place, common, soiled and trampled! It is a happy thought, not uncommon nowadays, to make the back yard, not often seen by other's eyes, a place of beauty and sweetness, turning the common and the obscure into a source of pleasure and all that is wholesome and inspiring.

One may do well to look after the back yard of his own life. He has sometimes a front that all men see and admire. Toward his friends and neighbors he is careful to make a fair exhibition of good morals and courteous manner. He maintains a front with which no fault can be found. But can the rear, the small and commonplace, the every-day and out-of-sight part of character and conduct, bear the same careful inspection? Are there any fair and fragrant flowers that spring up where no man ever looks, and only God's eye can see?

(349)

Character Wrought by Hardship—See .

CHARACTERISTIC TRAITS

A look, a touch, a word is enough, not infrequently, to betray the man back of it, the unconscious being the characteristic.

Mendelssohn once revealed his master-*hand as a musician to the organ-keeper in Strasburg Cathedral by the way he made the instrument speak, just as Giotto, as an artist, did to a stranger on one occasion by drawing a perfect circle at a stroke.

(350)

Characteristics Revealing Authorship—See .

Characterization, Improper—See.

CHARITY

Don't look for the flaws as you go through life, And, even when you find them, It's wise and kind to be somewhat blind, And search for the light behind them.

(351)

See.

Charity, Inadequate—See.

CHARITY, LOGIC OF

Put a Chinaman into your hospital and he will get treated. You may lie awake at night drawing up reasons for doing something different with this disgusting Chinaman—who somehow is in the world and is thrown into your care, your hospital, your thought—but the machinery of your own being is so constructed that if you take any other course with him than that which you take with your own people, your institution will instantly lose its meaning; you would not have the face to beg money for its continuance in the following year. The logic of this, which, if you like, is the logic of self-protection under the illusion of self-sacrifice, is the logic which is at the bottom of all human progress. The utility of hospitals is not to cure the sick. It is to teach mercy. The veneration for hospitals is not because they cure the sick, it is because they stand for love, and responsibility.—

(352)

CHARITY RESPECTED

It is reported that during the late disturbances in southern China consequent upon the French expedition to Tonquin, a small Wesleyan mission station at Fatshan was at the mercy of a riotous mob. The chapel was wrecked. The hospital for days was menaced and was hourly expected to fall, but here, for the first time, the rioters appeared to hesitate. Some of the sick were removed before their eyes; others, they knew, could not leave the building. They constantly threatened assault, but the blow never came, and amid their angry menaces the doctor was allowed to pass freely to and from the hospital. A finer touch than that which compelled a kindred feeling between this rabble and its foreign benefactors does not exist in nature. The Chinese mob probably did not include many acute controversialists in theology, but it did, as a whole, recognize