70 EVIDENCE AND EXAMPLES. 



Ill studying the character of these leaders and of the 

 majority of the leaders of movements, certain i'eatures of 

 the active temperament are very marked. Bunyan and 

 Wesley were said to be singularly earnest men. Such 

 earnestness as they displayed is often said to be 

 " passionate earnestness." But frequently repeated,, 

 prolonged, and even impressive speech like " rousing- 

 ness " of speech, often misleads ; frequently it is 

 associated with a remarkable absence of deep emotion. 

 It is not an artifice, not a contrivance ; it is the 

 involuntary inevitable physiological unfolding of rhet- 

 orical nerve and nerve bias. Rhetoric is the form 

 which action often takes in active and unimpassioned 

 persons. Unlike the occasional and specially caused 

 outbursts of truly passionate earnestness, it is quite 

 consistent with undisturbed appetite, digestion, and 

 sleep. Twelve months of John Wesley's life, or of 

 Gladstone's at his busiest period, would have put a 

 Robert Burns, or a Nelson, or a John Bright, or a 

 silent seclusion-loving Hawthorne, or a George Eliot, 

 or a Charlotte Bronte, into the grave. The unemo- 

 tional, although stirring and persuasive, rhetorician 

 may last his eighty or ninety years or more. 



The self-confidence and not rarely the self-importance 

 so frequently found in the group of characteristics 

 which tend to run together in the more active type of 

 human nature are curiously manifested in the popular 

 religious leader of all degrees of social or religious 

 importance. He (or she) believes himself to be the 

 special object of supernatural guidance as those are 

 prone to do who mentally seize and dwell on single 

 positions. The broadly reflective nature which 

 examines many positions finds it more difficult 

 to believe that he (or she) is singled out as the 



