Your Character Will Last Beyond This Life

(Found here)

“We visit the scenes of ancient civilization, once the centers of intense activity, now silent and deserted; the records of human genius and ambition are all around us, yet the interest they awaken is not merely the interest of the antiquarian. There is a deeper and more human interest: these were the scenes of moral conflicts. These streets and palaces, these mighty temples and amphitheaters witnessed the struggle of conscience with human passion and sin, which we know so well, the struggle of the eternal with the temporal. The earthly end of those ancient civilizations was soon fulfilled, and they passed away; the thousand things that set the wheels spinning and kept them going have passed away. But the characters that were formed by them, whose shaping these silent streets and crumbling walls witnessed, remain forever. The things that seemed so important, that stirred the city to its depths and filled the streets with eager crowds, have passed like a storm and left no trace but upon the souls who bear them for eternity.

How little we realize this, the supreme purpose of life. As we think of men whose names are known in the social, political, and literary worlds and think of what they have done and how they have made their names memorable, we forget that the momentous question for them is not so much what they have done as what has been the effect of all they have done upon their own moral character.

It is not necessary that a man should realize this to make it so. Some realize it keenly, others never give it a thought, but it is true for everyone, whether he believes it or denies it. The veriest trifler who plays all his life upon the mere surface of things, and the materialist who denies there is any future life and who professes that moral distinctions are but the outcome of social instincts and hereditary training, are as deeply marked by life as the most serious and the most religious. No one can escape from it, whatever his creed, or, if he has no creed, whatever his philosophy of life, and even if he has no such philosophy, but lives only in the passing moment. Whether he ever pauses to think of what he is doing or not, the principle is the same for all: the one lasting effect of life is character.

. . . How many men realize that by far the most important result of the business they are engaged in, which taxes all their powers, mental and physical, is not whether it succeeds or fails, but whether it makes them honest or dishonest, thorough or slipshod, generous or mean toward the men they deal with — in a word, the moral effects upon them. Many a man has purchased success at the price of moral failure. Who would believe, if he were told, that the most important act in a day’s work, in which great issues were at stake and all a man’s resources were taxed to the utmost, was the self-control that was exercised, or the answer given to the supreme question that was being pressed home during all those hours of strain and tension, ‘Will you surrender principle for the sake of success?’ The success or failure of life cannot be measured by material results; it must be weighed ‘in the balance of the sanctuary.’ Each of us is cast into the seething cauldron of the world with latent possibilities of good and evil, and we come forth well-shaped, strong, and purposeful, or crushed, misshapen, and demoralized.

We are thus led to look beneath the surface of all that is going on around us, and to see all as the machinery designed by God for the molding of character.

It is indeed a gigantic and massive machinery. But if we consider the vastness and complexity of the system He has formed for the well-being of the human body, needing countless ages of preparation and comprising not merely the earth but the solar system, and for all we know a great deal more; and if we realize how much more valuable the moral life is than the physical, it will not surprise us.

It will, moreover, encourage rather than discourage us. For in times of difficulty, when we are depressed with the slowness of our progress and the smallness of the results achieved, it will help us to realize the greatness of the task in which we are engaged to consider the greatness of the machinery we must employ.”
~Basil Maturin