Page:The Power of the Spirit.djvu/100

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THE FRUITS OF THE SPIRIT
95

so the qualities, which we in a very haphazard and mistaken way are apt to differentiate between the sexes, are blended in the harvest of the Spirit. The Christian character is a marriage of the male and female virtues.

Common, too, to the best women and the best men is the Constraining Quality, which governs them all, Self-control. I need not remind you of how the meaning of 'temperance' has been narrowed till in popular usage it means only one form of this many-sided virtue.

Such is Holiness, the harvest of the Spirit. If a man is not amiable and cheerful, and good-tempered, and equable and strong, he falls very far short of holiness. Yet the so-called religious world has not on the whole made this kind of impression on the world at large. People are not in the habit of saying, 'I'm sure that man must be a very holy man, because he's so jolly!' There is, and has been for centuries, a widespread impression that religious people are negative; rather depressed, very easily shocked, much given to faction and intolerance; combining a somewhat abject profession of self-abasement towards God with a pretension to superiority over their secular fellow man, and a still greater contempt and exclusiveness towards the members of other Churches; showing also a marked tendency to tabu, and tending to mark themselves off, sometimes by inhuman asceticism, sometimes by