SOURCE OF PERSONAL BEAUTY.

Thames Star, Volume X, Issue 3135, 6 March 1879, Page 4

SOURCE OF PERSONAL BEAUTY.

A beautiful person is the natural form of a beautiful soul. The mind builds its own house. The soul takes precedence of the body, and shapes the body to its own likeness. A vacant mind takes all the meaning out of the fairest face. A sensual disposition deforms the handsomest features. A cold selfish heart shrivels and distorts the best looks. A mean, grovelling spirit takes all the dignity out of the figure and all the character out of the countenance. A cherished hatred transforms the most beautiful lineaments into an image of ugliness. It is as impossible to preserve good looks with a brood of bad passions feeding on the blood, a set of low loves tramping through the heart, and a selfish, disdainful spirit enthroned in the will, as to preserve the beauty of an elegant mansion with a litter of swine in the basement, a tribe of gipsies in the parlor, and owls and vultures in the upper part. Badness and beauty will no more keep company a great while than poison will consort with health, or an elegant carving survive the furnace fire. The experiment of putting them together has been tried.for thousands of years, but with one unvarying result. There is no sculptor like the mind. There is nothing that so refines, polishes, and ennobles face and mien as the constant presence of great thoughts. The man who lives in the region of ideas, moonbeams though they be, becomes idealised. There are no arts, no gymnastics, no cosmetics which can contribute a tithe so much of the dignity, the strength, the ennobling of a man's looks, as a great purpose, a high determination, a noble principle, an unquenchable enthusiasm. But more powerful still than any of these as a beautifier of the person is the overmastering purpose and pervading disposition of kindness in the heart. Affection is the organising force in the human constitution. Woman is fairer than man because she has more affection than man. Loveliness is the outside of love. Kindness, sweetness, goodwill, a prevailing desire and determination, to make others happy, make the body a temple of the Holy Ghost. The soul that is full of pure and generous affections, fashions the features into its own angelic likeness, as the rose by inherent impulse grows in grace and blossoms into loveliness which art cannot equal. There is nothing on earth which so quickly transfigures a personality, refines, exalts, irradiates with heaven's own impress of loveliness, as a pervading, prevailing kindness of heart. The angels are beautiful because they are good, and God is beautiful because He is love.— Christian Globe.