The host was determined to draw him out, and so, addressing him, said: "All at this table are self-made men, unless the bishop is an exception." The bishop promptly replied, "I am not made yet," and the reply contained a profound truth.

So long as life lasts, with its discipline of joy or sorrow, its opportunities for good or evil, so long our characters are being shaped and fixed.
Milton said: "He who would write heroic poems, must make his whole life an heroic poem." We are responsible for our thoughts, and unless we could command them, mental and moral excellence would be impossible.
Charles Kingsley has well said: "Let any one set his heart to do what is right and nothing else, and it will not be long ere his brow is stamped with all that goes to make up the heroic expression, with noble indignation, noble self-restraint, great hopes, great sorrows, perhaps even with the print of the martyr's crown of thorns." Said James Martineau: "God insists on having a concurrence between our practice and our thoughts.

If we proceed to make a contradiction between them, He forthwith begins to abolish it, and if the will will not rise to the reason, the reason must be degraded to the will." "When I say, in conducting your understanding," says Sidney Smith, "love knowledge with a great love, with a vehement love, with a love co-eval with life--what do I say but love innocence, love virtue, love purity of conduct, love that which, if you are rich and great, will vindicate the blind fortune which has made you so, and make them call it justice; love that which, if you are poor, will render your poverty respectable, and make the proudest feel that it is unjust to laugh at the meanness of your fortunes; love that which will comfort you, adorn you, and never quit you--which will open to you the kingdom of thought, and all the boundless regions of conception as an asylum against the cruelty, the injustice, and the pain that may be your lot in the world--that which will make your motives habitually great and honorable, and light up in an instant a thousand noble disdains at the very thought of meanness and of fraud ?" The Arabs express this by a parable that incarnates, as is their wont, the Word in the recital.

King Nimrod, say they, one day summoned his three sons into his presence.

He ordered to be set before them three urns under seal.