serving others. "He that would be great among you," said Christ,
"let him serve." He that would be happy, let him remember that
there is but one way--"it is more blessed, it is more happy, to
give than to receive."

The next ingredient is a very remarkable one: GOOD TEMPER. "Love
is not provoked."

Nothing could be more striking than to find this here. We
are inclined to look upon bad temper as a very harmless weakness.
We speak of it as a mere infirmity of nature, a family failing, a
matter of temperament, not a thing to take into very serious account
in estimating a man's character. And yet here, right in the heart
of this analysis of love, it finds a place; and the Bible again and
again returns to condemn it as one of the most destructive elements
in human nature.

The peculiarity of ill temper is that it is the vice of the virtuous.
It is often the one blot on an otherwise noble character. You
know men who are all but perfect, and women who would be entirely
perfect, but for an easily ruffled, quick-tempered, or "touchy"
disposition. This compatibility of ill temper with high moral
character is one of the strangest and saddest problems of ethics.
The truth is, there are two great classes of sins--sins of the BODY
and sins of the DISPOSITION. The Prodigal Son may be taken as a
type of the first, the Elder Brother of the second. Now, society
has no doubt whatever as to which of these is the worse. Its brand
falls, without a challenge, upon the Prodigal. But are we right?
We have no balance to weigh one another's sins, and coarser and
finer are but human words; but faults in the higher nature may be