Benjamin Morgan Palmer, The Formation of Character. Monroe, LA: Dabney Thornwell Institute, 2025. Originally published in 1899 as “Formation of Character: Twelve Lectures Delivered in the First Presbyterian Church”, E.S. Upton: New Orleans, La. $19.99, hardcover.
The bestselling tables are full of books on habits, grit, and discipline. James Clear’s Atomic Habits has sold millions of copies. Cal Newport’s Deep Work is cited like gospel among entrepreneurs and productivity coaches. Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life gets shelved in both self-help and philosophy. Ryan Holiday has become a worldwide celebrity for his resurrection of Stoic philosophy through the lens of self-help literature. Even secularists are waking up to the idea that character matters, that life must be shaped rather than merely experienced. But while these books scratch the surface of an important truth, they lack a meaningful center. The foundation they offer is that of personal efficiency, rather than eternal destiny. A life of achievement without much purpose beyond the finite material world.
The culture is hungry for more and Christians should see in this cultural hunger a providential opportunity. The world is asking good questions about meaning, formation, and self-mastery. Men are reading these books with a sense of curiosity and motivation because the authors speak with authority and do not mince their words. We should give them a better answer to the questions they are asking by recovering the spiritual riches already present in the Southern Presbyterian tradition. We should put forward men like Benjamin Morgan Palmer.
Palmer’s The Formation of Character is not a Christianized version of modern productivity theory. It is something far more demanding. First delivered as a series of addresses to students and most recently published as a coherent volume by The Dabney-Thornwell Institute, Palmer’s work is a clarion call to recover the Christian vision of character. This is what makes this work particularly valuable for today.
B.M. Palmer (1818–1902), was a towering figure in nineteenth-century Southern Presbyterianism. His theological and pastoral voice remains deeply relevant. He was a man who shaped generations of Christians from his pulpit ministry at First Presbyterian Church in New Orleans. Even now, Palmer’s ministry lives on in this book as he turns his penetrating insight toward the development of Christian men. His intended audience was students, young men on the brink of adulthood. His goal was to give them a vision of what it means to become strong, good, and holy.
Formation, Not Fabrication
Palmer begins with a conviction that sounds foreign in our therapeutic age. Character is not something you discover within yourself. It is something you must become. It is not something that is optional. Palmer makes the point that character formation is inevitable; it is not a question of if one will develop character, but only a matter of which kind. He writes,
Consider that, within this period, a character of some sort must be formed. It is not submitted to our discretion whether this shall or shall not be. (6)
He continues,
Let it be remembered, too, that character thus formed abides with us an enduring possession. During this mortal state it may be modified, both for good and evil; it may be improved; it may deteriorate in a previous aspect; it may be transformed. (7)
Where the modern world urges people to look inward and be true to themselves, Palmer exhorts them to look upward. Fix your gaze on Christ. Submit to divine providence and cultivate the habits of virtue. There is no shortcut to holiness, no hack for integrity. Palmer emphasizes just how important our youthful years are in forming these habits when he writes,
Twenty years is not too long to form habits which are to be to us a second nature; or to establish principles which are to be the law of our activity forever; or to mold a character which, by its own development, shall crystallize into a form of beauty to endure while the heavens remains. (6)
Palmer utterly rejects the idea that young people should simply “find themselves.” Selfhood, he argues, must be submitted to the claims of the Creator:
On the one hand the will is ever prompting to the utmost degree of self-assurance; and the sense of guilt fain seek to be the arbiter of his own destiny. On the other hand, he is constrained to bow, often with a reluctant homage, to an authority higher than himself. (137)
It seems as though the temptation of seeking “self-esteem” as the highest good is not unique to our age. Palmer was addressing these very concerns in his own day,
But so long as the young are wrapped in self contemplation and self love, how difficult it is to make them estimate the value of personal religion. (66)
This is a word all Christians, and men in particular, are dying to hear, and need to hear. They do not need more advice on finding balance. They need a summons. Beneath the apathy and anxiety of modern man lies a deep desire to be given a charge. They will respond to being told to stand firm, to strive toward something greater than comfort, and to rise to the duty of their covenant promises. Palmer offers precisely this:
By the seal of that covenant, which through them binds you to the service of God, I would adjure you to assume and to discharge the supreme obligation it imposes. (40)
In an era of passivity and distraction, where young men are taught to defer responsibility and extend adolescence, Palmer calls them to act,
We may use our best efforts to postpone but the process of development goes on just the same. No protest of the reason, or of the will, can arrest the operation of the law which defines the conditions under which character is formed, and into what perfect form. (6)
He does not flatter his readers. Instead, he treats them as men who, though fallen and frail, are called to glory. It is specifically a generational kind of glory that he holds before them,
A strong man is willing to die, if he leaves a son equal to himself. But if that son be a man of brighter nature, of more seductive, noble, and more than, will rejoice to divest himself of his own honors, and cast them as a priestly robe upon him who bears his name and office. (4)
In other words, greatness is not the fruit of success, but of surrender. It is not simply the accumulation of achievement that will make a man honored by his family for generations, but the submission to higher purpose. A man becomes strong when he bows to a higher standard. This charge is especially strong, Palmer argues, for those who find themselves raised in a Christian home:
Life has come down to us through a long succession, deriving its cast and color from those who preceded us; and we have ‘entered into their labors.’ Yes, we owe a debt to the past, we are under obligations to the ancestors from whose loins we sprang. Every father leaves to the son, who is his heir, the obligation of family honor to transmit that name untarnished to those who shall come after; and in a large sense we are the heirs of the generations which have trodden the earth from the first moment of recorded time (54-55)
A generation becomes mighty when it remembers that it was made for more than self-expression. It was made for duty, sacrifice, and service to the God of eternity.
The Elements of Character
The book unfolds across several chapters, each of which explores a different aspect of formation: moral purpose, the development of the will, the power of discipline, the necessity of affliction, and the sovereignty of divine grace. Palmer is especially profound when addressing the role of suffering. He warns his readers not to resent affliction but to embrace it as a lesson in the school of sanctification:
My young friends, I suppose most of us have gone through this kind of experience and it has been a happy discovery to find that, when the first shock of the battle is felt, these preliminary fears are given to the winds. The first resistance to our entrance upon life has rendered the will more compact; and with a firmer purpose we have conquered success in what first feared to undertake. (66)
Like the early church fathers, he views suffering not as a defect in the system but as the essential crucible of sanctification. This is not Stoicism dressed in Calvinist robes. Rather, it is a theological anthropology rooted in the cross.
He also devotes significant attention to education. But unlike the modern obsession with credentials and information, Palmer understands education as moral formation. The goal is not to produce clever men, but good ones. Here he anticipates much of what the classical Christian education movement is now recovering. True education aims at virtue, not merely at utility.
Gravitas in an Age of Flippancy
Palmer writes with a solemnity that feels almost subversive today. His language seems elevated to the modern reader, yes, but never indulgent. He is not trying to impress the reader. He is trying to rouse him and draw his listeners to love the law of God:
[The apostle] shows how utterly worthless is a religious profession, which is not marked by reverential and loving obedience to Divine law…It is an old commandment, inasmuch as love from the beginning was the root from which all obedience must spring: ‘thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.’ (49)
Readers who are unaccustomed to nineteenth-century prose may find some passages dense, but Palmer rewards careful attention. This is not a book for skimming. It is a book for marking up, meditating on, and returning to.
Conclusion
It is difficult to read The Formation of Character without lamenting what we have lost. Palmer’s message is sorely needed. It is a sad reality that our generation is formed not by catechesis but by algorithms. We are discipled by platforms rather than pastors. We live in a time obsessed with psychological wellness but starved for moral seriousness. We train children in self-esteem but not in self-command. We speak of trauma but not of temptation. The result is a generation of Christians who know how to brand themselves but not how to deny themselves. In such a world, Palmer sounds not just like a theologian, but like a prophet.
This book belongs in the hands of fathers, pastors, teachers, and especially young men.
