it. I don't take much credit to myself for refusing that drink; and, if I had taken it, why, I wouldn't have put all the blame on the saloon-keeper, as some folks do. It takes two, every time, to make a successful temptation."
It was an honest way to look at the question. Temptation is not all a matter of outward happening, but also of inner readiness. No outsider can be responsible for our sins as we are responsible. "He tempted me" only explains one side of the temptation. The other side—the personal side—we must answer for, and no excuse will save us. "It takes two," and one of the two is always our own responsible self.—Michigan Christian Advocate.
(3194)
Temptations—See Curves of Temptation.
TENACITY
After Grant got fairly well started in his
studies, the best he could say for himself
is in this characteristic sentence to his father:
"I don't expect to make very fast progress,
but I will try to hold on to what I get." Here
was somewhat a foreshadowing of the bull-*dog
tenacity which afterward made him so
famous.—Nicholas Smith, "Grant, the Man
of Mystery."
(3195)
See Clinging by Faith.
Tenacity of Birth and Training—See
Aristocracy, Ingrained.
TENDENCIES, INHERITED
From earliest childhood, says his mother,
Charles Hamilton (the aviator), has given
unmistakable evidence of his desire to leave
the earth and invade the skies. The mother—who,
with perfect confidence in his ability,
saw her son go aloft in an aeroplane for the
first time and immediately wanted to take
a trip on it with him—dates her first realization
of this fact to the day when Charles, but
eight years old, surreptitiously borrowed her
best parasol, climbed with it tightly clutched
in his hands to the eaves of the barn, and
then jumped off, employing the parasol parachute-wise
to break his fall.
He not only broke his fall, but he completely smashed the parasol in that little escapade. But his mother did not have the heart to punish the child for his act because, as she put it, "I realized that, after all, it was only the budding desire to fly that I myself have felt since early girlhood. How could I punish my boy for doing what I always had wanted to do?"
The interim between that barn-and-parasol episode of Hamilton's achievement of his insatiable ambition—to fly—was the matter of only a few years. He managed to get a balloon man, who was giving exhibitions in a spherical gas bag just outside of New Britain, to take him up. From that moment his fever to invade the sky knew no bounds, and, as he himself put it only a few days ago, never is he happier than when up in his aeroplane doing the now-famous Hamilton dip.
After a lapse of several years, during which he left his beloved machinery and aerial paraphernalia long enough to get in some schooling, Hamilton turned his attention to ballooning on his own account. Then kites of all fashions, shapes and sizes took up his attention. The dirigible balloon coming in, he turned to that, and for four years gave exhibitions that startled the world by their daring and success. Then he returned to the kite end of the game, working with Israel Ludlow along those lines of aviation. Finally he made his first aeroplane ascension, and since then he has done almost everything possible to do with a heavier-than-air machine of the present-day type.
(3196)
TENDENCY
One ship drives east and another west
With the self-same winds that blow.
'Tis the set of the sails and not the gales
Which tell us the way to go.
Like the winds of the sea are the waves of fate,
As we voyage along through life.
'Tis the set of the soul which decides the goal,
And not the calm, nor the strife.
(3197)
TENDERNESS
"The tenderest are the bravest; the loving are the daring." This finds its illustration in an incident relater by the wife of Gen. George E. Pickett, of the Confederate army, just after his famous Gettysburg charge:
One Sunday, just after the battle, when he
was in Richmond recruiting his division, we
were walking to church together, when we
saw a little Hebrew child, standing first on
one foot and then on the other, rubbing his
eyes with very dirty hands, and crying as if
his heart would break.
"What is the matter, little man?" my Soldier asked.
