ter adoption, so that it shall become a habit in
the character: _i. e._, a constant "having" or "behaving;" and, lastly,
ethical power in performance and endurance, which is the skill following
on habit, and the ease reached by frequency of right doing.

The sensibility of the nation is indicated by the fineness of its
customs; its courage, continence, and self-respect by its persistence in
them.

By sensibility I mean its natural perception of beauty, fitness, and
rightness; or of what is lovely, decent, and just: faculties dependent
much on race, and the primal signs of fine breeding in man; but
cultivable also by education, and necessarily perishing without it. True
education has, indeed, no other function than the development of these
faculties, and of the relative will. It has been the great error of
modern intelligence to mistake science for education. You do not educate
a man by telling him what he knew not, but by making him what he was
not.

And making him what he will remain for ever: for no wash of weeds will
bring back the faded purple. And in that dyeing there are two
processes--first, the cleansing and wringing-out, which is the baptism
with water; and then the infusing of the blue and scarlet colours,
gentleness and justice, which is the baptism with fire.

107.[54] The customs and manners of a sensitive and highly-trained race
are always Vital: that is to say, they are orderly manifestations of
intense life, like the habitual action of the fingers of a musician. The
customs and manners of a vile and rude race, on the contrary, are
conditions of decay: they are not, properly speaking, habits, but
incrustations; not restraints, or forms, of life; but gangrenes,
noisome, and the beginnings of death.

And generally, so far as custom attaches itself to indolence instead of
action, and to prejudice instead of perception, it takes this deadly
character, so that thus

Custom hangs upon us with a weight
Heavy as frost, and deep almost as life.

But that weight, if it become impetus, (living instead of dead weight)
is just what gives value to custom, when it works _with_ life, instead
of against it.

108. The high ethical training of a nation implies perfect Grace,
Pitifulness, and Peace; it is irreconcilably inconsistent with filthy or
mechanical employments,--with the desire of money,--and with mental
states of anxiety, jealousy, or indifference to pain. The present
insensibility of the upper