52 PROCEEDINGS OF THE CANADIAN INSTITUTE. 



principle of habit. However, the principle is as powerful for evil as 

 it is for good. Through it the tendency to evil may grow, and be- 

 come fixed, and vice may become the absolute despot of the soul. 

 Abuse of our faculties may become their only use. The growth of 

 moral good and evil depends upon the operation of one and the same 

 law, which, in virtue of our freedom, gives into our own hands the 

 regulation of our life and character. The spirit of the outcast and 

 abandoned has been developed through exercise as well as that of the 

 saintly and pure. Man, as he comes from the hand of the Creator, 

 is endowed with powers. In their actual use he is free and uncon- 

 strained. Through this law of habit, which rivets the consequences 

 of action indissolubly upon the agent, he is the " architect of his own 

 destiny." The proverbs which tell us " Practice makes perfect," 

 and " Habit is a second nature," contain a vein of deepest truth, 

 namely, the recognition of the stability and assurance that habit 

 gives to moral tendencies. Without this assurance we could have 

 no confidence in character, and without this confidence in character, 

 this faith in human nature, the very foundation would be withdrawn 

 from the institutions of society. For example, without it men would 

 not become parties to any schemes except such as bring immediate 

 results. The medium of exchange would lose its value ; business 

 agreements would be mere shams ; in fact all the apparatus of com- 

 merce would become paralyzed and useless. In the same way every- 

 thing belonging to men as constituting societies, distinguished from 

 men as merely individuals, would be deprived of that upon which it 

 could alone rest. It is this confidence in the special direction of 

 tendencies due to previous exercise therein that causes a man's I'epu- 

 tation to be accepted in legal courts as evidence of his innocence or 

 guilt, a man's reputation being but his own shadow projected upon 

 his pathway by the light of his past life. And it is this experience 

 of the abiding character of the results of habitual action which con- 

 stitutes the foundation of all our trust that the training which we 

 give the present will develop in the future the results desired. 

 Men will live, in fact must live, as they have learned to live ; what 

 men choose continually they finally become, just as unchangeably 

 and as certainly as if the Creator had originally made them so. 



This law of habit, in this way, warns us of the terrible fact that 

 the tendency to evil, through continued practice, shall grow and 

 finally be confirmed, that abuse of our moral faculties shall, through 



