burden is bound up in these three great words--acts, habits, character.
Remember and ponder these three words, and you will in due time become a
moral philosopher. Ponder and practise them, and you will become what is
infinitely better--a moral man. For acts, often repeated, gradually
become habits, and habits, long enough continued, settle and harden and
solidify into character. And thus it is that the severe and laconic
bishop has so often made us shudder as he demonstrated it to us that we
are all with our own hands shaping our character not only for this world,
but much more for the world to come, by every act we perform, by every
word we speak, almost by every breath we draw. Butler is one of the most
terrible authors in the world. He stands on our nearest shelf with Dante
on one side of him and Pascal on the other. He is indeed terrible, but
it is with a terror that purifies the heart and keeps the life in the
hour of temptation. Paul sometimes arms himself with the same terror;
only he composes in another style than that of Butler, and, with all his
vivid intensity, he calls it the terror of the Lord. Paul and Bunyan are
of the same school of moralists and stylists; Butler went to school to
the Stoics, to Aristotle, and to Plato.

Our Lord Himself came to be the express image He was and is by living and
acting under this same universal law of human life--acts, habits,
character. He was made perfect on this same principle. He learned
obedience both by the things that He did, and the things that He
suffered. Butler says in one deep place, that benevolence and justice
and veracity are the basis of all good character in God and in man, and
thus also in the God-man. And those three foundation stones of our
Lord's character settled deeper and grew stronger to bear and to suffer
as He went on practising acts and speaking words of justice, goodness,
and truth. And so of all the other elements of His moral character. Our
Lord left Gethsemane a much more submissive and a much more surrendered