ect as regards success in life. "Everything,"
the proverb says, "comes to him who waits." The patient and forbearing
man attains his object much sooner than the man of passion and abuse.
Such a person is continually thwarted in his plans. People refuse to
be bullied into acquiescence; and threats, which have well been called
"the arguments of a coward," raise rather than disarm opposition.
(_d_) It has a bad effect spiritually. (1) The man of evil temper
wants the calm disposition of soul necessary to communion with God.
The glass through which he looks into the spiritual world is clouded
and gives a distorted vision. He whose soul is filled with anger and
clouded by passion cannot pray. Before he lays his gift upon the
altar, he must be reconciled to his brother. (2) Scripture is full of
warnings against evil temper: "He that is soon angry dealeth
foolishly." "Make no friendship with an angry man, and with a furious
man thou shalt not go, lest thou learn his ways and get a snare to thy
soul." "An angry man stirreth up strife, and a furious man aboundeth
in transgression." "Be ye angry and sin not; let not the sun go down
upon your wrath." "Let all bitterness, and wrath, and anger, and
clamor, and evil speaking be put away from you, with all malice; and be
ye kind one to another, tender hearted, forgiving one another, even as
God for Christ's sake hath forgiven you." The example of our blessed
Lord specially teaches the same lessen. Calmly and peacefully He
pursued His divine work. "When reviled he reviled not again, but
committed himself to him that judgeth righteously." Before the High
Priest, Pilate and Herod, His indignant silence was more eloquent than
scorching words.

II. _We should deliberately cultivate self-control_.--If a railway
train is going swiftly along, and the driver sees something on the
track, he applies the brake, and thus avoids collision. In regard to
temper, self-control is like the brake, and we should be ever ready to
put it on. A person can come, in time, to get a wonderful control over
his temper if he watches against it. The writer knew a young man who
was at one time of an ungovernable temper; he used to be at times like
"one possessed." But by watching and resolutely putting on the brake
he grew up one of the sweetest-tempered and most lovable of men. He
fought the wild beast within him, lashed it and kept it down. A
merchant had passionately abused a Quaker, who rece