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CHAPTER XLVII

HABIT--THE SERVANT,--THE MASTER

Habit, if wisely and skilfully formed, becomes truly a second
nature.--BACON.

Habit, with its iron sinews,
Clasps and leads us day by day.
LAMARTINE.

The chain of habit coils itself around the heart like a serpent, to
gnaw and stifle it.--HAZLITT.

You can not, in any given case, by any sudden and single effort, will
to be true, if the habit of your life has been insincerity.--F. W.
ROBERTSON.

It is a beautiful provision in the mental and moral arrangement of our
nature, that that which is performed as a duty may by frequent
repetition, become a habit; and the habit of stern virtue, so repulsive
to others, may hang around our neck like a wreath of flowers.--PAXTON
HOOD.

"When shall I begin to train my child?" asked a young mother of a
learned physician.

"How old is the child?" inquired the doctor.

"Two years, sir."

"Then you have lost just two years," replied he, gravely.

"You must begin with his grandmother," said Oliver Wendell Holmes, when
asked a similar question.

"At the mouth of the Mississippi," says Beecher, "how impossible would
it be to stay its waters, and to separate from each other the drops
from the various streams that have poured in on either side,--of the
Red River, the Arkansas, the Ohio, and the Missouri,--or to sift, grain
by grain the particles of sand that have been washed from the
Alleghany, or the Rocky Mountains; yet how much more impossible would
it be when character is the river, and habits are the side-streams!"

"We sow an act, we reap a habit; we sow a habit, we reap a character."

While correct habits depend largely on self-discipline, and often on
self-denial, bad habits, like weeds, spring up, unaided and untrained,
to choke the plants of virtue and as with Canada thistles, allowed to
go to seed in a fair meadow, we may have "one day's seeding, ten years'
weeding."

We seldom see much change in people after they get to be twenty-five or
thirty years of age, except in going further in the way they have
started; but it is a great comfort to think that, when one is young, it
is almost as easy to acquire a good habit as a bad one, and that it is
possible to be hardened in goodness as well as in evil.

Take good care of the first twenty years of your life, and you may hope
that the last twenty will take good care of you.

A writer on the history of Staffordshire tells of an idiot who, liv