Good Temper: "Love is not easily provoked." We are inclined to look upon bad temper as a very harmless weakness. We speak of it as a mere infirmity of nature, a family failing, a matter of temperament, not a thing to take into very serious account in estimating a man's character. And yet here, right in the heart of this analysis of love, it finds a place ; and the Bible again and again returns to condemn it as one of the most destructive elements of human nature. The peculiarity of ill-temper is that it is the vic eof the virtuous. It is often the one blot on an otherwise noble character. You know men who are all but perfect, and women who would be entirely perfect, but for an easily ruffled quick-tempered or "touchy" disposition. This compatibility of ill-temper with high moral character is one of the strangest and saddest problems of ethics. The truth is there are two great classes of sins - sins of the Body, and sins of Disposition. The prodigal son may be taken as a type of the first, the Elder brother of the second. Now society has no doubt whatever as to which of these is the worse. Its brand falls, without a challenge, upon the Prodigal. But are we right? We have no balance to weigh one another's sins, and coarser and finer are but human words ; but faults in the higher nature may be less venial than those in the lower, and to the eye of Him who is Love, a sin against Love may seem a hundred times more base. No form of vice, not worldliness, not greed of gold, not drunkenness itself does more to un-christianise society than evil temper. For embittering life, for breaking up communities, for destroying the most sacred relationships, for devastating homes, for withering up men and women, for taking the bloom off childhood; in short for sheer gratuitous misery-producing power, this influence stands alone. Jealousy, anger, pride, uncharity, cruelty, self-righteousness, touchiness, doggedness, sullenness - in varying proportions these are the ingredients of all ill-temper. Judge if such sins of disposition are not worse to live in, and for others to live with than sins of the body. There is really no place in Heaven for a disposition like this. A man with such a mood could only make Heaven miserable for all the people in it.
