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“And be ye kind one to another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God for Christ’s sake hath forgiven you” (Ephesians 4:32).

More than half of us are bad-tempered - at least an English social scientist tells us so.  He claims that this is no mere general statement and no bit of guesswork; he gives us the figures for it.  He arranged to have about two thousand people put unconsciously under espionage as to their ordinary temper, and then had careful reports made of the results.  The calculations of the returns have been announced, and are decidedly unflattering to the two thousand tempers that were thus put to the test.  More than half of these people - to be entirely accurate, 52 percent of them - are set down as bad-tempered in various degrees.

The dictionary has been well-near exhausted of adjectives of this order, in giving the different shades of bad-temper: aggressive, angry, bickering, bitter, capricious, choleric, contentious, crotchety, despotic, domineering, easily offended, gloomy, grumpy, hasty, huffy, irritable, morose, obstinate, reproachful, peevish, sulky, surly, vindictive - these are some of the qualifying words.  There are employed, in all, 46 terms which describe a bad temper.

We do not like to believe that the case is quite so serious - that many of us are unamiable in some offensive degree.  It is easier to confess our neighbour’s faults and infirmities, than our own.  So, therefore, quietly taking refuge for ourselves among the 48 percent of good-tempered people - we are willing to admit that a great many of the people we know, have at times rather ungentle tempers.  They are easily provoked; they fly into a passion on very slight occasion; they are haughty, domineering, peevish, fretful or vindictive!

What is even worse, most of them appear to make no effort to grow out of their infirmities of disposition!   The sour fruit does not come to mellow ripeness in the passing years; the roughness is not polished off the diamond to reveal its lustrous hidden beauty.  The same petulance, pride, vanity, selfishness and other disagreeable qualities are found in the life, year after year!  Where there is a struggle to overcome one’s faults and grow out of them, and where the progress toward better and more beautiful spiritual character is perceptible, though ever so slow - we should have sympathy.  But where one appears unconscious of one’s blemishes, and manifests no desire to conquer one’s faults -there is little ground for encouragement.

Bad temper is such a disfigurement of character, and, besides, works such harm to one’s self and to one’s neighbours, that no one should spare any pains or cost to have it cured!  The ideal Christian life is one of unbroken kindliness.  It is dominated by love - the love whose portrait is drawn for us in the immortal thirteenth chapter of First Corinthians:  “Charity suffereth long, and is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up,   Doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil.”    That is the picture of the ideal Christian life!

We have but to turn to the gospel pages - to find the story of a life in which all this was realised.  Jesus never lost his temper.  He lived among people who tried Him at every point - some by their dullness, others by their bitter enmity and persecution - but He never failed in sweetness of disposition, in patience, in self-denying love.   Like the flowers which give out their perfume only when crushed; like the odoriferous wood which bathes the axe which hews it with fragrance; the life of Christ yielded only the tenderer, sweeter love to the rough impact of men’s harshness and wrong.  That is the pattern on which we should strive to fashion our life and our character.  Every outbreak of violent temper, every shade of ugliness in disposition, mars the radiant loveliness of the picture we are seeking to have fashioned in our souls!  Whatever is not loving - is unlovely character.

There is another phase:  bad-tempered people are continually hurting others, oft times their best and truest friends.  Some people are sulky - and one person’s sulkiness casts a chilling shadow over a whole household!  Others are so sensitive, ever watching for slights and offended by the merest trifles - that even their nearest friends have no freedom of fellowship with them!  Others are despotic, and will brook no kindly suggestion, nor listen to any expression of opinion!  Others are so quarrelsome that even the meekest and gentlest person cannot live peaceably with them!  Whatever may be the special characteristic of the bad temper, it makes only pain and humiliation for the person’s friends! 
(… to be continued)
(Adapted from Gracegems website)