to illustrate my point. Things that are not admirable are not
good. If the dress of a Shaker is not admirable, it is not good.
If that sort of life which is led in a cloister, by monks or nuns,
is not admirable, it is not good. If a man who professes to be a
Christian lives a life out of which is shut all with which an
unsophisticated humanity sympathizes--a life barren of attractive
fruit--a life bare in all its surroundings--a life with no genial
outflow and expression--a life of niggardly negatives rather than
of generous positives--then that life is not admirable, and if it
be not admirable it cannot be good in those respects. A man may
carry along with such a life as this a spotless conscience and a
strict devotion to apprehended duty, and these may be admirable
and good, but the other characteristics cannot be either; and
however much God may approve his honest heart and honest endeavor,
He cannot admire the style of manhood in which they have their
dull and difficult illustration. The idea that I wish definitely
to convey is this: that on the basis of a right heart, God would
have us build up a bright, generous, genial, expressive Christian
character, and use gratefully and gladly all those things which He
has prepared to make life cheerful and admirable. I believe a
saint ought to have a better tailor than a sinner, and be in all
manly ways a better fellow. I believe a true Christian should be
in every thing that constitutes and belongs to a man the most
admirable man in the world.

I have an idea that God looks with the same kind of contempt on
the prominent characteristics of certain styles of Christian men
and women, that men of the world do. There is nothing admirable in
cant and whine, and nasal psalm-singing, and men whose hearts are
livers and whose blood is bile; and I cannot believe that He