| Week-Day Religion |
Chapter 23 |
Page 3 |
Those who would cultivate personal beauty must look to their inner life. As the dweller’s taste and refinement always manifest themselves in the adornment of his home, so goodness and moral beauty in a soul will always exhibit themselves in look and manner and bearing.
Hence there is no beautifier of the person like the Holy Ghost dwelling in a lowly heart. The plainest features are often made to shine in almost supernatural loveliness when struck through with the warmth and tenderness of indwelling love. The most beautiful people in the world are truly benevolent people, their hearts full of sympathy and kindness and their lives devoted to labors of love for the good of the race. The sweetest faces I ever saw were those of dear old Quaker mothers. All their life through they have kept their hearts at peace. They have never resisted, never defended their rights, never struggled against circumstances. They have quietly submitted to the will of God, and his calm and holy peace has filled their souls and ruled their lives. This blessed peace, indwelling, has made their faces almost transparent, radiant with the radiance of heaven and lovely beyond any picture on this earth. Old age writes no lines of decay and leaves no marks of wasting or fading upon them. The sweetness and freshness of youth linger through all the chill winter of years, like those tender plants and flowers that creep out in springtime from under melting snows unharmed and fragrant. An anxious and fretful disposition simply reverses all this.
Love is the fulfilling of the law – not selfish love, but the love that goes out in self denial, in sympathy, in kindness, in continual thought and effort and sacrifice for others. Such love builds beauty for its home, just as the chaste and delicate flower by its own nature fashions for itself a form of exquisite shape and hue. “The angels are beautiful because they are good, and God is beauty because he is love.” Men and women grow lovely even in outward feature just in the degree in which they become filled with the love of God.
Not, then, to the outside must our care be given, but to the culture of the heart. A beautiful soul will transform the most repulsive features. On the other hand, a bad heart will break through natural loveliness, spoiling its delicacy and beauty. When God took from a devoted mother a precious and her only child, she, to occupy her heart and hand in some way about her vanished treasure, filled the first days with touching a faithful photograph of her child which she possessed. Love wrought very skillfully, and under her brush the very features of the sweet, coy child life came out in the picture. The photograph was laid carefully away for a few days, and when she sought it again the eyes were dimmed and the face marred with strange and ugly blotches. Patiently she wrought it over a second time, and the beauty was restored. Again it was laid away, and again the ugly blotches appeared. The fault was in the paper on which the photograph had been taken. There were chemicals lurking in it which affected the delicate colors. The analogy holds in human lives. We may adorn the face and features as we will. By art and skill and care we may try to keep the complexion fair, the skin fresh and soft and the whole countenance beautiful; but if there are within us selfish hearts, groveling dispositions, uncontrolled appetites, they will work out through the surface beauty, and will blotch and spoil it all.
Page 3
<< Prior Page 1 2 3 4 Next Page >>