Character and conduct
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Title: Character and conduct
A book of helpful thoughts by great writers of past and present ages
Compiler: Constance M. Whishaw
Illustrator: Edward John Poynter
Release date: May 7, 2012 [eBook #39648]
Language: English
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CHARACTER AND CONDUCT
[Illustration: FAITHFUL UNTO DEATH
SIR E. J. POYNTER, BART., P.R.A.
_This picture represents a Roman Guard on duty at one of the palaces
during the destruction of Herculanaeum, who, although he might perhaps
have made his escape prefers to remain at his post, faithful unto
death._]
CHARACTER AND CONDUCT
A Book of Helpful Thoughts by
Great Writers of Past and
Present Ages
Selected and Arranged for Daily
Reading by the Author of
"Being And Doing"
With a Frontispiece by
Sir E. J. Poynter, Bart., P.R.A.
Liverpool
Henry Young & Sons
London
Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent & Co. Ltd.
1905
First Edition, 2000 copies, printed November 1904
Second Edition, 1000 copies, printed December 1904
TO
_E. K._
_"It is more_ men _that the world wants, not more systems. It is
character that our modern life waits for, to redeem and transform it;
and conduct as the fruitage of character."_
_The Citizen in his Relation to the Industrial
Situation_, BISHOP POTTER.
PREFACE
This collection of noble thoughts expressed by men and women of past and
present ages who have endeavoured to leave the world a little better
than they found it, is similar in arrangement and purpose to my former
volume "Being and Doing"; and has been compiled at the request of
several readers who have found that book helpful.
It is obvious that without the kindly co-operation of many authors and
publishers such books could not exist, and I tender sincere and hearty
thanks to those who have made the work possible. All have treated me
with unfailing courtesy and generosity.
Where I have occasionally used short quotations without permission I ask
forgiveness.
It would be impossible to name separately each one to whom I am a
grateful debtor, so special mention must only be made of the more
heavily taxed, and of those who have asked for a formal acknowledgment,
namely:--
The Literary Executors of the late Mr. Ruskin, _per_ Mr. George Allen,
for extracts from Mr. Ruskin's works.
Mr. Edward Arnold for those from _Red Pottage_, by Mary Cholmondeley.
Canon Barnett for those from _The Service of God_.
Messrs. Deighton Bell & Co. for those from _Pastor Pastorum_, by the
Rev. Henry Latham.
Mr. James Drummond for those from the writings of Professor Henry
Drummond.
Messrs. Kegan Paul, Trench, Truebner & Co. for those from Sir Edwin
Arnold's _Light of Asia_.
Miss May Kendall for those from _Turkish Bonds_, &c.
Messrs. Longmans, Green & Co. for those from the works of Bishop Paget,
and from Canon MacColl's _Here and Hereafter_.
Professor MacCunn for those from _The Making of Character_.
Messrs. Macmillan & Co. for those from the works of Bishop Westcott,
Mrs. Bernard Bosanquet; Tennyson's Poems; from the present Lord
Tennyson's Life of his father; from the _Mettle of the Pasture_, by
James Lane Allen; and from Mrs. Humphry Ward's translation of _Amiel's
Journal_.
Messrs. Methuen & Co. for one from the _Life of R. L. Stevenson_.
Mr. Lloyd Osbourne for those from R. L. Stevenson's works.
Messrs. Wells, Gardner, Darton & Co. for those from Bishop Winnington
Ingram's _Under the Dome_ and _Friends of the Master_.
Dr. John Watson for those from his writings.
Permission was kindly given me before by Messrs. Macmillan to quote from
the works of the late Archbishop Temple and of Matthew Arnold. By
Messrs. Smith, Elder & Co. for quotations from Robert Browning. By Mr.
C. Lewes for quotations from George Eliot; and from Lord Avebury and the
Rev. Stopford Brooke for those from their works.
In my experience the reading of extracts often leads to the reading of
the books from which they were taken, and I hope and believe many of
these gleanings will serve as introductions.
CONSTANCE M. WHISHAW.
SUNNY BANK, ARNSIDE,
CARNFORTH.
New Year's Day
JANUARY 1
"Here you stand at the parting of the ways; some road you are to take;
and as you stand here, consider and know how it is that you intend to
live. Carry no bad habits, no corrupting associations, no enmities and
strifes into this New Year. Leave these behind, and let the Dead Past
bury its Dead; leave them behind, and thank God that you are able to
leave them."
EPHRAIM PEABODY.
"WOULD'ST shape a noble life? Then cast
No backward glances toward the past,
And though somewhat be lost and gone,
Yet do thou act as one new-born;
What each day needs, that shalt thou ask,
Each day will set its proper task."
GOETHE.
"No aim is too high, no task too great, no sin too strong, no trial too
hard for those who patiently and humbly rest upon God's grace: who wait
on Him that He may renew their strength."
_Faculties and Difficulties for Belief and
Disbelief_, BISHOP PAGET.
Purpose
JANUARY 2
"You did not come into this world by chance, you were not born by
accident. You all came charged with a mission to use your best efforts
to extend the frontier of your Master's Kingdom by purifying your own
hearts and leavening for good the hearts of all who come within the
sphere of your influence. Your business here is not to enjoy yourselves
in those fleeting pleasures which perish in the using; not to sip as
many dainties as you can from the moments as they fly; not to gather as
many flowers as you can pluck from the garden of this perishing earth;
not even to rest in the enjoyment of those nobler delights which come
from the exercise of the intellect in the investigation of the works of
God and man; but rather to do your best to fit yourselves and others for
the new heavens and new earth, which God has prepared for those who love
Him."
_Life Here and Hereafter_, CANON MACCOLL.
"Do not despise your situation; in it you must act, suffer, and conquer.
From every point on earth we are equally near to heaven and to the
infinite."
_Amiel's Journal._
A Noble Life
JANUARY 3
"A man's greatness lies not in wealth and station, as the vulgar
believe, nor yet in his intellectual capacity, which is often associated
with the meanest moral character, the most abject servility to those in
high places, and arrogance to the poor and lowly; but a man's true
greatness lies in the consciousness of an honest purpose in life,
founded on a just estimate of himself and everything else, on frequent
self-examination, and a steady obedience to the rule which he knows to
be right, without troubling himself about what others may think or say,
or whether they do or do not do that which he thinks and says and does."
GEORGE LONG.
"Whether a life is noble or ignoble depends not on the calling which is
adopted, but on the spirit in which it is followed."
_The Pleasures of Life_, LORD AVEBURY.
"Every noble life leaves the fibre of itself interwoven for ever in the
work of the world."
TRENCH.
Holiness
JANUARY 4
"Jesus and His Apostles teach that the supreme success of life is not to
escape pain but to lay hold on righteousness, not to possess but to be
holy, not to get things from God but to be like God. They were ever
bidding Christians beware of ease, ever rousing them to surrender and
sacrifice."
_The Potter's Wheel_, DR. JOHN WATSON.
"The end of life is not to deny self, nor to be true, nor to keep the
Ten Commandments--it is simply to do God's will. It is not to get good
nor be good, nor even to do good--it is just what God wills, whether
that be working or waiting, or winning or losing, or suffering or
recovering, or living or dying."
_The Ideal Life_, HENRY DRUMMOND.
"Do not act as if thou wert going to live ten thousand years. Death
hangs over thee. While thou livest, while it is in thy power, be good."
MARCUS AURELIUS.
The Power of the Holy Spirit
JANUARY 5
"We are haunted by an ideal life, and it is because we have within us
the beginning and the possibility of it."
PHILLIPS BROOKS.
"The power of the Holy Spirit!--an everlasting spiritual presence among
men. What but that is the thing we want? That is what the old oracles
were dreaming of, what the modern Spiritualists tonight are fumbling
after. The power of the Holy Ghost, by which every man who is in doubt
may know what is right, every man whose soul is sick may be made
spiritually whole, every weak man may be made a strong man,--that is
God's one sufficient answer to the endless appeal of man's spiritual
life; that is God's one great response to the unconscious need of
spiritual guidance, which He hears crying out of the deep heart of every
man.--I hope that I have made clear to you what I mean. I would that we
might understand ourselves, see what we might be; nay, see what we are.
While you are living a worldly and a wicked life, letting all sacred
things go, caring for no duty, serving no God, there is another self,
your possibility, the thing that you might be, the thing that God gave
you a chance to be."
PHILLIPS BROOKS.
A Symphony
JANUARY 6
"To live content with small means; to seek elegance rather than luxury,
and refinement rather than fashion; to be worthy, not respectable, and
wealthy, not rich; to study hard, think quietly, talk gently, act
frankly; to listen to stars and birds, to babes and sages, with open
heart; to bear all cheerfully, do all bravely, await occasions, hurry
never; in a word, to let the spiritual, unbidden and unconscious, grow
up through the common--this is to be my symphony."
WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING.
"Heed how thou livest. Do no act by day Which from the night shall drive
thy peace away. In months of sun so live that months of rain Shall still
be happy."
WHITTIER, _Translation_.
Patience with Ourselves
JANUARY 7
"To be honest, to be kind--to earn a little and to spend a little less,
to make upon the whole a family happier for his presence, to renounce
when that shall be necessary and not be embittered, to keep a few
friends but these without capitulation--above all, on the same grim
condition, to keep friends with himself--here is a task for all that a
man has of fortitude and delicacy."
_Across the Plains_, R. L. STEVENSON.
"People who love themselves aright, even as they ought to love their
neighbour, bear charitably, though without flattery, with self as with
another. They know what needs correction at home as well as elsewhere;
they strive heartily and vigorously to correct it, but they deal with
self as they would deal with some one else they wished to bring to God.
They set to work patiently, not exacting more than is practicable under
present circumstances from themselves any more than from others, and not
being disheartened because perfection is not attainable in a day."
FENELON.
"One is so apt to think that what works smoothest works to the highest
ends, having no patience for the results of friction."
Mrs. EWING.
The Foot-path to Peace
JANUARY 8
"To be glad of life because it gives you the chance to love and to work
and to play and to look up at the stars; to be satisfied with your
possessions, but not contented with yourself until you have made the
best of them; to despise nothing in the world except falsehood and
meanness, and to fear nothing except cowardice; to be governed by your
admirations rather than by your disgusts; to covet nothing that is your
neighbour's except his kindness of heart and gentleness of manners; to
think seldom of your enemies, often of your friends, and every day of
Christ; and to spend as much time as you can, with body and with spirit,
in God's out-of-doors--these are little guideposts on the foot-path to
peace."
HENRY VAN DYKE.
"O Lord, that lends me life, lend me a heart replete with thankfulness."
SHAKESPEARE.
Purpose
JANUARY 9
"He who lives without a definite purpose achieves no higher end than to
serve as a warning to others. He is a kind of bell-buoy, mournfully
tolled by the waves of circumstance, to mark the rocks or shoals which
are to be avoided."
"Surely there is something to be done from morning till night, and to
find out _what_ is the appointed work of the onward-tending soul."
FANNY KEMBLE.
"I ask you while hope is still fresh and enthusiasm unchilled to gain
some conception of the solemnity, the vastness, the unity, the purpose
of life: to pause in the street or on the river bank and ask yourselves
what that strange stream of pleasure and frivolity and sorrow and vice
means, and means to you: to reflect that you are bound by intelligible
bonds to every suffering, sinning man and woman: to learn, while the
lesson is comparatively easy, the secret of human sympathy: to search
after some of the essential relationships of man to man: to interpret a
little of the worth of even trivial labour: to grow sensitive to the
feelings of the poor: to grow considerate to the claims of the weak."
Bishop WESTCOTT.
Life, a School
January 10
"All life is a school, a preparation, a purpose: nor can we pass current
in a higher college, if we do not undergo the tedium of education in
this lower one."
_Tennyson--a Memoir_, by his Son.
"Life is a succession of lessons, which must be lived to be understood."
EMERSON.
"We never know for what God is preparing us in His schools, for what
work on earth, for what work in the hereafter. Our business is to do our
work well in the present place, whatever that may be."
LYMAN ABBOTT.
Character and Service
January 11
"Never should we forget the close connection between character and
service, between inward nobleness and outward philanthropy. We are not
here to dream, or even to build up in grace and beauty our individual
life; we are responsible, each in our own little way, for trying to
leave this sad world happier, this evil world better than we found it.
In this way slackness is infamy, and power to the last particle means
duty. Each of us, in some degree, must have the ambition to be an 'Alter
Christus'--another Christ, shouldering with the compassionate Son of God
to lift our shadowed world from the gates of death."
"What men want is not talent, it is purpose; not the power to achieve,
but the will to labour."
BULWER LYTTON.
"'Awake, thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall
give thee light.' This is the principle with which we should look forth
upon the world and our own life at the beginning of this year. We look
upon the world; it seems as if it were sleeping still, like Rome, as if
it needed as much as ever to hear the shout, 'Awake, thou that
sleepest.'"
STOPFORD BROOKE.
Present Circumstances
JANUARY 12
"Everywhere and at all times it is in thy power piously to acquiesce in
thy present condition, and to behave justly to those who are about thee,
and to exert thy skill upon thy present thoughts, that nothing shall
steal into them without being well examined."
MARCUS AURELIUS.
"Such as are thy habitual thoughts, such also will be the character of
thy mind; for the soul is dyed by the thoughts. Dye it then with a
continuous series of such thoughts as these: for instance, that where a
man can live, there he can also live well. But he must live in a
palace;--well then, he can also live well in a palace."
MARCUS AURELIUS.
"Of nothing can we be more sure than this: that, if we cannot sanctify
our present lot, we could sanctify no other."
MARTINEAU.
Circumstances
JANUARY 13
"Occasion is the father of most that is good in us. As you have seen the
awkward fingers and clumsy tools of a prisoner cut and fashion the most
delicate little pieces of carved work; or achieve the most prodigious
underground labours, and cut through walls of masonry, and saw iron bars
and fetters; 'tis misfortune that awakens ingenuity, or fortitude or
endurance, in hearts where these qualities had never come to life but
for the circumstance which gave them a being."
_Esmond_, W. M. THACKERAY.
"It always remains true that if we had been greater, circumstances would
have been less strong against us."
G. ELIOT.
"A consideration of petty circumstances is the tomb of great things."
VOLTAIRE.
The Ifs of Life
JANUARY 14
"If it were--_if_ it might be--_if_ it could be--_if_ it had been. One
portion of mankind go through life always regretting, always whining,
always imagining. _As_ it is--this is the way in which the other class
of people look at the conditions in which they find themselves. I
venture to say that if one should count the _ifs_ and the _ases_ in the
conversation of his acquaintances, he would find the more able and
important persons among them--statesmen, generals, men of
business--among the _ases_, and the majority of conspicuous failures
among the _ifs_."
_Over the Teacups_, O. W. HOLMES.
"It is sad, indeed, to see how man wastes his opportunities. How many
could be made happy, with the blessings which are recklessly wasted or
thrown away! Happiness is a condition of Mind, not a result of
circumstances; and, in the words of Dugald Stewart, the great secret of
happiness is to accommodate ourselves to things external, rather than to
struggle to accommodate external things to ourselves. Hume wisely said
that a happy disposition was better than an estate of L10,000 a year.
Try to realise all the blessings you have, and you will find perhaps
that they are more than you suppose. Many a blessing has been recognised
too late."
Lord AVEBURY.
"The pleasure of life is according to the man that lives it, and not
according to the work or the place."
EMERSON.
Harmony
JANUARY 15
"... Have good will
To all that lives, letting unkindness die
And greed and wrath; so that your lives be made
Like soft airs passing by.
... Govern the lips
As they were palace-doors, the King within;
Tranquil and fair and courteous be all words
Which from that presence win.
... Let each act
Assoil a fault or help a merit grow:
Like threads of silver seen through crystal beads
Let love through good deeds show."
_The Light of Asia_, E. ARNOLD.
"The Past is something, but the Present more;
Will It not, too, be past? Nor fail withal
To recognise the Future in your hopes;
Unite them in your manhood, each and all,
Nor mutilate the perfectness of life!--
You can remember; you can also hope."
A. H. CLOUGH.
Harmony
JANUARY 16
... "THIS is peace
To conquer love of self and lust of life,
To tear deep-rooted passion from the breast,
To still the inward strife;
For love to clasp Eternal Beauty close;
For glory to be Lord of self; for pleasure
To live beyond the gods; for countless wealth
To lay up lasting treasure
Of perfect service rendered, duties done
In charity, soft speech, and stainless days:
These riches shall not fade away in life,
Nor any death dispraise."
_The Light of Asia_, E. ARNOLD.
"WE are all of us made more graceful by the inward presence of what we
believe to be a generous purpose; our actions move to a hidden music--'a
melody that's sweetly played in tune.'"
GEORGE ELIOT.
Ideals
JANUARY 17
"It is not the ideals of earlier years that are the most unattainable.
'The petty done, the undone vast' is not the thought of the youth, but
of those who, having done the most, yet count themselves unprofitable
servants, because it is to them only that the experience, the knowledge,
and the reflection of maturer years have opened up the far vistas of
moral possibility."
_The Making of Character_, PROF. MACCUNN.
"In doing is this knowledge won,
To see what yet remains undone.
With this our pride repress,
And give us grace, a growing store,
That day by day we may do more
And may esteem it less."
TRENCH.
"Comfort me not!--for if aught be worse than failure from over-stress
Of a life's prime purpose, it is to sit down content with a little
success."
LYTTON.
The Celestial Surgeon
JANUARY 18
THE CELESTIAL SURGEON
"If I have faltered more or less
In my great task of happiness;
If I have moved among my race
And shown no glorious morning face;
If beams from happy human eyes
Have moved me not; if morning skies,
Books, and my food, and summer rain
Knocked on my sullen heart in vain:--
Lord, Thy most pointed pleasure take
And stab my spirit broad awake;
Or, Lord, if too obdurate I,
Choose Thou, before that spirit die,
A piercing pain, a killing sin,
And to my dead heart run them in."
_Underwoods_, R. L. STEVENSON.
Influence of Great Men
JANUARY 19
"The thirst for memoirs and lives and letters is not all to be put down
to the hero-worship which is natural to every heart. It means, perhaps,
a higher thing than that. It means, in the first place, that great
living is being appreciated for its own sake; and, in the second, that
great living is being imitated. If it is true that any of us are
beginning to appreciate greatness for its own sake--greatness, that is
to say, in the sense of great and true living--it is one of the most
hopeful symptoms of our history. And, further, if we are going on from
the mere admiration of great men to try and live like them, we are
obeying one of the happiest impulses of our being. There is indeed no
finer influence abroad than the influence of great men in great books,
and all that literature can do in supplying the deformed world with
worthy and shapely models is entitled to gratitude and respect."
_The Ideal Life_, HENRY DRUMMOND.
"Glimpses into the inner regions of a great soul do one good. Contact of
this kind strengthens, restores, refreshes. Courage returns as we gaze;
when we see what has been, we doubt no more that it can be again. At the
sight of a MAN we too say to ourselves, Let us also be men."
_Amiel's Journal._
Influence of Great Men
JANUARY 20
"We cannot look, however imperfectly, upon a great man, without gaining
something by him. He is the living life-fountain, which it is good and
pleasant to be near; the light which enlightens, which has enlightened,
the darkness of the world; and this not as a kindling lamp only, but
rather as a natural luminary, shining by the gift of Heaven; a flowing
light-fountain, as I say, of native original insight, of manhood and
heroic nobleness, in whose radiance all souls feel that it is well with
them."
CARLYLE.
"My sole fear was the fear of doing an unrighteous or unholy thing."
SOCRATES.
"The truly honest man, here and there to be found, is not only without
thought of legal, religious, or social compulsion, when he discharges an
equitable claim on him, but he is without thought of self-compulsion. He
does the right thing with a simple feeling of satisfaction in doing it;
and is, indeed, impatient if anything prevents him from having the
satisfaction of doing it."
HERBERT SPENCER.
The Habit of Admiration
JANUARY 21
"'We live by admiration, hope, and love,' Wordsworth tells us,--not,
therefore, by contempt, despondency, and hatred. These contract and
narrow the soul, as the others enlarge it. The more a man heartily
admires, the more he takes into his nature the goodness and beauty which
excite his admiration. His being grows up toward what thus evokes his
enthusiasm. And the habit of admiration is the outcome of a moral
discipline which represses peevish and fault-finding dispositions, and
seeks the admirable in every situation and every person that life brings
to us. 'Be ye enlarged' implies 'learn to admire and to praise.'"
"Learn to admire rightly; the great pleasure of life is that. Note what
the great men admired; they admired great things: narrow spirits admire
basely, and worship meanly."
THACKERAY.
Character of Henry Drummond
JANUARY 22
_Of Henry Drummond._--"He seemed to be invariably in good spirits, and
invariably disengaged. He was always ready for any and every office of
friendship. It should be said that though few men were more criticised
or misconceived, he himself never wrote an unkind word about any one,
never retaliated, never bore malice, and could do full justice to the
abilities and character of his opponents. I have just heard that he
exerted himself privately to secure an important appointment for one of
his most trenchant critics, and was successful.... The spectacle of his
long struggle with a mortal disease was something more than impressive.
Those who saw him in his illness saw that, as the physical life
flickered low, the spiritual energy grew. Always gentle and considerate,
he became even more careful, more tender, more thoughtful, more
unselfish. He never in any way complained. His doctors found it very
difficult to get him to talk of his illness. It was strange and painful,
but inspiring, to see his keenness, his mental elasticity, his universal
interest. Dr. Barbour says: 'I have never seen pain or weariness, or the
being obliged to do nothing, more entirely overcome, treated, in fact,
as if they were not. The end came suddenly from failure of the heart.
Those with him received only a few hours' warning of his critical
condition.' It was not like death. He lay on his couch in the
drawing-room, and passed away in his sleep, with the sun shining in, and
the birds singing at the open window. There was no sadness nor farewell.
It recalled what he himself said of a friend's death--'putting by the
well-worn tools without a sigh, and expecting elsewhere better work to
do.'"
_Character Sketch by_ W. ROBERTSON NICOLL
_in "The Ideal Life."_
Character of R. L. Stevenson
JANUARY 23
"I Have referred to his chivalry only to find that in reality I was
thinking of every one of the whole group of attributes which are
associated with that name. Loyalty, honesty, generosity, courage;
courtesy, tenderness, and self-devotion; to impute no unworthy motives
and to bear no grudge; to bear misfortune with cheerfulness and without
a murmur; to strike hard for the right and take no mean advantage; to be
gentle to women and kind to all that are weak; to be very rigorous with
oneself and very lenient to others--these, and any other virtues ever
implied in 'chivalry,' were the traits that distinguished Stevenson."
_The Life of R. L. Stevenson_, GRAHAM BALFOUR.
"Through life he did the thing he was doing as if it were the one thing
in the world that was worth being done."
_The Life of R. L. Stevenson_, GRAHAM BALFOUR.
Being and Doing
JANUARY 24
"Upon the man who desired to be His disciple and a member of God's
Kingdom were laid the conditions of a pure heart, of a forgiving spirit,
of a helpful hand, of a heavenly purpose, of an unworldly mind. Christ
did not ground His Christianity in thinking, or in doing, but, first of
all, in being."
_The Mind of the Master_, DR. JOHN WATSON.
"History and literature furnish many instances of men who have made
their mark in virtue of a striking _personality_; whose reputation
rests, not on any visible tokens,--not on kingdoms conquered,
institutions founded, books written, or inventions perfected or anything
else that they _did_,--but mainly on what they _were_. Their merely
having passed along a course on earth, and lived and talked and acted
with others, has left lasting effects on mankind."
_Pastor Pastorum_, HENRY LATHAM.
Being and Doing
JANUARY 25
"Perfection is being, not doing--it is not to effect an act, but to
achieve a character. If the aim of life were to do something, then, as
in an earthly business, except in doing this one thing the business
would be at a standstill. The student is not doing the one thing of
student-life when he has ceased to think or read. The labourer leaves
his work undone when the spade is not in his hand, and he sits beneath
the hedge to rest. But in Christian life, every moment and every act is
an opportunity for doing the one thing of _becoming_ Christ-like. Every
day is full of a most expressive experience. Every temptation to evil
temper which can assail us to-day will be an opportunity to decide the
question whether we shall gain the calmness and the rest of Christ, or
whether we shall be tossed by the restlessness and agitation of the
world. Nay, the very vicissitudes of the season, day and night, heat and
cold, affecting us variably, and producing exhilaration or depression,
are so contrived as to conduce towards the being which we become, and
decide whether we shall be masters of ourselves, or whether we shall be
swept at the mercy of accident and circumstance, miserably susceptible
of merely outward influences. Infinite as are the varieties of life, so
manifold are the paths to saintly character; and he who has not found
out how directly or indirectly to make everything converge towards his
soul's sanctification, has as yet missed the meaning of this life."
FREDERICK W. ROBERTSON.
Life-Giver, not Deed-Doer
JANUARY 26
"Christ was not primarily the Deed-Doer or the Word-Sayer. He was the
Life-Giver. He made men live. Wherever He went He brought vitality. Both
in the days of His Incarnation and in the long years of His power which
have followed since He vanished from men's sight, His work has been to
create the conditions in which all sorts of men should live."
PHILLIPS BROOKS.
"Therefore with all the strength God has given us, let us be fulfillers.
Let us try to make the life of the world more complete. What can we do?
First, each of us can put one more healthy and holy life into the world,
and so directly increase the aggregation of righteousness. That is much.
To fasten one more link, however small, in the growing chain that is
ultimately to bind humanity to God beyond all fear of separation, is
very much indeed. And besides that, we can, with sympathy and
intelligence, patience and hope, bring up the lagging side in all the
vitality around us, and assert for man the worth, the meaning, and the
possibility of this his human life."
PHILLIPS BROOKS.
Seeing One's Life in Perspective
JANUARY 27
"If we wish to cultivate our higher nature we must have solitude. It is
vitally necessary at times that we should be able to get away from every
other being on the face of the earth. What thoughtful person does not
love to be alone; to be surrounded with no objects but the fields and
the trees, the mountains and the waters, to hear nothing but the
rustling of the foliage and the songs of the birds, and to feel the
fresh breeze of heaven playing upon his cheeks? Moreover, when we are
very much in contact with human life, when we are mingling with it, we
are liable to become too conscious of its turbid side, or drearily
oppressed with its commonplace features. To see human life, and weigh it
in its many aspects, we need at times to go away and be as it were on a
pinnacle, where we can take it all in with one sweeping glance. Solitude
can affect us somewhat as religious worship does. It can take us out of
the consciousness of where we belong, away from the ordinary selfish
instincts by which we may be dominated.
"Too much solitude may be dangerous, just as too much of the sense of
mystery may be. Yet something of it is essential to our advance in
spiritual life. A man must go away where he can feel the mystery of his
own being. Moreover, a certain degree of solitude seems necessary to the
full growth of the mind, and it is in solitude that great principles are
first thought out, and the genius of eminent men formed, for solitude is
the nurse of enthusiasm, and enthusiasm is the real parent of genius.
Solitude, moreover, is essential to any depth of meditation or of
character, and is the cradle of thoughts and aspirations."
H. W. SMITH.
"One sees one's life in perspective when one goes abroad, and to be
spectators of ourselves is very solemn."
HENRY DRUMMOND.
Triviality
JANUARY 28
"Triviality is the modern equivalent for worldliness, the regard for the
outward and the visible. The trivial mind is enmity with God, and it is
of many kinds. There is the triviality which concerns itself with
'nothing,' which gossips about 'him' and 'her,' and becomes serious over
a form, a phrase, a dress, a race or a show. There is the triviality to
which the working people are forced by the cares of this life, who all
day and every day have to think of the bread which perisheth, while
their souls starve for lack of knowledge which endureth. The cares of
life as often choke the growth of the Word as the deceitfulness of
riches. There is also that most insidious kind of triviality which tends
to haunt the more serious circles, wrapping itself in talk about social
schemes, Church progress, policies and philosophies, passing itself off
as serious, when all the time the concern of the talker is to achieve a
wordy success or to get notice for his little self or his little
system."
_The Service of God,_ CANON BARNETT.
"I believe that the mind can be profaned by the habit of attending to
trivial things, so that all our thoughts shall be tinged with
triviality."
THOREAU.
Triviality
JANUARY 29
"They that use to employ their Minds too much upon Trifles, commonly
make themselves incapable of any Thing that is Serious or Great."
LA ROCHEFOUCAULD.
"Be still and cool in thy own mind and spirit from thy own thoughts, and
then thou wilt feel the principle of God to turn thy mind to the Lord,
from whom cometh life; whereby thou mayest receive the strength and
power to allay all storms and tempests. That is it which works up into
patience, innocency, soberness, into stillness, staidness, quietness up
to God, with His power. Therefore mind; that is the word of the Lord God
unto thee, that thou mayest feel the authority of God, and thy faith in
that, to work down that which troubles thee; for that is it which keeps
peace, and brings up the witness in thee, which hath been transgressed,
to feel after God with His power and life, who is a God of order and
peace."
GEORGE FOX.
"It is not sin so much as triviality which hides God."
_The Service of God_, CANON BARNETT.
The Art of being Quiet
JANUARY 30
"It is only when we begin to _think_ about life, and how we should live,
that the art of being quiet assumes its real value; to the irrational
creature it is nothing, to the rational it is much. In the first place,
it removes what De Quincey, with his usual grand felicity of expression,
calls 'the burden of that distraction which lurks in the infinite
littleness of details.' It is the infinite littleness of details which
takes the glory and the dignity from our common life, and which we who
value that life for its own sake and for the sake of its great Giver
must strive to make finite.
"Since unconscious life is not possible to the intellectual adult, as it
is to the child--since he cannot go on living without a thought about
the nature of his own being, its end and aim--it is good for him to
cultivate a habit of repose, that he may think and feel like a man
putting away those childish things--the carelessness, the thoughtless
joy, 'the tear forgot as soon as shed,' which, however beautiful,
because appropriate, in childhood, are not beautiful because not
appropriate in mature age.
"The art of being quiet is necessary to enable a man to possess his own
soul in peace and integrity--to examine himself, to understand what
gifts God has endowed him with, and to consider how he may best employ
them in the business of the world. This is its universal utility. It is
unwholesome activity which requires not repose and thoughtful quiet as
its forerunner, and every man should secure some portion of each day for
voluntary retirement and repose within himself."
The Art of being Quiet
JANUARY 31
"One of the special needs of our day is more time for meditation and
reflection."
_Life Here and Hereafter_, Canon MACCOLL.
"We are too busy, too encumbered, too much occupied, too active! We read
too much! The one thing needful is to throw off all one's load of cares,
of preoccupations, of pedantry, and to become again young, simple,
child-like, living happily and gratefully in the present hour. We must
know how to put occupation aside, which does not mean that we must be
idle. In an inaction which is meditative and attentive the wrinkles of
the soul are smoothed away, and the soul itself spreads, unfolds, and
springs afresh, and, like the trodden grass of the roadside or the
bruised leaf of a plant, repairs its injuries, becomes new, spontaneous,
true, and original. Reverie, like the rain of night, restores colour and
force to thoughts which have been blanched and wearied by the heat of
the day. With gentle fertilising power it awakens within us a thousand
sleeping germs, and, as though in play, gathers round us materials for
the future, and images for the use of talent."
_Amiel's Journal._
Inward Stillness
February 1
"Let each of us sit still, and keep watch for awhile in the silent house
of his spirit.... As near as is the light to one sleeping in the light,
so near is Christ, the Awakener, to every Eternal man, deeply as he may
be asleep within his outer man."
JOHN PULSFORD.
"Let us then labour for an inward stillness,
An inward stillness and an inward healing;
That perfect silence where the lips and heart
Are still, and we no longer entertain
Our own imperfect thoughts and vain opinions,
But God alone speaks in us, and we wait
In singleness of heart that we may know
His will, and in the silence of our own spirits,
That we may do His will, and that only."
LONGFELLOW.
Commune with your Own Heart and be Still
FEBRUARY 2
"Perhaps one very simple, but alas too often neglected rule, may be
suggested to those who are indeed desirous of realising through all the
petty vicissitudes and monotonous or trivial round of their daily life,
the Divine presence and power. 'Devotion early in the day _before the
day's worries begin._ It is the _only_ way to keep the spirit Godward
through them all.' Devotion, it is needless to add, is not 'saying
prayers' in words either of our own or any one else's--nor is it only or
chiefly 'making request.' It is pre-eminently _worship_, the deliberate
homage of the mind and heart--of the whole being to God who is its
source. And here steadfastness of will, showing itself in determined
concentration of attention, is the indispensable condition of success;
for such concentration is by no means always an easy matter to attain,
even when the effort is 'made early in the day before the day's worries
begin.' Sometimes there are sleepless 'worries' which assert their
presence with the first dawn of consciousness; sometimes we are mentally
or physically lazy, inert or languid. Well, if we habitually give in to
such difficulties in a way of which we should be utterly ashamed were
any other object of mental effort in question, we must not be surprised
if the entirely natural result ensues that we fail to 'realise' what we
have never honestly set ourselves to treat as real.... Amid the
thronging duties, the ceaseless cares, the toilsome or pleasurable round
of daily life, we must take and we must keep time to 'commune with our
own hearts and in our own chamber, and be still.'"
E. M. CAILLARD.
The Receptive Side of Life
FEBRUARY 3
"To all who are active in Christian work I would say, ever remember that
there must be fidelity to the receptive side of life if you are to
exercise any real abiding influence. How often do we hear men say that
they have worked hard in their district, or their school, or their
class, and yet there is no result.
"Perhaps they have worked too hard. There are a multitude of Marthas in
modern English life; but it were good for such if, at times, they would
follow the example of the wiser Mary, and sit down quietly at Jesus'
feet, and draw in from Him that power which cannot by any possibility be
given out, before it is taken in."
Canon BODY.
"The problem set before us is to bring our daily task into the temple of
contemplation and ply it there, to act as in the presence of God, to
interfuse one's little part with religion. So only can we inform the
detail of life, all that is passing, temporary, and insignificant, with
beauty and nobility. So may we dignify and consecrate the meanest of
occupations. So may we feel that we are paying our tribute to the
universal work and the eternal will. So are we reconciled with life and
delivered from the fear of death. So are we in order and at peace."
_Amiel's Journal._
Regulation of Time
FEBRUARY 4
"No two things differ more than hurry and despatch. Hurry is the mark of
a weak mind, despatch of a strong one. A weak man in office, like a
squirrel in a cage, is labouring eternally, but to no purpose, and in
constant motion, without getting on a jot: like a turnstile, he is in
everybody's way, but stops nobody: he talks a great deal, but says very
little; looks into everything, but sees into nothing; and has a hundred
irons in the fire, but very few of them are hot, and with these few that
are he burns his fingers."
COLTON.
"Hurry belongs to the mortal who wants to see the outcome of his work,
while eternity is lavish of time."
_Pastor Pastorum_, HENRY LATHAM.
"Unfaithfulness in the keeping of an appointment is an act of clear
dishonesty. You may as well borrow a person's money as his time."
HORACE MANN.
"Punctuality is the politeness of kings."
LOUIS XIV.
Business-like Habits
FEBRUARY 5
"It is very important to cultivate business-like habits. An eminent
friend of mine assured me not long ago that when he thought over the
many cases he had known of men, even of good ability and high character,
who had been unsuccessful in life, by far the most frequent cause of
failure was that they were dilatory, unpunctual, unable to work
cordially with others, obstinate in small things, and, in fact, what we
call unbusiness-like."
LORD AVEBURY.
"A 'bustling' man is, to a man of business, what a monkey is to a man.
He is the shadow of despatch, or, rather, the echo thereof; for he
maketh noise enough for an alarm. The quickness of a true man of
business he imitateth, imitateth excellently well, but neither his
silence nor his method; and it is to be noted that he is ever most
vehement about matters of no significance. He is always in such headlong
haste to overtake the next minute, that he loses half the minute in
hand; and yet is full of indignation and impatience at other people's
slowness, and wasteth more time in reiterating his love of despatch than
would suffice for doing a great deal of business. He never giveth you
his quiet attention with a mind centred on what you are saying, but
hears you with a restless eye, and a perpetual shifting posture, and is
so eager to show his quickness that he interrupteth you a dozen times,
misunderstands you as often, and ends by making you and himself lose
twice as much time as was necessary."
H. ROGERS.
Time and Method
FEBRUARY 6
"The thrift of time will repay in after life with usury of profit beyond
your most sanguine dreams, and waste of it will make you dwindle alike
in intellectual and moral stature beyond your darkest reckoning."
GLADSTONE.
"One of the striking characteristics of successful persons is their
faculty of readily determining the relative importance of different
things. There are many things which it is desirable to do, a few are
essential, and there is no more useful quality of the human mind than
that which enables its possessor at once to distinguish which the few
essential things are. Life is so short and time so fleeting that much
which one would wish to do must fain be omitted. He is fortunate who
perceives at a glance what it will do, and what it will not do, to omit.
This invaluable faculty, if not possessed in a remarkable degree
naturally, is susceptible of cultivation to a considerable extent. Let
any one adopt the practice of reflecting, every morning, what must
necessarily be done during the day, and then begin by doing the most
important things first, leaving the others to take their chance of being
done or left undone. In this way attention first to the things of first
importance soon acquires the almost irresistible force of habit, and
becomes a rule of life. There is no rule more indispensable to
success."
Concentration
FEBRUARY 7
"The marked differences of working power among men are due chiefly to
differences in the power of concentration. A retentive and accurate
memory is conditioned upon close attention. If one gives entire
attention to what is passing before him, he is not likely to forget it,
or to confuse persons or incidents. The book which one reads with eyes
which are continually lifted from the page may furnish entertainment for
the moment, but cannot enrich the reader, because it cannot become part
of his knowledge. Attention is the simplest form of concentration, and
its value illustrates the supreme importance of that focussing of all
the powers upon the thing in hand which may be called the sustained
attention of the whole nature.
"Here, as everywhere in the field of man's life, there enters that
element of sacrifice without which no real achievement is possible. To
secure a great end, one must be willing to pay a great price. The exact
adjustment of achievement to sacrifice makes us aware, at every step, of
the invisible spiritual order with which all men are in every kind of
endeavour. If the highest skill could be secured without long and
painful effort, it would be wasted through ignorance of its value, or
misused through lack of education; but a man rarely attains great skill
without undergoing a discipline of self-denial and work which gives him
steadiness, restraint, and a certain kind of character. The giving up of
pleasures which are wholesome, the turning aside from fields which are
inviting, the steady refusal of invitations and claims which one would
be glad to accept or recognise, invest the power of concentration with
moral quality, and throw a searching light on the nature of genuine
success.
"To do one thing well, a man must be willing to hold all other interests
and activities subordinate; to attain the largest freedom, a man must
first bear the cross of self-denial."
Concentration
FEBRUARY 8
"Strive constantly to concentrate yourself; never dissipate your powers;
incessant activity, of whatever kind, leads finally to bankruptcy."
GOETHE.
"All impatience disturbs the circulation, scatters force, makes
concentration difficult if not impossible."
C. B. NEWCOMB.
"They have great powers, and they waste them pitifully, for they have
not the greatest power,--the power to rule the use of their powers."
F. W. ROBERTSON.
"Concentration is the secret of strength."
EMERSON.
Readiness
FEBRUARY 9
"To know how to be ready--a great thing--a precious gift,--and one that
implies calculation, grasp and decision. To be always ready, a man must
be able to cut a knot, for everything cannot be untied; he must know how
to disengage what is essential from the detail in which it is enwrapped,
for everything cannot be equally considered; in a word, he must be able
to simplify his duties, his business, and his life. To know how to be
ready, is to know how to start.
"It is astonishing how all of us are generally cumbered up with the
thousand and one hindrances and duties which are not such, but which
nevertheless wind us about with their spider threads and fetter the
movement of our wings. It is the lack of order which makes us slaves;
the confusion of to-day discounts the freedom of to-morrow.
"Confusion is the enemy of all comfort, and confusion is born of
procrastination. To know how to be ready we must be able to finish.
Nothing is done but what is finished. The things which we leave dragging
behind us will start up again later on before us and harass our path.
Let each day take thought for what concerns it, liquidate its own
affairs and respect the day which is to follow, and then we shall be
always ready. To know how to be ready, is at bottom to know how to die."
_Amiel's Journal._
Order
FEBRUARY 10
"What comfort, what strength, what economy there is in _order_--material
order, intellectual order, moral order. To know where one is going and
what one wishes--this is order; to keep one's word and one's
engagements--again order; to have everything ready under one's hand, to
be able to dispose of all one's forces, and to have all one's means of
whatever kind under command--still order; to discipline one's habits,
one's efforts, one's wishes; to organise one's life, to distribute one's
time, to take the measure of one's duties and make one's rights
respected; to employ one's capital and resources, one's talent and one's
chances profitably;--all this belongs to and is included in the word
_order_. Order means light and peace, inward liberty and free command
over oneself; order is power. Aesthetic and moral beauty consist, the
first in a true conception of order, and the second in submission to it,
and in the realisation of it, by, in, and around oneself. Order is man's
greatest need and his true well-being."
_Amiel's Journal._
"The commissioning of the Twelve imposed no particular form of rule; but
it taught the lesson that organisation and order and the distribution of
duty were essential in things spiritual as well as in things temporal,
and that it was well for the children of light to be as 'wise in their
generation' as the children of the world."
_Pastor Pastorum_, HENRY LATHAM.
The Secret of Thrift
FEBRUARY 11
"The secret of thriving is thrift; saving of force; to get as much work
as possible done with the least expenditure of power, the least jar and
obstruction, the least wear and tear. And the secret of thrift is
knowledge. In proportion as you know the laws and nature of a subject,
you will be able to work at it easily, surely, rapidly, successfully,
instead of wasting your money or your energies in mistaken schemes,
irregular efforts, which end in disappointment and exhaustion."
CHARLES KINGSLEY.
"It is never enough for us simply to _know_. We must also _weigh_."
_The Making of Character_, PROF. MACCUNN.
"Doing good, being so divine a privilege, is beset by its own dangers.
Let us see that our good be not evil spoken of by want of thought,
method, and self-denial in the doing of it. The world is waiting for us,
with our little store. Oh that we might economise it more, devote it
more thoroughly, and add to it! Every time we pray, or study, or work,
we are receiving to give away. Men are looking to us in faintness,
weariness, and want, and a voice says to us, 'Give ye them to eat.' If
it is but five loaves, we can offer them to Christ, and He will multiply
them."
PHILLIPS BROOKS.
Endurance
FEBRUARY 12
"'A somewhat varied experience of men has led me, the longer I live,'
said Huxley, 'to set less value on mere cleverness; to attach more and
more importance to industry and physical endurance. Indeed, I am much
disposed to think that endurance is the most valuable quality of all;
for industry, as the desire to work hard, does not come to much if a
feeble frame is unable to respond to the desire. No life is wasted
unless it ends in sloth, dishonesty, or cowardice. No success is worthy
of the name unless it is won by honest industry and brave breasting of
the waves of fortune.'"
"Of all work producing results, nine-tenths must be drudgery. There is
no work, from the highest to the lowest, which can be done well by any
man who is unwilling to make that sacrifice. Part of the very nobility
of the devotion of the true workman to his work consists in the fact
that a man is not daunted by finding that drudgery must be done, and no
man can really succeed in any walk of life without a good deal of what
in ordinary English is called pluck. That is the condition of all
success, and there is nothing which so truly repays itself as this
perseverance against weariness."
Bishop PHILPOTTS.
Perseverance
FEBRUARY 13
"Practise thyself even in the things which thou despairest of
accomplishing. For even the left hand, which is ineffectual for all
other things for want of practice, holds the bridle more vigorously than
the right hand; for it has been practised in this."
MARCUS AURELIUS.
"'It is not the spurt at the start, but the continued, unresting,
unhasting advance that wins the day.'"
"The same law runs in ordinary life, and he only need expect to attain
success and win the honour of his fellow-men who is thorough. The reason
why men fail is, in five cases out of six, not through want of influence
or brains, or opportunity, or good guidance, but because they are slack;
and the reason why certain men with few advantages succeed, is that they
are diligent, concentrated, persevering and conscientious--because, in
fact, they are thorough."
_The Homely Virtues_, DR. JOHN WATSON.
"Unto him who works, and feels he works,
This same grand year is ever at the doors."
TENNYSON.
Pleasure in Work
FEBRUARY 14
"Joy or delight in what we are doing is not a mere luxury; it is a
means, a help for the more perfect doing of our work. Indeed, it may be
truly said that no man does any work perfectly who does not enjoy his
work. Joy in one's work is the consummate tool without which the work
may be done indeed, but without which the work will always be done
slowly, clumsily, and without its finest perfectness. Men who do their
work without enjoying it are like men carving statues with hatchets. The
statue gets carved perhaps, and is a monument for ever of the dogged
perseverance of the artist; but there is a perpetual waste of toil, and
there is no fine result in the end."
PHILLIPS BROOKS.
"Efforts to be permanently useful must be uniformly joyous,--a spirit
all sunshine; graceful from very gladness, beautiful because bright."
CARLYLE.
"Every joy is gain, and gain is gain, however small."
BROWNING.
Duty
FEBRUARY 15
"In Life's small things be resolute and great
To keep thy muscle trained: know'st thou when Fate
Thy measure takes, or when she'll say to thee
'I find thee worthy; do this thing for me'?"
LOWELL.
"Our duty is to be useful, not according to our desires but according to
our powers."
_Amiel's Journal._
"I'll bind myself to that which, once being right, Will not be less
right when I shrink from it."
KINGSLEY.
"There's life alone in duty done,
And rest alone in striving."
WHITTIER.
Duty
FEBRUARY 16
"A duty is no sooner divined than from that very moment it becomes
binding upon us."
_Amiel's Journal._
"Don't waste life in doubts and fears; spend yourself on the work before
you, well assured that the right performance of this hour's duties will
be the best preparation for the hours or ages that follow it."
EMERSON.
"The toppling crags of duty scaled
Are close upon the shining table-lands
To which our God Himself is moon and sun."
TENNYSON.
The Iron Chains of Duty
FEBRUARY 17
"... One conviction I have gained from the experience of the last
years--life is not jest and amusement; life is not even enjoyment ...
life is hard labour. Renunciation, continual renunciation--that is its
secret meaning, its solution. Not the fulfilment of cherished dreams and
aspirations, however lofty they may be--the fulfilment of duty, that is
what must be the care of man. Without laying on himself chains, the iron
chains of duty, he cannot reach without a fall the end of his career."
_A Lear of the Steppes_, IVAN TURGENEV.
"Granted that life is tragic to the marrow, it seems the proper function
of religion to make us accept and serve in that tragedy, as officers in
that other and comparable one of war. Service is the word, active
service, in the military sense; and the religious man is he who has a
military joy in duty--not he who weeps over the wounded."
_Lay Morals_, R. L. STEVENSON.
Power
FEBRUARY 18
"Oh, do not pray for easy lives. Pray to be stronger men! Do not pray
for tasks equal to your powers. Pray for powers equal to your tasks!
Then the doing of your work shall be no miracle. But you shall be a
miracle. Every day you shall wonder at yourself, at the richness of life
which has come in you by the grace of God.
"THERE is nothing which comes to seem more foolish to us, I think, as
years go by, than the limitations which have been quietly set to the
moral possibilities of man. They are placidly and perpetually assumed.
'You must not expect too much of him,' so it is said. 'You must remember
that he is only a man after all.' 'Only a man!' That sounds to me as if
one said, 'You may launch your boat and sail a little way, but you must
not expect to go very far. It is only the Atlantic Ocean.' Why, man's
moral range and reach is practically infinite, at least no man has yet
begun to comprehend where its limit lies. Man's powers of conquering
temptation, of despising danger, of being true to principle, have never
been even indicated, save in Christ."
PHILLIPS BROOKS.
"Virgil said of the winning crew in his boat-race, 'They can, because
they believe they can.'"
An Ideal Level
FEBRUARY 19
"No man who, being a Christian, desires the kingdom of God, can justly
neglect giving his energy to the bettering of the social, physical, and
educational condition of the poor, the diseased, and the criminal
classes. But he is not a Christian, or he has not realised the problem
fully, if that is all he does. Social improvement is a work portions of
which any one can do, in which all ought to share; but if we who follow
Christ desire to do the best work in that improvement, and in the best
way, we ought to strive--while we join in the universal movement towards
a juster society--to give a spiritual life to that movement; to keep it
at an ideal level; to free it from mere materialism; to maintain in it
the monarchy of self-sacrifice; to fix its eyes on invisible and
unworldly truths; to supply it with noble and spiritual faiths; to base
all associations of men on the ground of their spiritual union--all
being children of God, and brothers of one another, in the love and
faith by which Jesus lived; and to maintain the dignity of this
spiritual communion of men in faith in their immortal union with God.
This is the fight of faith we, as fellow-workers with God, shall have to
wage; and this not only binds us up with the poor, but with the rich,
not only with the ignorant, but the learned; for on these grounds all
men are seen as stripped of everything save of their humanity and their
divine kinship.... Improve, then, the material condition and the
knowledge of all who are struggling for justice; it is part of your life
which if you neglect, you are out of touch with the new life; but kindle
in it, uphold and sanctify in it, the life which is divine, the
communion with man of God, without union with whose character all effort
for social improvement will revert to new miseries and new despair."
_The Gospel of Joy_, STOPFORD BROOKE.
Work
FEBRUARY 20
"Idleness standing in the midst of unattempted tasks is always proud.
Work is always tending to humility. Work touches the keys of endless
activity, opens the infinite, and stands awe-struck before the immensity
of what there is to do. Work brings a man into the good realm of facts.
Work takes the dreamy youth who is growing proud in his closet over one
or two sprouting powers which he has discovered in himself, and sets him
out among the gigantic needs and the vast processes of the world, and
makes him feel his littleness. Work opens the measureless fields of
knowledge and skill that reach far out of sight. I am sure we all know
the fine, calm, sober humbleness of men who have really tried themselves
against the great tasks of life. It was great in Paul, and in Luther,
and in Cromwell. It is something that never comes into the character,
never shows in the face of a man who has never worked."
PHILLIPS BROOKS.
"No man is born into the world, whose work
Is not born with him; there is always work,
And tools to work withal, for those who will;
And blessed are the horny hands of toil!
The busy world shoves angrily aside
The man who stands with arms akimbo set,
Until occasion tells him what to do;
And he who waits to have his task marked out
Shall die and leave his errand unfulfilled."
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL.
Special Work for Each
FEBRUARY 21
"There is some particular work which lies to every one's hand which he
can do better than any other person. What we ought to be concerned about
is not whether it be on a large scale or a small--about which we can
never be quite certain--nor whether it is going to bring us fame or
leave us in obscurity--an issue which is in the hands of God--but that
we do it, and that we do it with all our might. Having done that, there
is no cause to fret ourselves or ask questions which cannot be answered.
We may rest with a quiet conscience and a contented heart, for we have
filled our place and done what we could. The battle of life extends over
a vast area, and it is vain for us to inquire about the other wings of
the army; it is enough that we have received our orders, and that we
have held the few feet of ground committed to our charge. There let us
fight and there let us die, and so fighting and so dying in the place of
duty we cannot be condemned, we must be justified. Brilliant qualities
may never be ours, but the homely virtues are within our reach, and
character is built up not out of great intellectual gifts and splendid
public achievements, but out of honesty, industry, thrift, kindness,
courtesy, and gratitude, resting upon faith in God and love towards man.
And the inheritance of the soul which ranks highest and lasts for ever
is character."
_The Homely Virtues,_ Dr. JOHN WATSON.
The Sin of Idleness
FEBRUARY 22
"There is a certain amount of work to be done in this world. If any of
us does not take his full share, he imposes that which he does not take
on the shoulders of another; and the first cause of poverty, of disease,
of misery in all States, is the overwork which is imposed on men and
women by the idle and indifferent members of the nation. This is to
steal from the human race; to steal from them joy, leisure, health,
comfort and peace, and to impose on them sorrow and overwork, disease
and homelessness, bitter anger and fruitless tears. This is the curse
which the selfish dreamer leaves behind him. Many have been the fierce
oppressors and defrauders of the human race, but the evil they have done
is less than that done by those who drop by drop and hour by hour drain
the blood of mankind by doing no work for the overworked. This is the
crime with which the idle and indifferent will be confronted when the
great throne is set in our soul, and the books we have written on men's
lives are opened, and God shall lay judgment to the line and
righteousness to the plummet. 'Lord, what hast Thou to do with it?' we
will say. 'I did not neglect Thee; I took my ease, it is true, but I
kept Thy law. I was never impious, never an atheist. When was I not
religious?' Then He will answer: 'Inasmuch as ye never worked for the
least of these My brothers, ye never worked for Me!'"
_The Gospel of Joy_, STOPFORD BROOKE.
"Let us start up and live: here come moments that cannot be had again;
some few may yet be filled with imperishable good."
J. MARTINEAU.
Idleness
FEBRUARY 23
"It is not necessary for a man to be actively bad in order to make a
failure of life; simple inaction will accomplish it. Nature has
everywhere written her protest against idleness; everything which ceases
to struggle, which remains inactive, rapidly deteriorates. It is the
struggle towards an ideal, the constant effort to get higher and further
which develops manhood and character."
"Shun idleness, it is the rust that attaches itself to the most
brilliant metals."
VOLTAIRE.
"There is always hope in a man that actually and earnestly works. In
idleness alone is there perpetual despair."
CARLYLE.
"'Twere all as good to ease one breast of grief
As sit and watch the sorrows of the world."
_The Light of Asia_, E. ARNOLD.
Fear of Failure
FEBRUARY 24
"Who would ever stir a finger, if only on condition of being guaranteed
against oversights, misinformation, mistakes, ignorance, loss, and
danger?"
H. MARTINEAU.
"The man who insists upon seeing with perfect clearness before he
decides, never decides."
_Amiel's Journal._
"He who is too much afraid of being duped has lost the power of being
magnanimous."
_Amiel's Journal._
"Nothing will ever be attempted if all possible objections must be first
overcome."
DR. JOHNSON.
Fear of Failure
FEBRUARY 25
"Extreme caution is no less harmful than its opposite."
VAUVENARGUES.
"The men who succeed best in public life are those who take the risk of
standing by their own convictions."
GARFIELD.
"Our doubts are traitors,
And make us lose the good we oft might win,
By fearing to attempt."
SHAKESPEARE.
"IT is better by a noble boldness to run the risk of being subject to
half of the evils which we anticipate, than to remain in cowardly
listlessness for fear of what may happen."
HERODOTUS.
Falterers
FEBRUARY 26
"Nay, never falter: no great deed is done
By falterers who ask for certainty.
No good is certain, but the steadfast mind,
The undivided will to seek the good:
'Tis that compels the elements, and wrings
A human music from the indifferent air.
The greatest gift the hero leaves his race
Is to have been a hero. Say we fail!--
We feed the high tradition of the world,
And leave our spirit in our children's breasts."
GEORGE ELIOT.
"How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rest unburnish'd, not to shine in use!
As though to breathe were life."
TENNYSON.
"After all, depend upon it, it is better to be worn out with work in a
thronged community, than to perish in inaction in a stagnant solitude:
take this truth into consideration whenever you get tired of work and
bustle."
MRS. GASKELL'S _Life of C. Bronte_.
Courage
FEBRUARY 27
"Whether you be man or woman you will never do anything in the world
without courage. It is the greatest quality of the mind next to honour."
JAMES LANE ALLEN.
"The brave man is not he who feels no fear,
For that were stupid and irrational,
But he whose noble soul its fear subdues
And bravely dares the danger nature shrinks from."
JOANNA BAILLIE.
"Heroism is the brilliant triumph of the soul over the flesh--that is to
say, over fear: fear of poverty, of suffering, of calumny, of sickness,
of isolation, and of death. There is no serious piety without heroism.
Heroism is the dazzling and glorious concentration of courage."
_Amiel's Journal._
"Self-trust is the essence of heroism."
EMERSON.
Responsibility
FEBRUARY 28
"Thousands live and die in the dim borderland of destitution; that
little children wail, and starve, and perish, and soak and blacken soul
and sense, in our streets; that there are hundreds and thousands of the
unemployed, not all of whom, as some would persuade us, are lazy
impostors; that the demon of drink still causes among us daily horrors
which would disgrace Dahomey or Ashantee, and rakes into his coffers
millions of pounds which are wet with tears and red with blood; these
are facts patent to every eye. Now, God will work no miracle to mend
these miseries. If we neglect them they will be left uncured, but He
will hold us responsible for the neglect. It is vain for us to ask, 'Am
I my brother's keeper?' In spite of all the political economists, in
spite of all superfine theories of chilly and purse-saving wisdom, in
spite of all the critiques of the irreligious--still more of the
semi-religious, and the religious press, He will say to the callous and
the slothful, with such a glance 'as struck Gehazi with leprosy, and
Simon Magus with a curse,' 'What hast thou done? Smooth religionist,
orthodox Churchman, scrupulous Levite, befringed and bephylacteried
Pharisee, thy brother's blood crieth to Me from the ground!'"
F. W. FARRAR.
"The healing of the world
Is in its nameless saints. Each separate star
Seems nothing, but a myriad scattered stars
Break up the night, and make it beautiful."
BAYARD TAYLOR.
The Sin of Indifference
MARCH 1
"They hear no more the cries of their brothers caught in the nets of
misery: 'Help us, we are perishing.' The curtains of their comfort are
fast drawn; they sit at home wrapt in family ease. Outside, the sleet is
falling, the bitter wind is blowing, thousands of the children of sorrow
are dying in the fierce weather. God Himself is knocking at the door,
calling 'Come forth and seek the lost with Jesus.' We hear nothing, the
cotton of comfort stops our ears. For a time, till God Himself breaks in
on us with storm, and disperses our comfort to the winds, we can run no
Christian race.... Therefore, lay aside, not all comfort--men have a
right to that--but that excess of it which softens and enfeebles the
soul; which sends to sleep the longing for God's perfection; which makes
our life too slothful to follow Christ, the Healer of the world!"
_The Gospel of Joy_, STOPFORD BROOKE.
"All my soul is full
Of pity for the sickness of this world;
Which I will heal, if healing may be found
By uttermost renouncing and strong strife."
_The Light of Asia_, E. ARNOLD.
Wasted Emotions
MARCH 2
"Pity, indignation, love, felt and not made into acts of pity or of
self-sacrifice, lose their very heart in our dainty dreaming, and are
turned into their opposites. Our animation and activity of love,
unexercised, becomes like the unused muscle, attenuated; and we are
content to think with pleasure of the times when we were animated and
active--a vile condition. But the worst wretchedness of these losses
does not consist in the damage we do ourselves, but in the loss of power
to benefit mankind, in the loss of power to do God's work for the
salvation and the greater happiness of man. We are guilty to man, and
guilty before God, when we lose our powers in inglorious ease. We owe
ourselves to men and women; no amount of work frees us from the duty of
keeping ourselves in the best possible trim, body and soul, mind and
spirit, that we may nobly work the loving work of Him that sent us."
_The Gospel of Joy_, STOPFORD BROOKE.
"Opportunities are swarming around us all the time, thicker than gnats
at sundown. We walk through a cloud of them."
VAN DYKE.
"Doing" more than "Feeling"
MARCH 3
"Our Lord ... always brings back to mind that doing is more than
feeling."
_Pastor Pastorum_, HENRY LATHAM.
"A maxim of Professor James 'never to suffer a single emotion to
evaporate without exacting from it some practical service.'"
_The Making of Character_, Prof. JOHN MACCUNN.
"But two ways are offered to our will--
Toil with rare triumph, Ease with safe disgrace:--
Nor deem that acts heroic wait on chance!
The man's whole life preludes the single deed
That shall decide if his inheritance
Be with the sifted few of matchless breed,
Or with the unnoticed herd that only sleep and feed."
LOWELL.
The Sacredness of Work
MARCH 4
"All true work is sacred; in all true work, were it but true
hand-labour, there is something of divineness."
CARLYLE.
"Some of the commonest faults of thought and work are those which come
from thinking too poorly of our own lives, and of that which must
rightly be demanded of us. A high standard of accuracy, a chivalrous
loyalty to exact truth, generosity to fellow-workers, indifference to
results, distrust of all that is showy, self-discipline and
undiscouraged patience through all difficulties,--these are among the
first and greatest conditions of good work; and they ought never to seem
too hard for us if we remember what we owe to the best work of bygone
days."
_The Spirit of Discipline_, Bishop PAGET.
"Whether thy work be fine or coarse, planting corn or writing epics, so
only it be honest work, done to thine own approbation, it shall earn a
reward to the senses as well as to the thought; no matter how often
defeated, you are born to victory. The reward of a thing well done is to
have done it."
EMERSON.
Doing our Best
MARCH 5
"It is not the quantity of our work that He regards, but the quality of
it. He is less anxious that we should fulfil our task--for He can make
up for our deficiencies--than that we should do our best; for what He
desires is the improvement of our characters, and that requires the
co-operation of our own wills with His."
_Life Here and Hereafter_, Canon MACCOLL.
"Experience shows that success is due less to ability than to zeal. The
winner is he who gives himself to his work, body and soul."
CHARLES BUXTON.
"Life is too short to waste,
* * * * *
'Twill soon be dark;
Up! mind thine own aim, and
God speed the mark!"
EMERSON.
Work--Effective Reforms
MARCH 6
"We must be careful not to undermine independence in our anxiety to
relieve distress. There is always the initial difficulty that whatever
is done for men takes from them a great stimulus to work, and weakens
the feeling of independence; all creatures which depend on others tend
to become mere parasites. It is important therefore, as far as possible,
not so much to give a man bread, as to put him in the way of earning it
for himself; not to give direct aid, but to help others to help
themselves. The world is so complex that we must all inevitably owe much
to our neighbours; but, as far as possible, every man should stand on
his own feet."
Lord AVEBURY.
"We are now generally agreed upon our aims: nobility of character and
not only outward prosperity; victory over evil at its source, and not in
its consequences; reforms which shall regard the welfare of future
generations, who are 'the greatest number.'"
Bishop WESTCOTT.
"We fall under the temptation of seeking material solutions for
spiritual problems; material remedies for spiritual maladies. The
thought of spiritual poverty, of spiritual destitution, is crowded out.
We treat the symptoms and neglect the disease itself."
Bishop WESTCOTT.
Work--Effective Reforms
MARCH 7
"If you are moved with a vague desire to help men be better men, you
must know that you can do it not by belabouring the evil but by training
the good that there is in them."
PHILLIPS BROOKS.
"The Christian, therefore, I repeat, as Christian, will take his full
part in preparing for the amelioration of the conditions of men no less
than for their conversion. He will in due measure strive to follow,
under the limitations of his own labour, the whole example of his Lord,
who removed outward distresses and satisfied outward wants, even as He
brought spiritual strength and rest to the weak and weary. Moreover,
this effort based upon resolute thought, belongs to the completeness of
the religious life of the Christian."
Bishop WESTCOTT.
"Reforms which are effective must develop and strengthen character."
Bishop WESTCOTT.
Work--"To cure is the Voice of the Past"
MARCH 8
"All measures of reformation are effective in exact proportion to their
timeliness. Partial decay may be cut away and cleansed, incipient error
corrected: but there is a point at which corruption can no more be
stayed, nor wandering recalled. It has been the manner of modern
philanthropy to remain passive until that precise period, and to leave
the sick to perish, and the foolish to stray, while it spent itself in
frantic exertions to raise the dead, and reform the dust."
_The Queen of the Air_, JOHN RUSKIN.
"THE real work of charity is not to afford facilities to the poor to
lower their standard, but to step in when calamity threatens and prevent
it from falling."
_The Standard of Life_, MRS. BERNARD BOSANQUET.
"To cure is the voice of the past; to prevent, the divine whisper of
to-day."
_Children's Rights_, KATE DOUGLAS WIGGIN.
Satan's Opportunities
MARCH 9
"Physiologists know as much about morality as ministers of the gospel.
The vices which drag men and women into crime spring as often from
unhealthy bodies as from weak wills and callous consciences. Vile
fancies and sensual appetites grow stronger and more terrible when a
feeble physique and low vitality offer no opposing force. Deadly vices
are nourished in the weak diseased bodies that are penned, day after
day, in filthy crowded tenements of great cities."
_Children's Rights_, KATE DOUGLAS WIGGIN.
"Man's unpitied misery is Satan's opportunity."
"Mould conditions aright, and men will grow good to fit them."
HORACE FLETCHER.
"Evil is Wrought by want of Thought"
MARCH 10
"But evil is wrought by want of thought, As well as want of heart."
THOMAS HOOD.
"It is clear that in whatever it is our duty to act, those matters also
it is our duty to study."
DR. ARNOLD.
"No alms-giving of money is so helpful as alms-giving of care and
thought; the giving of money without thought is indeed continually
mischievous; but the invective of the economist against indiscriminate
charity is idle if it be not coupled with pleading for discriminate
charity, and above all, for that charity which discerns the uses that
people may be put to, and helps them by setting them to work in those
services. That is the help beyond all others; find out how to make
useless people useful, and let them earn their money instead of begging
it."
_Arrows of the Chace_, JOHN RUSKIN.
(From a letter published in the _Daily Telegraph_ of
December 20, 1868.)
The Hallowing of Work
March 11
"We shall not do much of that which is best worth doing in the world if
we only consecrate to it our gifts. We have something else to consecrate
for our work's sake, for our friend's sake, for the sake of all for whom
in any way we are responsible. Beyond and above all that we may do, is
that which we may be. 'For their sakes I sanctify, I consecrate,
Myself.' So our Blessed Lord spoke in regard to those whom He had drawn
nearest to Himself--His friends; those whose characters He would fashion
for the greatest task that ever yet was laid upon frail men. And even
when we have set apart all that was unique in the nature and results of
His Self-consecration, all that He alone could, once for all, achieve;
still, I think, the words disclose a principle that concerns every one
of us--the principle of all that is highest and purest in the influence
of one life upon the lives it touches: 'For their sakes I consecrate
Myself.' There is the ultimate secret of power; the one sure way of
doing good in our generation. We cannot anticipate or analyse the power
of a pure and holy life; but there can be no doubt about its reality,
and there seems no limit to its range. We can only know in part the laws
and forces of the spiritual world; and it may be that every soul that is
purified and given up to God and to His work releases or awakens
energies of which we have no suspicion--energies viewless as the wind;
but we can be sure of the result, and we may have glimpses sometimes of
the process--surely, there is no power in the world so unerring or so
irrepressible as the power of personal holiness. All else at times goes
wrong, blunders, loses proportion, falls disastrously short of its aim,
grows stiff or one-sided, or out of date--'whether there be prophecies,
they shall fail; whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether
there be knowledge, it shall vanish away;' but nothing mars or misleads
the influence that issues from a pure and humble and unselfish
character."
_The Hallowing of Work_, Bishop PAGET.
One by One
MARCH 12
"Nothing is more characteristic of Jesus' method than His indifference
to the many--His devotion to the single soul. His attitude to the
public, and His attitude to a private person were a contrast and a
contradiction. If His work was likely to cause a sensation Jesus charged
His disciples to let no man know it: if the people got wind of Him, He
fled to solitary places: if they found Him, as soon as might be He
escaped. But He used to take young men home with Him, who wished to ask
questions: He would spend all night with a perplexed scholar: He gave an
afternoon to a Samaritan woman. He denied Himself to the multitude: He
lay in wait for the individual. This was not because He under-valued a
thousand, it was because He could not work on the thousand scale: it was
not because He over-valued the individual, it was because His method was
arranged for the scale of one. Jesus never succeeded in public save
once, when He was crucified: He never failed in private save once, with
Pontius Pilate. His method was not sensation: it was influence. He did
not rely on impulses: He believed in discipline. He never numbered
converts, because He knew what was in man: He sifted them, as one
winnoweth the wheat from the chaff. Spiritual statistics are unknown in
the Gospels: they came in with St. Peter in the pardonable intoxication
of success: they have since grown to be a mania. As the Church coarsens
she estimates salvation by quantity, how many souls are saved: Jesus was
concerned with quality, after what fashion they were saved. His mission
was to bring Humanity to perfection."
_The Mind of the Master_, Dr. JOHN WATSON.
One by One
MARCH 13
"Our Lord ... does not, on entering a village, ordain that all the
lepers in it shall be cleansed, or all the palsied restored to the use
of their limbs. He condescends to take each case by itself."
_Pastor Pastorum_, HENRY LATHAM.
"'One by one' is not only the safest way of helping, it is the only
possible way of ensuring that any real good is done."
_Rich and Poor_, Mrs. BERNARD BOSANQUET.
"Love cannot be content while any suffer,--cannot rest while any sin."
"I would not let one cry whom I could save."
_The Light of Asia_, E. ARNOLD.
Interruptions
MARCH 14
"So long as there is work to do there will be interruptions--breaks in
its progress. The minister at work on his sermon, the merchant at his
desk, the woman in her household duties--all must expect these calls to
turn aside from the work in hand. And it is a part of one's character
growth to bear these timely or untimely interruptions without any break
in good temper or courtesy. A young student who was privileged to call
often upon Phillips Brooks in his study, told the writer that he could
never have learned from the Bishop's manner or words, that the
big-hearted, busy man was ever too busy to receive him. To bear
interruptions thus serenely is an opportunity for self-control not to be
overlooked by any one who wants to do God's work in the right spirit."
"He threw himself spontaneously, apparently without effort and yet
irresistibly, into the griefs and joys, the needs and interests of
others. He had the happy gift of taking everybody to his heart. He was
never inattentive. As you talked to him you always felt he was listening
and really trying to understand your case. In the light of sympathy you
saw yourself reflected in the mirror of his heart. Nor did he forget you
when you were gone from sight. His was not the cheap sympathy of an
outward manner, but the true emotion of the inward self. To your
surprise, when you had left Bishop Fraser with a sense of shame at
having occupied, in your interview, so much of his overcrowded time, you
would find the next morning a letter upon your table giving his fuller
and more mature opinion of your plans or course of action."... "Tender
and loving, in sympathy with the lowliest, forbearing with the most
unreasonable, often interrupted, but never resenting, the sacrifice of
self crowning all."
_Bishop Fraser's Lancashire Life_, Archdeacon DIGGLE.
Mechanical Work
MARCH 15
"Miss Keane took but little heed of the presence of Rachel and Hester in
her brother's house. Those who work mechanically on fixed lines seem as
a rule to miss the pith of life. She was kind when she remembered them,
but her heart was where her treasure was--namely, in her escritoire,
with her list of Bible classes, and servants' choral unions, and the
long roll of contributors to the guild of work which she herself had
started."
_Red Pottage_, MARY CHOLMONDELEY.
"Any man seeking to be holy who does not set himself in close live
contact with the life about him, stands in great danger of growing pious
or punctilious instead of holy."
PHILLIPS BROOKS.
An Ideal Guest-chamber
MARCH 16
"In Mrs. Charles' well-known book, 'Chronicles of the Schonberg-Cotta
family,' there is a beautiful passage where Fritz and Eva, beginning
their young life together, take into their house a penitent woman who
was thought to be near death. Eva writes: 'There is a little room over
the porch that we had set apart as a guest-chamber, and very sweet it
was to me that Bertha should be its first inmate; very sweet to Fritz
and me that our home should be what our Lord's heart is, a refuge for
the outcast, the penitent, the solitary, and the sorrowful.'"
"We all say we follow Christ, but most of us only follow Him and His
cross--part of the way. When we are told that our Lord bore our sins,
and was wounded for our transgressions, I suppose that meant that He
felt as if they were His own, in His great love for us. But when you
shrink from bearing your fellow-creatures' transgressions, it shows that
your love is small."
_Red Pottage_, MARY CHOLMONDELEY.
"Radiant with heavenly pity, lost in care
For those he knew not, save as fellow lives."
_The Light of Asia_, E. ARNOLD.
"To be Trusted is to be Saved"
MARCH 17
"No one can perish in whom any spark of the Divine life is still
burning. No one can be plucked out of the Saviour's hands who still
struggles towards Him, however feebly and falteringly."
_Life Here and Hereafter_, Canon MACCOLL.
"To be trusted is to be saved. And if we try to influence or elevate
others, we shall soon see that success is in proportion to their belief
of our belief in them. For the respect of another is the first
restoration of the self-respect a man has lost; our ideal of what he is
becomes to him the hope and pattern of what he may become."
_The Greatest Thing in the World_, HENRY DRUMMOND.
"Coarse treatment never wins souls."
God's Children
MARCH 18
"Hallow the name of God, hallow His character, in all noble and good
humanity.
"That is not difficult. But to hallow God's character in men and women
who are not good, in sinful humanity--that is not so easy. Yet, if we
would be true to this prayer of Christ, this too is part of our duty.
The evil are also the children of God. They have not hallowed His
character, but abandoned its worship. Nevertheless they cannot get rid
of it. That divine thing lies hid, ineradicably, beneath their evil
doing and evil thought. The truth, justice, love, piety, and goodness of
God are in abeyance in the wrong-doer, but they are not dead in him.
They cannot die; nothing can destroy them. And we, whose desire it
should be to save men, can, if we have faith in the indestructible God
in men, pierce to this immortal good in the evil, appeal to it, and call
it forth to light, like Lazarus, from the tomb. This we can do, if, like
Jesus, we love men enough; if our faith that the evil are still God's
children be deep and firm enough. In this we can keep closest to Christ,
for it was His daily way of life; and divinely beautiful it was. He
hallowed God's character in the criminal and the harlot. He saw the good
beneath the evil. At His touch it leaped into life, and its life
destroyed the death in the sinner's soul. It seems as if He said when He
looked into the face of the wrong-doer, 'Father, hallowed be Thy
character.' No lesson for life can be wiser or deeper than this. It
ought to rule all our doings with the weak and guilty. It is at the very
centre of the prayer, 'Hallowed be Thy name.'"
_The Gospel of Joy_, STOPFORD BROOKE.
"Always at the door
Of foulest hearts, the angel-nature yet
Knocks to return and cancel all its debt."
J. R. Lowell.
Raw Material
MARCH 19
"One also is filled with _hope_ at the figure of the clay, because it
suggests the immense and unimagined possibilities of human nature. Upon
first sight how poor a thing is this man, with his ignorances,
prejudices, pettinesses, his envy, jealousy, evil temper. Upon second
thoughts how much may be in this man, how much he may achieve, how high
he may attain. This dull and unattractive man must not be despised,
whether he be yourself or another: he is incalculable and unfathomable.
He is simply raw material, soul stuff, and one can no more anticipate
him than you could foresee a Turner from the master's colours--some of
them very strange--or a Persian rug from a heap of wool. Out of that
unpromising face, that sleeping intellect, those awkward ways, this
crust of selfishness and a hundred faults, is going to be made a man
whom the world will admire and honour."
_The Potter's Wheel_, Dr. JOHN WATSON.
"To have faith is to create; to have hope is to call down blessing; to
have love is to work miracles."
_The Roadmender_, MICHAEL FAIRLESS.
"The faith which saves others is the enthusiasm of patience."
_The Service of God_, Canon BARNETT.
Pessimism
MARCH 20
"The next thing to speak of is a tendency in the world which is the very
opposite of that of which we have spoken, but which is equally
characteristic of a time when a new life and spirit is on the verge of
taking its form. As part of the fight of faith is to support and direct
the first, so part of that battle is to weaken and oppose the doctrine
that the world is going from bad to worse, that there is no regeneration
for it, and that there ought to be none. On this doctrine I have
frequently spoken, but I do not hesitate to speak of it again. It is the
fashion to praise it; it deserves no praise, it is detestable. This is a
favourite doctrine of the comfortable classes who are idle and luxurious
or merely fantastic, and of a certain type of scientific men, both of
whom are profoundly ignorant of the working world and of the poor, who
hate this doctrine and despise it. The sufferings of the poor and the
oppressed are used as an argument in its favour, but, curiously enough,
you scarcely ever find it held by the poor and the oppressed;--on the
contrary, these are the creators and builders of Utopias: out of this
class grow those who prophesy a golden year. Those who have most reason
to despair never despair."
_The Gospel of Joy_, STOPFORD BROOKE.
"Of all bad habits despondency is among the least respectable, and there
is no one quite so tiresome as the sad-visaged Christian who is
oppressed by the wickedness and hopelessness of the world."
Service
MARCH 21
"Service implies self-giving. There is service which is just
self-satisfaction, pleasing to the taste for doing and meddling, and
there is service which is exactly measured to its pay. True service
implies giving, the surrender of time or taste, the subjection of self
to others, the gift which is neither noticed nor returned."
_The Service of God_, Canon BARNETT.
"Christian greatness is born of willingness to lay the lowliest duties
on yourself, and the way to be first is to be ready to remain last."
_Pastor Pastorum_, HENRY LATHAM.
"Nobleness consists in a valiant suffering for others, not in making
others suffer for us. The chief of men is he who stands in the van of
men; fronting the peril which frightens back all others.... Every noble
crown is, and on earth will for ever be, a crown of thorns."
_Past and Present_, CARLYLE.
"No one is useless in this world who lightens the burden of it to any
one else."
DICKENS.
Service
MARCH 22
"They were to mortify the self-importance and vain dignity that will not
render commonplace kindness. 'If I then, your Lord and Master, have
washed your feet, ye also ought to wash one another's feet.'"
_The Mind of the Master_, Dr. JOHN WATSON.
"Nothing is degrading which a high and graceful purpose ennobles, and
offices the most menial cease to be menial the moment they are wrought
in love."
J. MARTINEAU.
"And service will be the personal tribute to Jesus, whom we shall
recognise under any disguise, as his nurse detected Ulysses by his
wounds, and whose Body, in the poor and miserable, will ever be with us
for our discernment. Jesus is the leper whom the saint kissed, and the
child the monk carried over the stream, and the sick man the widow
nursed into health, after the legends of the ages of faith. And Jesus
will say at the close of the day, 'Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one
of the least of these My brethren, ye have done it unto Me.'"
_The Mind of the Master_, Dr. JOHN WATSON.
Service
MARCH 23
"We must not be perplexed or put out if we have to change our plans. God
sends us hither and thither; we may think that we are wasting our
special talents, when God has, after all, some particular need for our
particular work at a particular time. And equally we must learn to
measure our strength; we cannot all do the same things, we are not all
adapted to the same work, or charged with the same duties. Why should we
overstrain ourselves in that which is beyond our strength, or neglect
plain duties for others less obvious? Ah! God receives many a Corban now
which He will never accept; self-chosen work done at the expense of
duty; work outside done to the neglect of our own proper work; work done
at the entire expense of our home and social duties; the clear
commandment of God shattered to pieces by some purely human tradition."
Canon NEWBOLT.
"Every Christian is the servant of men, always and everywhere, without
respect to the distinctions of sex, or class, or nationality, or creed."
Canon BODY.
Mens Sana in Corpore Sano
MARCH 24
"As there is a will of God for our higher nature--the moral laws--as
emphatically is there a will of God for the lower, the natural laws. If
you would know God's will in the higher, therefore, you must begin with
God's will in the lower: which simply means this--that if you want to
live the ideal life, you must begin with the ideal body. The law of
moderation, the law of sleep, the law of regularity, the law of
exercise, the law of cleanliness,--this is the law or will of God for
you. This is the first law, the beginning of His will for you. And if we
are ambitious to get on to do God's will in the higher reaches, let us
respect it as much in the lower; for there may be as much of God's will
in minor things, as much of God's will in taking good bread and pure
water, as in keeping a good conscience or living a pure life. Whoever
heard of gluttony doing God's will, or laziness, or uncleanness, or the
man who was careless and wanton of natural life? Let a man disobey God
in these, and you have no certainty that he has any true principle for
obeying God in anything else: for God's will does not only run into the
church and the prayer-meeting and the higher chambers of the soul, but
into the common rooms at home down to wardrobe and larder and cellar,
and into the bodily frame down to blood and muscle and brain."
_The Ideal Life_, HENRY DRUMMOND.
The Duty of Physical Health
MARCH 25
"Excess is not the only thing which breaks men in their health, and in
the comfortable enjoyment of themselves; but many are brought into a
very ill and languishing habit of body by mere sloth; and sloth is in
itself both a great sin, and the cause of many more."
Bishop SOUTH.
"There is no true care for the body which forgets the soul. There is no
true care for the soul which is not mindful of the body.... The duty of
physical health and the duty of spiritual purity and loftiness are not
two duties; they are two parts of one duty,--which is the living of the
completest life which it is possible for man to live. And the two parts
minister to one another. Be good that you may be well; be well that you
may be good. Both of those two injunctions are reasonable, and both are
binding on us all."
PHILLIPS BROOKS.
The Duty of Physical Health
MARCH 26
"Moreover, health is not only a great element of happiness, but it is
essential to good work. It is not merely wasteful but selfish to throw
it away.
"It is impossible to do good work,--at any rate, it is impossible to do
our best,--if we overstrain ourselves. It is bad policy, because all
work done under such circumstances will inevitably involve an additional
period of quiet and rest afterwards; but apart from this, work so done
will not be of a high quality, it will show traces of irritability and
weakness: the judgment will not be good: if it involves co-operation
with others there will be great possibility of friction and
misunderstandings."
Lord AVEBURY.
"When we are out of sorts things get on our nerves, the most trifling
annoyances assume the proportions of a catastrophe. It is a sure sign
that we need rest and fresh air."
Lord AVEBURY.
"O Almighty and most merciful God, of Thy bountiful goodness keep us, we
beseech Thee, from all things that may hurt us; that we, being ready
both in body and soul, may cheerfully accomplish those things that Thou
wouldest have done; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen."
_The Book of Common Prayer._
Physical Morality
MARCH 27
"The preservation of health is a _duty_. Few men seem conscious that
there is such a thing as physical morality. Men's habitual words and
acts imply the idea that they are at liberty to treat their bodies as
they please. Disorders entailed by disobedience to Nature's dictates
they regard simply as grievances, not as the effects of a conduct more
or less flagitious. Though the evil consequences inflicted on their
dependants, and on future generations, are often as great as those
caused by crime, yet they do not think themselves in any degree
criminal. It is true that in the case of drunkenness the viciousness of
this bodily transgression is recognised, but none appear to infer that
if this bodily transgression is vicious, so, too, is every bodily
transgression. The fact is that all breaches of the laws of health are
_physical sins_."
HERBERT SPENCER.
"... Health is not merely a matter of the body. 'Anger, hatred, grief,
and fear are among the influences most destructive of vitality.' And, on
the other hand, cheerfulness, good-humour, and peace of mind are
powerful elements of health."
Lord AVEBURY.
Invalids
MARCH 28
"If you are an invalid, do your best to get well; but, if you must
remain an invalid, still strive for the unselfishness and serenity which
are the best possessions of health. There are no sublimer victories than
some that are won on sick-beds."
"We have sometimes known some men or women, helpless so that their lives
seemed to be all dependent, who yet, through their sickness, had so
mounted to a higher life and so identified themselves with Christ that
those on whom they rested found the Christ in them and rested upon it.
Their sick-rooms became churches. Their weak voices spoke gospels. The
hands they seemed to clasp were really clasping theirs. They were
depended on while they seemed to be most dependent. And when they died,
when the faint flicker of their life went out, strong men whose light
seemed radiant found themselves walking in the darkness; and stout
hearts, on which theirs used to lean, trembled as if the staff and
substance of their strength was gone."
PHILLIPS BROOKS.
"Pain is no evil unless it conquers us."
GEORGE ELIOT.
Invalids
MARCH 29
"It may be that God used to give you plentiful chances to work for Him.
Your days went singing by, each winged with some enthusiastic duty for
the Master whom you loved.... You can be idle for Him, if so He wills,
with the same joy with which you once laboured for Him. The sick-bed or
the prison is as welcome as the harvest-field or the battle-field, when
once your soul has come to value as the end of life the privilege of
seeking and of finding Him."
PHILLIPS BROOKS.
"To be well enough to work is the wish of my natural heart; but if that
may not be, I know that 'they also serve who only stand and wait.' God
will not require healthy men's labour from you or me; and if we are poor
in power and opportunity to serve Him, our widow's mite will weigh
against the gold ingots of His chosen apostles."
_Memoir of George Wilson._
"The widow's mite? Well, when they laughed at S. Theresa because she
wanted to build a great orphanage and had only three ducats to begin
with, she answered, 'With three ducats Theresa can do nothing, but with
God and her three ducats there is nothing which Theresa cannot do.'"
F. W. FARRAR.
Lessons of Suffering
MARCH 30
"To have suffered much is like knowing many languages. You have learnt
to understand all, and to make yourself intelligible to all."
"We have all met some great sufferers, whose cheerfulness and
good-humour are not only a lesson to us who enjoy good health, but who
seem to be, as it were, raised and consecrated by a life of suffering."
Lord AVEBURY.
"What man goes worthily through sorrow and does not come out hating
shams and pretences, hungering for truth; and also full of sympathy for
his fellow-man whose capacity for suffering has been revealed to him by
his own?"
PHILLIPS BROOKS.
Hypochondriacs
MARCH 31--APRIL 1
"There is a temperament called _Hypochondriac_, to which many persons,
some of them the brightest, the most interesting, the most gifted, are
born heirs,--a want of balance of the nervous powers, which tends
constantly to periods of high excitement and of consequent
depression,--an unfortunate inheritance for the possessor, though
accompanied often with the greatest talents....
"People of this temperament are subject to fits of gloom and
despondency, of nervous irritability and suffering, which darken the
aspect of the whole world to them, which present lying reports of their
friends, of themselves, of the circumstances of their life, and of all
with which they have to do.
"Now the highest philosophy for persons thus afflicted is to understand
themselves and their tendencies, to know that these fits of gloom and
depression are just as much a form of disease as a fever or a
toothache,--to know that it is the peculiarity of the disease to fill
the mind with wretched illusions, to make them seem miserable and
unlovely to themselves, to make their nearest friends seem unjust and
unkind, to make all events appear to be going wrong and tending to
destruction and ruin.
"The evils and burdens of such a temperament are half removed when a man
once knows that he has it, and recognises it for a disease,--when he
does not trust himself to speak and act in those bitter hours as if
there were any truth in what he thinks and feels and sees. He who has
not attained to this wisdom overwhelms his friends and his family with
the waters of bitterness; he stings with unjust accusations, and makes
his fireside dreadful with fancies which are real to him, but false as
the ravings of fever.
"A sensible person, thus diseased, who has found out what ails him, will
shut his mouth resolutely, not to give utterance to the dark thoughts
that infest his soul.
"A lady of great brilliancy and wit, who was subject to these periods,
once said to me, 'My dear sir, there are times when I know I am
possessed of the Devil, and then I never let myself speak.' And so this
wise woman carried her burden about with her in a determined, cheerful
reticence, leaving always the impression of a cheery, kindly temper,
when, if she had spoken out a tithe of what she thought and felt in her
morbid hours, she would have driven all her friends from her, and made
others as miserable as she was herself. She was a sunbeam, a life-giving
presence in every family, by the power of self-knowledge and
self-control."
_Little Foxes_, HARRIET BEECHER STOWE.
"Comfort's Art"
APRIL 2
"It would be very petty of us who are well and can bear things, to think
much of small offences from those who carry a weight of trial."
GEORGE ELIOT.
"Trouble is so hard to bear, is it not? How can we live and think that
any one has trouble--piercing trouble--and we could help them and never
try?"
GEORGE ELIOT.
"Pity makes the world soft to the weak and noble for the strong."
_The Light of Asia_, E. ARNOLD.
"Ask God to give thee skill
For comfort's art,
That thou may'st consecrated be,
And set apart
Unto a life of sympathy!
For heavy is the weight of ill
For every heart,
And comforters are needed much
Of Christlike touch."
Irritability
APRIL 3
"Irritability is, more than most unlovely states, a sin of the flesh. It
is not, like envy, malice, spite, revenge, a vice which we may suppose
to belong equally to an embodied or a disembodied spirit: in fact, it
comes nearer to being physical depravity than anything I know of. There
are some bodily states, some conditions of the nerves, such that we
could not conceive of even an angelic spirit, confined in a body thus
disordered, as being able to do any more than simply endure. It is a
state of nervous torture; and the attacks which the wretched victim
makes on others are as much a result of disease as the snapping and
biting of a patient convulsed with hydrophobia.... I think it is
undeniable that the peace and happiness of the home-circle are very
generally much invaded by the recurrence in its members of these states
of bodily irritability. Every person, if he thinks the matter over, will
see that his condition in life, the character of his friends, his
estimate of their virtues and failings, his hopes and expectations, are
all very much modified by these things. Cannot we all remember going to
bed as very ill-used, persecuted individuals, all whose friends were
unreasonable, whose life was full of trials and crosses, and waking up
on a bright bird-singing morning to find all these illusions gone with
the fogs of the night? Our friends are nice people, after all; the
little things that annoyed us look ridiculous by bright sunshine; and we
are fortunate individuals."
_Little Foxes_, HARRIET BEECHER STOWE.
Irritability
APRIL 4
"The philosophy of life, then, as far as this matter is concerned, must
consist of two things: first, to keep ourselves out of irritable bodily
states; and, second, to understand and control these states, when we
cannot ward them off. Of course, the first of these is the most
important; and yet, of all things, it seems to be least looked into and
understood. We find abundant rules for the government of the tongue and
temper; it is a slough into which, John Bunyan hath it, cartloads of
wholesome instructions have been thrown; but how to get and keep that
healthy state of brain, stomach, and nerves which takes away the
temptation to ill-temper and anger is a subject which moral and
religious teachers seem scarcely to touch upon.... We have a common
saying, that this or that person is soon used up. Now most nervous,
irritable states of temper are the mere physical result of a used-up
condition. The person has overspent his nervous energy,--like a man who
should eat up on Monday the whole food which was to keep him for a week,
and go growling and faint through the other days; or the quantity of
nervous force which was wanted to carry on the whole system in all its
parts is seized on by some one monopolising portion, and used up to the
loss and detriment of the rest."
_Little Foxes_, HARRIET BEECHER STOWE.
Accidie
APRIL 5
"... 'Accidie,' the spiritual sloth, which we rechristen 'depression'
and 'low spirits,' and meet with sympathy! Dante met it by fixing its
victims in the mire beneath the water, where they keep gurgling in their
throats the confession--
'We sullen were
In the sweet air, which by the sun is gladdened,
Bearing within ourselves the sluggish reek;
Now we are sullen in this sable mire.'"
_Stray Thoughts on Reading_, LUCY SOULSBY.
"A dull day need not be a depressing day; depression always implies
physical or moral weakness, and is therefore never to be tolerated so
long as one can struggle against it."
HAMILTON W. MABIE.
Accidie
APRIL 6
"... The sin of accidie, which is 'a sorrowfulness so weighing down the
mind that there is no good it likes to do. It has attached to it as its
inseparable comrade a distress and weariness of soul, and a sluggishness
in all good works, which plunges the whole man into lazy languor, and
works in him a constant bitterness. And out of this vehement woe springs
silence and a flagging of the voice, because the soul is so absorbed and
taken up with its own indolent dejection, that it has no energy for
utterance, but is cramped, and hampered, and imprisoned in its own
confused bewilderment, and has not a word to say.'"
_The Spirit of Discipline_, Bishop PAGET.
"Try it for a day, I beseech you, to preserve yourself in an easy and
cheerful frame of mind. Compare the day in which you have rooted out the
weed of dissatisfaction with that on which you have allowed it to grow
up, and you will find your heart open to every good motive, your life
strengthened and your breast armed with a panoply against every trick of
fate; truly, you will wonder at your own improvement."
RICHTER.
Accidie
APRIL 7
"As one compares the various estimates of the sin, one can mark three
main elements which help to make it what it is--elements which can be
distinguished, though in experience, I think, they almost always tend to
meet and mingle; they are _gloom_ and _sloth_ and _irritation_."
_The Spirit of Discipline_, Bishop PAGET.
"You find yourself refreshed by the presence of cheerful people. Why not
make earnest effort to confer that pleasure on others? You will find
half the battle is gained if you never allow yourself to say anything
gloomy."
LYDIA MARIA CHILDS.
"Wondrous is the strength of cheerfulness; altogether past calculation
its power of endurance."
CARLYLE.
Accidie
APRIL 8
"'It is a mood which severs a man from thoughts of God, and suffers him
not to be calm and kindly to his brethren. Sometimes, without any
provoking cause, we are suddenly depressed by so great sorrowfulness,
that we cannot greet with wonted courtesy the coming even of those who
are dear and near to us, and all they say in conversation, however
appropriate it may be, we think annoying and unnecessary, and have no
pleasant answer for it, because the gall of bitterness fills all the
recesses of our soul.' Those who are sad after this fashion have, as St.
Gregory says, anger already close to them; for from sadness such as this
come forth (as he says in another place) malice, grudging,
faint-heartedness, despair, torpor as to that which is commanded, and
the straying of the mind after that which is forbidden."
_The Spirit of Discipline_, Bishop PAGET.
"Activity is the antidote to the depressions that lower our vitality,
whether they come from physical or psychical causes."
Accidie
APRIL 9
"We may be somewhat surprised when we discover how precisely Pascal, or
Shakspeare, or Montaigne, can put his finger on our weak point, or tell
us the truth about some moral lameness or disorder of which we, perhaps,
were beginning to accept a more lenient and comfortable diagnosis. But
when a poet, controversialist and preacher of the Eastern Church, under
the dominion of the Saracens, or an anchoret of Egypt, an Abbot of Gaul,
in the sixth century, tells us, in the midst of our letters, and railway
journeys, and magazines, and movements, exactly what it is that on some
days makes us so singularly unpleasant to ourselves and to others--tells
us in effect that it is not simply the east wind, or dyspepsia, or
overwork, or the contrariness of things in general, but that it is a
certain subtle and complex trouble of our own hearts, which we perhaps
have never had the patience or the frankness to see as it really is;
that he knew it quite well, only too well for his own happiness and
peace, and that he can put us in a good way of dealing with it--the very
strangeness of the intrusion from such a quarter into our most private
affairs may secure for him a certain degree of our interest and
attention."
_The Spirit of Discipline_, Bishop PAGET.
Accidie
APRIL 10
"And now, as ever, over against Accidie rises the great grace of
Fortitude; the grace that makes men undertake hard things by their own
will wisely and reasonably. There is something in the very name of
Fortitude which speaks to the almost indelible love of heroism in men's
hearts; but perhaps the truest Fortitude may often be a less heroic, a
more tame and business-like affair than we are apt to think. It may be
exercised chiefly in doing very little things, whose whole value lies in
this, that, if one did not hope in God, one would not do them; in
secretly dispelling moods which one would like to show; in saying
nothing about one's lesser troubles and vexations; in seeing whether it
may not be best to bear a burden before one tries to see whither one can
shift it; in refusing for one's self excuses which one would not refuse
for others. These, anyhow, are ways in which a man may every day be
strengthening himself in the discipline of Fortitude; and then, if
greater things are asked of him, he is not very likely to draw back from
them. And while he waits the asking of these greater things, he may be
gaining from the love of God a hidden strength and glory such as he
himself would least of all suspect; he may be growing in the patience
and perseverance of the saints. For most of us the chief temptation to
lose heart, the chief demand upon our strength, comes in the monotony of
our failures, and in the tedious persistence of prosaic difficulties; it
is the distance, not the pace, that tries us. To go on choosing what has
but a look of being the more excellent way, pushing on towards a faintly
glimmering light, and never doubting the supreme worth of goodness even
in its least brilliant fragments,--this is the normal task of many
lives; in this men show what they are like. And for this we need a quiet
and sober Fortitude, somewhat like that which Botticelli painted, and
Mr. Ruskin has described."
_The Spirit of Discipline_, Bishop PAGET.
Temper
APRIL 11
"What is temper? Its primary meaning, the proportion and mode in which
qualities are mingled, is much neglected in popular speech, yet even
here the word often carries a reference to an habitual state or general
tendency of the organism in distinction from what are held to be
specific virtues and vices. As people confess to bad memory without
expecting to sink in mental reputation, so we hear a man declared to
have a bad temper and yet glorified as the possessor of every high
quality. When he errs or in any way commits himself, his temper is
accused, not his character, and it is understood that but for a brutal
bearish mood he is kindness itself. If he kicks small animals, swears
violently at a servant who mistakes orders, or is grossly rude to his
wife, it is remarked apologetically that these things mean nothing--they
are all temper.
"Certainly there is a limit to this form of apology; and the forgery of
a bill, or the ordering of goods without any prospect of paying for
them, has never been set down to an unfortunate habit of sulkiness or of
irascibility. But on the whole there is a peculiar exercise of
indulgence towards the manifestations of bad temper which tends to
encourage them, so that we are in danger of having among us a number of
virtuous persons who conduct themselves detestably, just as we have
hysterical patients who, with sound organs, are apparently labouring
under many sorts of organic disease. Let it be admitted, however, that a
man may be a 'good fellow' and yet have a bad temper, so bad that we
recognise his merits with reluctance, and are inclined to resent his
occasionally amiable behaviour as an unfair demand on our admiration."
GEORGE ELIOT.
Temper
APRIL 12
"Jealousy, anger, pride, uncharity, cruelty, self-righteousness,
sulkiness, touchiness, doggedness,--these are the staple ingredients of
Ill-Temper. And yet men laugh over it. 'Only temper,' they call it: a
little hot-headedness, a momentary ruffling of the surface, a mere
passing cloud. But the passing cloud is composed of drops, and the drops
here betoken an ocean, foul and rancorous, seething somewhere within the
life--an ocean made up of jealousy, anger, pride, uncharity, cruelty,
self-righteousness, sulkiness, touchiness, doggedness, lashed into a
raging storm.
"This is why temper is significant. It is not in what it is that its
significance lies, but in what it reveals. But for this it were not
worth notice. It is the intermittent fever which tells of
un-intermittent disease; the occasional bubble escaping to the surface,
betraying the rottenness underneath; a hastily prepared specimen of the
hidden products of the soul, dropped involuntarily when you are off your
guard. In one word, it is the lightning-form of a dozen hideous and
unchristian sins."
_The Ideal Life_, HENRY DRUMMOND.
"Whenever you are angry, be assured that it is not only a present evil,
but that you have increased a habit."
EPICTETUS.
Temper
APRIL 13
"Certainly if a bad-tempered man can be admirably virtuous, he must be
so under extreme difficulties. I doubt the possibility that a high order
of character can co-exist with a temper like Touchwood's. For it is of
the nature of such temper to interrupt the formation of healthy mental
habits, which depend on a growing harmony between perception,
conviction, and impulse. There may be good feelings, good deeds--for a
human nature may pack endless varieties and blessed inconsistencies in
its windings--but it is essential to what is worthy to be called high
character, that it may be safely calculated on, and that its qualities
shall have taken the form of principles or laws habitually, if not
perfectly, obeyed. If a man frequently passes unjust judgments, takes up
false attitudes, intermits his acts of kindness with rude behaviour or
cruel words, and falls into the consequent vulgar error of supposing
that he can make amends by laboured agreeableness, I cannot consider
such courses any the less ugly because they are ascribed to 'temper.'
Especially I object to the assumption that his having a fundamentally
good disposition is either an apology or a compensation for his bad
behaviour."
GEORGE ELIOT.
Temper
APRIL 14
"Consider how much more often you suffer from your anger and grief, than
from those very things for which you are angry and grieved."
MARCUS AURELIUS.
"The _difficult_ part of good temper consists in forbearance, and
accommodation to the ill-humour of others."
EMPSON.
"Do we not know that the storm of feeling can be checked, if only we can
prevent the first word from being spoken, the first gesture from being
made. And is it not matter of common observation that persons who begin
by being Stoics in demeanour end by becoming Stoics in reality?"
_The Making of Character_, Professor MACCUNN.
Temper
APRIL 15
"If this be one of our chief duties--promoting the happiness of our
neighbours--most certainly there is nothing which so entirely runs
counter to it, and makes it impossible, as an undisciplined temper. For
of all things that are to be met with here on earth, there is nothing
which can give such continual, such cutting, such useless pain. The
touchy and sensitive temper, which takes offence at a word; the
irritable temper, which finds offence in everything whether intended or
not; the violent temper, which breaks through all bounds of reason when
once roused; the jealous or sullen temper, which wears a cloud on the
face all day, and never utters a word of complaint; the discontented
temper, brooding over its own wrongs; the severe temper, which always
looks at the worst side of whatever is done; the wilful temper, which
over-rides every scruple to gratify a whim,--what an amount of pain have
these caused in the hearts of men, if we could but sum up their results!
How many a soul have they stirred to evil impulses; how many a prayer
have they stifled; how many an emotion of true affection have they
turned to bitterness! How hard they sometimes make all duties! How
painful they make all daily life! How they kill the sweetest and warmest
of domestic charities! The misery caused by other sins is often much
deeper and much keener, more disastrous, more terrible to the sight; but
the accumulated pain caused by ill-temper must, I verily believe, if
added together, outweigh all other pains that men have to bear from one
another."
Bishop TEMPLE.
Quarrels
APRIL 16
"Blow not into a flame the spark which is kindled between two friends.
They are easily reconciled, and will both hate you."
From the German.
"Quarrels would not last long if the fault was only on one side."
LA ROCHEFOUCAULD.
"He approaches nearest to the gods who knows how to be silent even
though he knows he is in the right."
CATO.
"When any one has offended me, I try to raise my soul so high that the
offence cannot reach it."
DESCARTES.
Quarrels
APRIL 17
"The mind is often clouded by passion until it is incapable of clear
thought. Harsh words, stinging words, cruel words are usually spoken
without thought. Rash deeds which result in most serious consequences
are performed without thought. The wrong-doer does not consider
beforehand the character of his deed, its effects on himself and others,
and its ultimate consequences."
"We shall never be sorry afterwards for thinking twice before we speak,
for counting the cost before entering upon any new course, for sleeping
over stings and injuries before saying or doing anything in answer, or
for carefully considering any business scheme presented to us before
putting money or name into it. It will save us from much regret, loss,
and sorrow, always to remember to do nothing rashly."
"Do nothing in a hurry. Nature never does. 'Most haste, worst speed,'
says the old proverb. If you are in doubt, sleep over it. But, above
all, never quarrel in a hurry. Think it over well. Take time. However
vexed you may be overnight, things will often look very different in the
morning. If you have written a clever and conclusive, but scathing
letter, keep it back till the next day, and it will very often never go
at all."
Lord AVEBURY.
Revenge
APRIL 18
"He that studieth revenge keepeth his own wounds green."
BACON.
"Ill-temper and envy and revenge find here an arsenal of pious
disguises; this is the playground of inverted lusts. With a little more
patience and a little less temper, a gentler and wiser method might be
found in almost every case; and the knot that we cut by some fine heady
quarrel-scene in private life, or, in public affairs, by some
denunciatory act against what we are pleased to call our neighbour's
vices, might yet have been unwoven by the hand of sympathy."
_Across the Plains_, R. L. STEVENSON.
"Still in thy right hand carry gentle Peace
To silence envious tongues."
SHAKESPEARE.
Touchiness
APRIL 19
"Touchiness, when it becomes chronic, is a morbid condition of the
inward disposition. It is self-love inflamed to the acute point."
HENRY DRUMMOND.
"Purge out of every heart the lurking grudge. Give us grace and strength
to forbear and to persevere. Offenders, give us the grace to accept and
to forgive offences. Forgetful ourselves, help us to bear cheerfully the
forgetfulness of others. Give us courage and gaiety and the quiet mind.
Spare to us our friends, soften to us our enemies. Bless us, if it may
be, in all our innocent endeavours. If it may not, give us the strength
to encounter that which is to come, that we be brave in peril, constant
in tribulation, temperate in wrath, and in all changes of fortune, and
down to the gates of death, loyal and loving one to another. As the clay
to the potter, as the windmill to the wind--as children of their sire,
we beseech of Thee this help and mercy for Christ's sake."
_Vailima Prayers_, R. L. STEVENSON.
Unbalanced Memory
APRIL 20
"It is so easy to forget a kindness, and to remember a kick. Yet
controlling our recollections is almost as important as controlling our
temper. We are apt to forget completely a hundred little kindnesses and
courtesies which one has shown us, and to remember a single careless
slight or thoughtless word. Often we hear it said of some wrong or
foolish deed, 'I have never thought so well of that man since then; it
was there he showed his real character,'--as if a man's real character
appeared more in one separate deed to which, perhaps, he was sorely
tempted, than in the striving and overcoming of many days and years."
"Our thoughts are often worse than we are, just as they are often better
than we are. And God sees us as we are altogether, not in separate
feelings or actions, as our fellow-men see us. We are always doing each
other injustice, and thinking better or worse of each other than we
deserve, because we only hear and see separate words and actions. We
don't see each other's whole nature."
GEORGE ELIOT.
"Enveloped in a common mist, we seem to walk in clearness ourselves, and
behold only the mist that enshrouds others."
GEORGE ELIOT.
Unbalanced Memory
APRIL 21
"Strange endurance of human vanity! a million of much more important
conversations have escaped one since then, most likely--but the memory
of this little mortification (for such it is, after all) remains quite
fresh in the mind, and unforgotten, though it is a trifle, and more than
half a score of years old. We forgive injuries, we survive even our
remorse for great wrongs that we ourselves commit; but I doubt if we
ever forgive slights of this nature put upon us, or forget circumstances
in which our self-love has been made to suffer."
W. M. THACKERAY.
"A past error may urge a grand retrieval."
GEORGE ELIOT.
"Memory is not a pocket, but a living instructor, with a prophetic sense
of the values which he guards; a guardian angel set there within you to
record your life, and by recording it to animate you to uplift it."
EMERSON.
"Silence a great Peacemaker"
APRIL 22
"Hard speech between those who have loved is hideous in the memory, like
the sight of greatness and beauty sunk into vice and rags."
GEORGE ELIOT.
"I don't want to say anything nasty, because nasty words always leave a
scar behind."
_Isabel Carnaby_, ELLEN THORNEYCROFT FOWLER.
"Silence is a great peacemaker."
LONGFELLOW.
"If bitterness has crept into the heart in the friction of the busy
day's unguarded moments, be sure it steals away with the setting sun.
Twilight is God's interval for peace-making."
Reconciliation
APRIL 23
"It is exceedingly noteworthy that in the rule laid down here by our
Lord, the responsibility of seeking reconciliation is laid primarily,
not upon the man who has done wrong, but upon the man who has received
the wrong. It is the injured man who is to take the initiative, to go
after the offender, to seek him out, and to exhaust all proper means of
bringing him to a right state of mind, and of getting him reconciled to
the man whom he has wronged. It is only after all these proper means
have been exhausted, after the man who has been injured has done
everything in his power--a great deal more than the law prescribed--it
is then only that he is to regard the offender as 'a heathen man and a
publican.' Is not this the exact opposite to the world's code of
morality upon that subject? Is it not the rule among men of the world--I
do not use the word in a bad sense--is it not the rule among Christian
men of the world, who live what we should call on the whole good honest
lives, to wait until the offender has come to them with a confession and
an apology? And if they then accept the apology and forgive the offence,
they probably think they have done something very magnanimous; nor would
they consider they had done anything very much amiss if they refused to
accept the apology, especially if the offence had been a gross one. If
the offender did not apologise, even an otherwise good Christian would
probably think that he might treat the matter with indifference, take no
notice of it, and say to himself, 'He has offended me, I will take no
notice, I will leave him to himself.' Would not men of the
world--Christian men--consider that they had upon the whole discharged
the Christian duty of forgiveness if they treated the offender in that
way? But the law which our Lord laid down in His answer to Peter, which
governed His own conduct, the law which rules the dealing of Almighty
God with sinful man, is that the man who has been injured, to whom the
wrong has been done, is to make the first move, is to take the first
step, is to go after the man who has done the wrong, and use his utmost
means of persuasion to convince him of his guilt, and to bring him back
from the error of his ways."
_Life Here and Hereafter_, Canon MACCOLL.
Reconciliation and Forgiveness
APRIL 24
"Never forget, when you have been injured, that your duty is not only to
refrain from retaliating, not simply to retire upon your dignity and
self-respect, not to leave the offender severely alone; but to seek him
out, to reason with him, to pray for him, to exhaust all your powers of
persuasion, all the resources of gentleness and love. It is only when
all this has been done that your responsibility is ended, and you are
justified in leaving him to be dealt with by Almighty God."
_Life Here and Hereafter_, Canon MACCOLL.
"'Remember,' he said, ... 'that if you forgive him, you become changed
yourself. You no longer see what he has done as you see it now. That is
the beauty of forgiveness: it enables us better to understand those whom
we have forgiven. Perhaps it will enable you to put yourself in his
place.'"
_The Mettle of the Pasture_, JAMES LANE ALLEN.
"Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each
other's eyes for an instant?"
THOREAU.
Forgiveness
APRIL 25
"The little hearts that know not how to forgive!"
TENNYSON.
"Oh, make my anger pure--let no worst wrong
Rouse in me the old niggard selfishness.
Give me Thine indignation--which is love
Turned on the evil that would part love's throng;
Thy anger scathes because it needs must bless,
Gathering into union calm and strong
All things on earth, and under, and above.
"Make my forgiveness downright--such as I
Should perish if I did not have from Thee;
I let the wrong go, withered up and dry,
Cursed with divine forgetfulness in me.
'Tis but self-pity, pleasant, mean and sly,
Low whispering bids the paltry memory live:--
What am I brother for, but to forgive?
* * * * *
Lord, I forgive--and step in unto Thee."
GEORGE MACDONALD.
Reparation
APRIL 26
"All high happiness has in it some element of love; all love contains a
desire for peace. One immediate effect of new happiness is to make us
turn toward the past with a wish to straighten out its difficulties,
heal its breaches and forgive its wrongs."
JAMES LANE ALLEN.
"As long as we love, we can forgive."
LA ROCHEFOUCAULD.
"When it is our duty to do an act of justice it should be done promptly.
To delay is injustice."
LA BRUYERE.
"His heart was as great as the world, but there was no room in it to
hold the memory of a wrong."
EMERSON (_said of Lincoln_).
The Unamiable
APRIL 27
"Of all mortals none are so awfully self-deluded as the unamiable. They
do not, any more than others, sin for the sake of sinning, but it may be
doubted whether, in the hour when all shall be uncovered to the eternal
day, there will be revealed a lower depth than the hell which they have
made. They inflict torments with an unconsciousness almost worthy of
spirits of light. The spirit sinks under the prospect of the retribution
of the unamiable, if all that happens be indeed for eternity, if there
be, indeed, a record of every chilling frown, of every querulous tone,
of every bitter jest, of every insulting word, of all abuses of that
tremendous power which mind has over mind. The throbbing pulse, the
quivering nerves, the wrung hearts that surround the unamiable; what a
cloud of witnesses is here! The terror of innocents who should know no
fear, the vindictive emotions of dependents who dare not complain, the
faintness of heart of lifelong companions, the anguish of those who
love; what an array of judges is here! The unamiable, the domestic
torturer, has heaped wrong upon wrong, woe upon woe, through the whole
portion of time which was given into his power, till it would be rash to
say that any others are more guilty than he."
HARRIET MARTINEAU.
Ill-Nature
APRIL 28
"HOW is ill-nature to be met and overcome? First, by humility: when a
man knows his own weaknesses, why should he be angry with others for
pointing them out? No doubt it is not very amiable of them to do so, but
still, truth is on their side. Secondly, by reflection: after all we are
what we are, and if we have been thinking too much of ourselves, it is
only an opinion to be modified; the incivility of our neighbours leaves
us what we were before. Above all, by pardon: there is only one way of
not hating those who do us wrong, and that is by doing them good; anger
is best conquered by kindness. Such a victory over feeling may not
indeed affect those who have wronged us, but it is a valuable piece of
self-discipline. It is vulgar to be angry on one's own account; we ought
only to be angry for great causes. Besides, the poisoned dart can only
be extracted from the wound by the balm of a silent and thoughtful
charity. Why do we let human malignity embitter us? Why should
ingratitude, jealousy--perfidy even--enrage us? There is no end to
recriminations, complaints, or reprisals. The simplest plan is to blot
everything out. Anger, rancour, bitterness, trouble the soul. Every man
is a dispenser of justice; but there is one wrong that he is not bound
to punish--that of which he himself is the victim. Such a wrong is to be
healed, not avenged."
_Amiel's Journal._
The Science of Social Life
APRIL 29
"Every man has his faults, his failings, peculiarities, eccentricities.
Every one of us finds himself crossed by such failings of others, from
hour to hour. And if he were to resent them all, or even notice all,
life would be intolerable. If for every outburst of hasty temper, and
for every rudeness that wounds us in our daily path, we were to demand
an apology, require an explanation, or resent it by retaliation, daily
intercourse would be impossible. The very science of social life
consists in that gliding tact which avoids contact with the sharp
angularities of character, which does not argue about such things, does
not seek to adjust or cure them all, but covers them, as if it did not
see."
FREDERICK W. ROBERTSON.
"If you would have a happy family life, remember two things,--in matters
of principle, stand like a rock; in matters of taste, swim with the
current."
The Science of Social Life
APRIL 30
"Much of the sorrow of life, however, springs from the accumulation, day
by day and year by year, of little trials--a letter written in less than
courteous terms, a wrangle at the breakfast table over some arrangement
of the day, the rudeness of an acquaintance on the way to the city, an
unfriendly act on the part of another firm, a cruel criticism needlessly
reported by some meddler, a feline amenity at afternoon tea, the
disobedience of one of your children, a social slight by one of your
circle, a controversy too hotly conducted. The trials within this class
are innumerable, and consider, not one of them is inevitable, not one of
them but might have been spared if we or our brother man had had a grain
of kindliness. Our social insolences, our irritating manners, our
censorious judgment, our venomous letters, our pinpricks in
conversation, are all forms of deliberate unkindness, and are all
evidences of an ill-conditioned nature."
_The Homely Virtues_, Dr. JOHN WATSON.
"Let us think, too, how much forbearance must have been shown us that we
were not even conscious of needing; how often, beyond doubt, we have
wounded, or annoyed, or wearied those who were so skilful and
considerate that we never suspected either our clumsiness or their
pain."
_Studies in the Christian Character_, Bishop PAGET.
The Science of Social Life
MAY 1
"Then, to be able, when we live with our brother men, not to remember
what we wish for ourselves, but only their wants, their joy and their
sorrow; to think, not of our own desires, but how to minister to the
great causes and the great conceptions which help mankind; to be eager
to give pity to men, and forgiveness to their wrong; to desire with
thirst to bind up the broken heart of man, and to realise our desire in
act--this is to thirst for God as Love. For this is self-forgetfulness,
and in the abysmal depths of His Being, as well as in every surface-form
into which He throws Himself out of Himself, God is the absolute
Self-forgetfulness."
_The Gospel of Joy_, STOPFORD BROOKE.
"If, in the paths of the world,
Stones might have wounded thy feet,
Toil or dejection have tried
Thy spirit, of that we saw
Nothing--to us thou wast still
Cheerful, and helpful, and firm!
Therefore to thee it was given
Many to save with thyself;
And, at the end of thy day,
O faithful shepherd! to come,
Bringing thy sheep in thy hand."
MATTHEW ARNOLD.
The Science of Social Life
MAY 2
"If you would be loved as a companion, avoid unnecessary criticism upon
those with whom you live. The number of people who have taken out
judges' patents for themselves is very large in any society. Now it
would be hard for a man to live with another who was always criticising
his actions, even if it were kindly and just criticism. It would be like
living between the glasses of a microscope. But these self-elected
judges, like their prototypes, are very apt to have the persons they
judge brought before them in the guise of culprits.
"Let not familiarity swallow up old courtesy. Many of us have a habit of
saying to those with whom we live such things as we say about strangers
behind their backs. There is no place, however, where real politeness is
of more value than where we mostly think it would be superfluous. You
may say more truth, or rather speak out more plainly to your associates,
but not less courteously than to strangers."
Sir ARTHUR HELPS.
"For manners are not idle, but the fruit
Of loyal nature, and of noble mind."
TENNYSON.
Sympathy
MAY 3
"There is nothing which seems to try men's patience and good temper more
than feebleness: the timidity, the vacillation, the conventionality, the
fretfulness, the prejudices of the weak; the fact that people can be so
well-meaning and so disappointing, these things make many men impatient
to a degree of which they are themselves ashamed. But it is something
far more than patience and good temper towards weakness that is demanded
here. It is that the strong, in whatsoever sphere their strength may
lie, should try in silence and simplicity, escaping the observation of
men, to take upon their own shoulders the burdens which the weak are
bearing; to submit themselves to the difficulties amidst which the weak
are stumbling on; to be, for their help's sake, as they are; to share
the fear, the dimness, the anxiety, the trouble and heart-sinking
through which they have to work their way; to forego and lay aside the
privilege of strength in order to understand the weak and backward and
bewildered, in order to be with them, to enter into their thoughts, to
wait on their advance; to be content, if they can only serve, so to
speak, as a favourable circumstance for their growth towards that which
God intended them to be. It is the innermost reality of sympathy, it is
the very heart and life of courtesy, that is touched here: but like all
that is best in moral beauty, it loses almost all its grace the moment
it attracts attention."
_The Spirit of Discipline_, Bishop PAGET.
"Nothing but the Infinite pity is sufficient for the infinite pathos of
human life."
J. SHORTHOUSE.
Patience
MAY 4
"The example of our Lord, as He humbly and calmly takes the rebuff, and
turns to go to another village, may help us in the ordinary ways of
ordinary daily life. The little things that vex us in the manner or the
words of those with whom we have to do; the things which seem to us so
inconsiderate, or wilful, or annoying, that we think it impossible to
get on with the people who are capable of them; the mistakes which no
one, we say, has any right to make; the shallowness, or conventionality,
or narrowness, or positiveness in talk which makes us wince and tempts
us towards the cruelty and wickedness of scorn;--surely in all these
things, and in many others like them, of which conscience may be ready
enough to speak to most of us, there are really opportunities for thus
following the example of our Saviour's great humility and patience. How
many friendships we might win or keep, how many chances of serving
others we might find, how many lessons we might learn, how much of
unsuspected moral beauty might be disclosed around us, if only we were
more careful to give people time, to stay judgment, to trust that they
will see things more justly, speak of them more wisely, after a while.
We are sure to go on closing doors of sympathy, and narrowing in the
interests and opportunities of work around us, if we let ourselves
imagine that we can quickly measure the capacities and sift the
characters of our fellow-men."
_Studies in the Christian Character_, Bishop PAGET.
Selfishness
MAY 5
"Any man--with the heart of a man and not of a mouse--is more likely
than not to behave well at a pinch; but no man who is habitually selfish
can be _sure_ that he will, when the choice comes sharp between his own
life and the lives of others. The impulse of a supreme moment only
focusses the habits and customs of a man's soul. The supreme moment may
never come, but habits and customs mould us from the cradle to the
grave.... Vice and cowardice become alike impossible to a man who has
never--cradled in selfishness, and made callous by custom--learned to
pamper himself at the expense of others!"
_A Happy Family_, Mrs. EWING.
"Sympathy is the safeguard of the human soul against selfishness."
CARLYLE.
"Where Love is, God is"
MAY 6
"Where Love is, God is. He that dwelleth in Love dwelleth in God. God is
Love. Therefore _love_. Without distinction, without calculation,
without procrastination, love. Lavish it upon the poor, where it is very
easy; especially upon the rich, who often need it most; most of all upon
our equals, where it is very difficult, and for whom perhaps we each do
least of all. There is a difference between _trying to please_ and
_giving pleasure_. Give pleasure. Lose no chance of giving pleasure. For
that is the ceaseless and anonymous triumph of a truly loving spirit. 'I
shall pass through this world but once. Any good thing therefore that I
can do, or any kindness that I can show to any human being, let me do it
now. Let me not defer it or neglect it, for I shall not pass this way
again.'"
_The Greatest Thing in the World_, HENRY DRUMMOND.
"Let the weakest, let the humblest remember, that in his daily course he
can, if he will, shed around him almost a heaven. Kindly words,
sympathising attentions, watchfulness against wounding men's
sensitiveness--these cost very little, but they are priceless in their
value. Are they not almost the staple of our daily happiness? From hour
to hour, from moment to moment, we are supported, blest, by small
kindnesses."
F. W. ROBERTSON.
Oil and Wine
MAY 7
"Whatever impatience we may feel towards our neighbour, and whatever
indignation our race may rouse in us, we are chained one to another,
and, companions in labour and misfortune, have everything to lose by
mutual recrimination and reproach. Let us be silent as to each other's
weakness, helpful, tolerant, nay, tender towards each other! Or, if we
cannot feel tenderness, may we at least feel pity! May we put away from
us the satire which scourges and the anger which brands; the oil and
wine of the good Samaritan are of more avail. We may make the ideal a
reason for contempt; but it is more beautiful to make it a reason for
tenderness."
_Amiel's Journal._
"It is always a mistake to paint people blacker than the facts warrant,
both because such exaggeration is pretty sure to cause a reaction to the
opposite extreme, and also because we are likely to miss the lesson
which the errors or misconduct of others should teach us, if we think
them so exceptionally wicked that we are ourselves in no danger of
following their example."
_Life Here and Hereafter_, Canon MACCOLL.
Family Life--"Without Jar or Jostle"
MAY 8
"Let us give everybody a right to live his own life, as far as possible,
and avoid imposing our own peculiarities on another.
"If we were to picture a perfect family, it should be a union of people
of individual and marked character, who, through love, have come to a
perfect appreciation of each other, and who so wisely understand
themselves and one another, that each may move freely along his or her
own track without jar or jostle,--a family where affection is always
sympathetic and receptive, but never inquisitive,--where all personal
delicacies are respected,--and where there is a sense of privacy and
seclusion in following one's own course, unchallenged by the
watchfulness of others, yet withal a sense of society and support in a
knowledge of the kind dispositions and interpretations of all around.
"In treating of family discourtesies, I have avoided speaking of those
which come from ill-temper and brute selfishness, because these are sins
more than mistakes. An angry person is generally impolite; and where
contention and ill-will are, there can be no courteousness. What I have
mentioned are rather the lackings of good and often admirable people,
who merely need to consider in their family-life a little more of
whatsoever things are lovely. With such the mere admission of anything
to be pursued as a duty secures the purpose; only in their somewhat
earnest pursuit of the substantials of life, they drop and pass by the
little things that give it sweetness and perfume."
_Little Foxes_, HARRIET BEECHER STOWE.
Ungraciousness
MAY 9
"We can recall occasions in which we have been impatient, inconsiderate,
self-willed, self-asserting. We have sharply resented some want of good
taste: we have made light of a scruple or of a difficulty which weighed
heavily on another: we have yielded ungraciously a service which may
have been claimed inopportunely: we have been exact in requiring
conventional deference to our judgment: we have not checked the keen
word, or the smile which might be interpreted to assert a proud
superiority.
"In all this we may have been justifiable according to common rules of
conduct; but we have given offence. We have not, that is, shewn, when we
might have shewn, that Christian sympathy, devotion, fellowship, come
down to little things; that the generosity of love looks tenderly, if by
any means it may find the soul which has not revealed itself."
Bishop WESTCOTT.
"Seek the graces of God with all your strength; but above all seek the
graces that specially belong to heaven. Try hard to be humble, to be
free from all conceit, to question your own opinions, to give up your
own way, to put simplicity first among all excellences of character, to
be ready to think yourself in the wrong, to prefer others to yourself;
for this character is nearest to God's heart, and to babes who are of
this sort does God reveal His most secret mysteries."
Bishop TEMPLE.
The Spectrum of Love
May 10
"The spectrum of Love has nine ingredients:--
_Patience_--'Love suffereth long.'
_Kindness_--'And is kind.'
_Generosity_--'Love envieth not.'
_Humility_--'Love vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up.'
_Courtesy_--'Doth not behave itself unseemly.'
_Unselfishness_--'Seeketh not her own.'
_Good Temper_--'Is not easily provoked.'
_Guilelessness_--'Thinketh no evil.'
_Sincerity_--'Rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in
the truth.'
Patience; kindness; generosity; humility; courtesy; unselfishness; good
temper; guilelessness; sincerity--these make up the supreme gift, the
stature of the perfect man. You will observe that all are in relation to
men, in relation to life, in relation to the known to-day and the near
to-morrow, and not to the unknown eternity. We hear much of love to God;
Christ spoke much of love to man. We make a great deal of peace with
heaven; Christ made much of peace on earth. Religion is not a strange or
added thing, but the inspiration of the secular life, the breathing of
an eternal spirit through this temporal world. The supreme thing, in
short, is not a thing at all, but the giving of a further finish to the
multitudinous words and acts which make up the sum of every common day."
_The Greatest Thing in the World_, HENRY DRUMMOND.
"My Duty to my Neighbour"
MAY 11
"There is an idea abroad among moral people that they should make their
neighbours good. One person I have to make good: myself. But my duty to
my neighbour is much more nearly expressed by saying that I have to make
him happy--if I may."
_Across the Plains_, R. L. STEVENSON.
"Of all the weapons we wield against wrong, there is none more effective
than pure and burning joy."
_The Gospel of Joy_, STOPFORD BROOKE.
"There is no beautifier of complexion, or form, or behaviour, like the
wish to scatter joy and not pain around us."
EMERSON.
Duty of giving Happiness
MAY 12
"It is astonishing how large a part of Christ's precepts is devoted
solely to the inculcation of happiness. How much of His life, too, was
spent simply in making people happy! There was no word more often on His
lips than 'blessed,' and it is recognised by Him as a distinct end in
life, _the_ end for this life, to secure the happiness of others. This
simple grace, too, needs little equipment. Christ had little. One need
scarcely even be happy one's self. Holiness, of course, is a greater
word, but we cannot produce that in others. That is reserved for God
Himself, but what is put in our power is happiness, and for that each
man is his brother's keeper. Now society is an arrangement for producing
and sustaining human happiness, and temper is an agent for thwarting and
destroying it. Look at the parable of the Prodigal Son for a moment, and
see how the elder brother's wretched pettiness, explosion of temper,
churlishness, spoiled the happiness of a whole circle. First, it
certainly spoiled his own. How ashamed of himself he must have been when
the fit was over, one can well guess. Yet these things are never so
quickly over as they seem. Self-disgust and humiliation may come at
once, but a good deal else within has to wait till the spirit is tuned
again. For instance, prayer must wait. A man cannot pray till the
sourness is out of his soul. He must first forgive his brother who
trespassed against him before he can go to God to have his own
trespasses forgiven."
_The Ideal Life_, HENRY DRUMMOND.
Duty of giving Happiness
MAY 13
"The function of culture is not merely to train the powers of enjoyment,
but first and supremely for helpful service."
Bishop POTTER.
"It was often in George Eliot's mind and on her lips that the only
worthy end of all learning, of all science, of all life, in fact, is
that human beings should love one another better. Culture merely for
culture's sake can never be anything but a sapless root, capable of
producing at best a shrivelled branch.... She was cheered by the hope
and by the belief in gradual improvement of the mass; for in her view
each individual must find the better part of happiness in helping
another. She often thought it wisest not to raise too ambitious an
ideal, especially in young people, but to impress on ordinary natures
the immense possibilities of making a small circle brighter and better.
Few are born to do the great work of the world, but all are born to
this. And to the natures capable of the larger effort the field of
usefulness will constantly widen."
_The Life of George Eliot_, J. W. CROSS.
"Blessed are the Happiness Makers"
MAY 14
"Have you ever noticed how much of Christ's life was spent in doing kind
things--in _merely_ doing kind things? Run over it with that in view,
and you will find that He spent a great proportion of His time simply in
making people happy, in doing good turns to people."
_The Greatest Thing in the World_, HENRY DRUMMOND.
"Take life all through, its adversity as well as its prosperity, its
sickness as well as its health, its loss of its rights as well as its
enjoyment of them, and we shall find that no natural sweetness of
temper, much less any acquired philosophical equanimity, is equal to the
support of a uniform habit of kindness. Nevertheless, with the help of
grace, the habit of saying kind words is very quickly formed, and when
once formed it is not speedily lost. Sharpness, bitterness, sarcasm,
acute observation, divination of motives--all these things disappear
when a man is earnestly conforming himself to the image of Christ Jesus.
The very attempt to be like our dearest Lord is already a wellspring of
sweetness within us, flowing with an easy grace over all who come within
our reach."
F. W. FABER.
"Blessed are the Happiness Makers. Blessed are they who know how to
shine on one's gloom with their cheer."
HENRY WARD BEECHER.
Character--The Right Atmosphere
MAY 15
"Character cannot be formed without action. Through it strength comes.
But every action must have its reaction upon the nature of the one who
puts it forth. If it does not, it fails of that which is its highest
result; for the finest expression of a man's nature is not to be found
in action, but in that very intangible thing which we call his
atmosphere. There are a great many people who are alert, energetic, and
decisive, but who give forth very little of this rare effluence--this
quality which seems to issue out of the very recesses of one's nature.
It is, however, through this quality that the most constant influence is
exercised; that influence which is not only put forth most steadily, but
which penetrates and affects others in the most searching way. The air
we breathe has much to do with health; in a relaxing atmosphere it is
difficult to work; in an atmosphere of vitality it is easy to work. We
never meet some people without going away from them with our ideals a
little blurred, or our faith in them a little disturbed. We can never
part from others without a sense of increased hope. There are those who
invigorate us by simple contact; something escapes from them of which
they are not aware and which we cannot analyse, which makes us believe
more deeply in ourselves and our kind.
"So far as charm is concerned, there is no quality which contributes so
much to it as the subtle thing we call atmosphere. There are some people
who do not need to speak in order not only to awaken our respect, but to
give us a sense of something rare and fine. In such an influence, all
that is most individual and characteristic flows together, and the woman
reveals herself without being conscious that she is making herself
known. Such an atmosphere in a home creates a sentiment and organises a
life which would not be possible if one should attempt to fashion these
things by intention. The finest things, like happiness, must be sought
by indirection and are the results of character, rather than objects of
immediate pursuit."
"It is always good to know, if only in passing, charming human beings.
It refreshes one like flowers, and woods, and clear brooks."
GEORGE ELIOT.
Character--Child-like-ness
MAY 16
"Jesus afterwards focussed the new type of character in a lovely
illustration which is not always appreciated at its full value, because
we deny it perspective. Every reader of the Gospels has marked the
sympathy of Jesus with children. How He watched their games! How angry
He was with His disciples for belittling them! How He used to warn men,
whatever they did, never to hurt a little child! How grateful were
children's praises when all others had turned against Him! One is apt to
admire the beautiful sentiment, and to forget that children were more to
Jesus than helpless gentle creatures to be loved and protected. They
were His chief parable of the Kingdom of Heaven. As a type of character
the Kingdom was like unto a little child, and the greatest in the
Kingdom would be the most child-like. According to Jesus, a
well-conditioned child illustrates better than anything else on earth
the distinctive features of Christian character. Because he does not
assert nor aggrandise himself. Because he has no memory for injuries,
and no room in his heart for a grudge. Because he has no previous
opinions, and is not ashamed to confess his ignorance. Because he can
imagine, and has the key of another world, entering in through the ivory
gate and living amid the things unseen and eternal. The new society of
Jesus was a magnificent imagination, and he who entered it must lay
aside the world standards and ideals of character, and become as a
little child."
_The Mind of the Master_, Dr. JOHN WATSON.
Character--Negative Virtues
MAY 17
"Some people seem to be here in the world just on their guard all the
while, always so afraid of doing wrong that they never do anything
really right. They do not add to the world's moral force; as the man,
who, by constant watchfulness over his own health, just keeps himself
from dying, contributes nothing to the world's vitality. All merely
negative purity has something of the taint of the impurity that it
resists. The effort not to be frivolous is frivolous itself. The effort
not to be selfish is very apt to be only another form of selfishness."
PHILLIPS BROOKS.
"Beware of making your moral staple consist of the negative virtues. It
is good to abstain and teach others to abstain, from all that is sinful
and hurtful. But making a business of it leads to emaciation of
character, unless one feeds largely also on the more nutritious diet of
active sympathetic benevolence."
O. W. HOLMES.
"The seductions of life are strong in every age and station; we make
idols of our affections, idols of our customary virtues; we are content
to avoid the inconvenient wrong, and to forego the inconvenient right
with almost equal self-approval, until at last we make a home for our
conscience among the negative virtues and the cowardly vices."
_The Life of R. L. Stevenson_, GRAHAM BALFOUR.
Character
MAY 18
"The moments of our most important decisions are often precisely those
in which nothing seems to have been decided; and only long afterwards,
when we perceive with astonishment that the Rubicon has been crossed, do
we realise that in that half-forgotten instant of hesitation as to some
apparently unimportant side issue, in that unconscious movement which
betrayed a feeling of which we were not aware, our choice was made. The
crises of life come, like the Kingdom of Heaven, without observation.
Our characters, and not our deliberate actions, decide for us; and even
when the moment of crisis is apprehended at the time by the troubling of
the water, action is generally a little late. Character, as a rule,
steps down first."
_Diana Tempest_, MARY CHOLMONDELEY.
"Great occasions do not make heroes or cowards--they simply unveil them
to the eyes of men. Silently and imperceptibly, as we wake or sleep, we
grow and wax strong, or we grow and wax weak, and at last some crisis
shows us what we have become."
Bishop WESTCOTT.
Character--"Our Echoes roll from Soul to Soul"
MAY 19
"One of the main seats of our weakness lies in this very notion, that
what we do at the moment cannot matter much; for that we shall be able
to alter and mend and patch it just as we like by-and-by."
HARE.
"We sleep, but the loom of life never stops; and the pattern which was
weaving when the sun went down is weaving when it comes up to-morrow."
BEECHER.
"Let every soul
Heed what it doth to-day, because to-morrow
The same thing it shall find gone forward there
To meet and make and judge it."
_The Light of Asia_, E. ARNOLD.
"Our echoes roll from soul to soul, And grow for ever and for ever."
TENNYSON.
Habit
MAY 20
"Like flakes of snow that fall unperceived upon the earth, the seemingly
unimportant events of life succeed one another. As the snow gathers
together, so are our habits formed: no single flake that is added to the
pile produces a sensible change; no single flake creates, however it may
exhibit, a man's character; but as the tempest hurls the avalanche down
the mountain, and overwhelms the inhabitant and his habitation, so
passion, acting upon the elements of mischief, which pernicious habits
have brought together by imperceptible accumulation, may overwhelm the
edifice of truth and virtue."
JEREMY BENTHAM.
"In the conduct of life, habits count for more than maxims, because
habit is a living maxim, become flesh and instinct. To reform one's
maxims is nothing: it is but to change the title of the book. To learn
new habits is everything, for it is to reach the substance of life. Life
is but a tissue of habits."
_Amiel's Journal._
Habit
MAY 21
"The Hell to be endured hereafter which theology tells, is no worse than
the hell we make for ourselves in this world by habitually fashioning
our characters the wrong way. Could the young realise how soon they will
become mere walking bundles of habits, they would give more heed to
their conduct while in the plastic state. We are spinning our own fates,
good or evil, and never to be undone. Every smallest stroke of virtue or
of vice leaves its never-so-little scar."
_Psychology_, Professor WILLIAM JAMES.
"Routine is a terrible master, but she is a servant whom we can hardly
do without. Routine as a law is deadly. Routine as a resource in the
temporary exhaustion of impulse and suggestion is often our salvation."
PHILLIPS BROOKS.
"It is just as easy to form a good habit as it is a bad one. And it is
just as hard to break a good habit as a bad one. So get the good ones
and keep them."
MCKINLEY.
Sin has its Pedigree
MAY 22
"One false note will spoil the finest piece of music, and one little
sin, as we deem it, may ruin the most promising character, involving it
in a network of unforeseen consequences out of which there may be no
escape."
_Life Here and Hereafter_, Canon MACCOLL.
"There is a physical demonstration of sin as well as a religious; and no
sin can come in among the delicate faculties of the mind, or among the
coarser fibres of the body, without leaving a stain, either as a
positive injury to the life, or, what is equally fatal, as a
predisposition to commit the same sin again. This predisposition is
always one of the most real and appalling accompaniments of the stain of
sin. There is scarcely such a thing as an isolated sin in a man's life.
Most sins can be accounted for by what has gone before. Every sin, so to
speak, has its own pedigree, and is the result of the accumulated force,
which means the accumulated stain of many a preparatory sin."
_The Ideal Life_, HENRY DRUMMOND.
Temptation
MAY 23
"Two things a genuine Christian never does. He never makes light of any
known sin, and he never admits it to be invincible."
Canon LIDDON.
"We always meet the temptation which is to expose us when we least
expect it."
_The Ideal Life_, HENRY DRUMMOND.
"It is of the essence of temptation that it should come on us unawares."
_Pastor Pastorum_, HENRY LATHAM.
"If we cannot at once rise to the sanctities of obedience and faith, let
us at least resist our temptations."
EMERSON.
Sin
MAY 24
"We judge of sins, as we judge of most things, by their outward form. We
arrange the vices of our neighbours according to a scale which society
has tacitly adopted, placing the more gross and public at the foot, the
slightly less gross higher up, and then by some strange process the
scale becomes obliterated. Finally it vanishes into space, leaving
lengths of itself unexplored, its sins unnamed, unheeded, and unshunned.
But we have no balance to weigh sins. Coarser and finer are but words of
our own. The chances are, if anything, that the finer are the lower. The
very fact that the world sees the coarser sins so well is against the
belief that they are the worst. The subtle and unseen sin, that sin in
the part of the nature most near to the spiritual, ought to be more
degrading than any other. Yet for many of the finer forms of sin society
has yet no brand."
_The Ideal Life_, HENRY DRUMMOND.
"Tried by final tests, and reduced to its essential elements, sin is the
preference of self to God, and the assertion of the human will against
the Will of God. With Jesus, from first to last, sin is selfishness."
_The Mind of the Master_, Dr. JOHN WATSON.
Sin
MAY 25-26
"We deceive ourselves in another way, namely, by seeking for all manner
of excuses and palliations. The strength of the temptation, or the
suddenness of it, or the length of it; our own weakness, our natural
tendency to that particular sort of sin; our wishes to be better, the
excellence of our feelings, the excellence of our desires; the
peculiarity of our circumstances, the special disadvantages which make
us worse off than others; all these we put before our minds as excuses
for having done wrong, and persuade ourselves too often that wrong is
not really wrong, and that though the deed was sinful the doer of it was
not. I do not mean that these palliations are never worth anything, nor
do I mean that in every case the same deed is the same sin. There are no
doubt infinite varieties of guilt in what appears outwardly the same
deed, and God will distinguish between them and will judge justly. But
the habit of mind which leads us to palliate our sins and find good
excuses for them, has this dangerous tendency, that it blinds us to the
evil of evil. We slip into the delusion that we are better than we
seem, that our faults look worse than they are, that inside we have good
dispositions, and good desires, and warm feelings, and religious
emotions, and that it is only the outside that is marked by those evil
stains. This _is_ a delusion and a grievous delusion. You cannot _be_
good and _do_ wrong. You cannot _be_ righteous and _do_ unrighteousness.
Granted that you may slip once into a sin which notwithstanding is not
really a part of your nature. Still, this cannot happen several times
over. Make no mistake. If you _do_ wrong the deed is a real part of your
life, and cannot be removed out of it by any fancy of yours that it is
on your circumstances, your temptations, your peculiar disadvantages
that the blame can be cast, still less by any wishes or emotions or
feelings even of the most religious kind."
Bishop TEMPLE.
"The strength of a man's virtue is not to be measured by the efforts he
makes under pressure, but by his ordinary conduct."
PASCAL.
Sins of the Spirit
MAY 27
"We must remember that it is by the mercy of Christ that we are saved
from being what we might have been. 'There goes John Bradford, but for
the grace of God,' said a good man when he saw a criminal being led to
execution. We are too apt to take the credit to ourselves for our
circumstances. Imagine that you were born of poor parents out of work in
Whitechapel, and had to pick up your living in the docks, or that you
were a working girl in Bethnal Green, trying to keep your poor parents
or nurse a sick brother out of making match-boxes at 2-1/4d. a gross,
and then thank God you were spared the temptation to a bad life, which
they have to undergo. So, again, we must remember that sins of the
spirit are quite as bad in the eyes of Christ as sins of the flesh; He
never spoke a hard word of the publican and sinner, but He lashed with
His scorn the 'Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites.' The sins that we
respectable people commit lightly every day, of pride and indolence and
indifference to the sufferings of the poor, may be worse in His sight
than the most flagrant sins of those who know no better."
_Friends of the Master_, Bishop WINNINGTON INGRAM.
Sin
MAY 28
"I have often observed in the course of my experience of human life,
that every man, even the worst, has something good about him; though
often nothing else than a happy temperament of constitution, inclining
him to this or that virtue. For this reason, no man can say in what
degree any other person besides himself can be, with strict justice,
called wicked. Let any one with the strictest character for regularity
of conduct among us, examine impartially how many vices he has never
been guilty of, not from any care or vigilance, but for want of
opportunity, or some accidental circumstances intervening; how many of
the weaknesses of mankind he has escaped because he was out of the line
of such temptation; and--what often, if not always, weighs more than all
the rest--how much he is indebted to the world's good opinion because
the world does not know all: I say, any man who can thus think will scan
the failings, nay, the faults and crimes of mankind with a brother's
eye."
BURNS.
"Very late in life, and only after many experiences, does a man learn,
at the sight of a fellow-creature's real failing or weakness, to
sympathise with him, and help him without a secret self-congratulation
at his own virtue and strength, but on the contrary, with every humility
and comprehension of the naturalness, almost the inevitableness of sin."
_An Unhappy Girl_, IVAN TURGENEV.
Sin
MAY 29
"Remove from us the protection, the encompassing safeguards and shelters
we enjoy; withdraw the influences for good that are daily and weekly
dropped on us like gentle dew from heaven, and have dropped ever since
we had any being; deprive us of the comforts and interests, the innocent
substitutes for forbidden pleasures; expose us to the loneliness, the
vacancy, the dreary monotony, the hopeless struggle, the despair in
which the majority of the men and women who fall find themselves
immersed; and bring before us, thus exposed and bereft, what temptation
you will--uncleanness, intemperance, theft, lying, blasphemy--and not
one in ten of ordinary Christian people, I believe, would stand before
it."
R. W. BARBOUR.
"Looking within myself, I note how thin
A plank of station, chance, or prosperous fate,
Doth fence me from the clutching waves of sin;--
In my own heart I find the worst man's mate,
And see not dimly the smooth-hinged gate
That opes to those abysses
Where ye grope darkly,--ye who never knew
On your young hearts love's consecrating dew
Or felt a mother's kisses,
Or home's restraining tendrils round you curled;
Ah, side by side with heart's-ease in this world,
The fatal night-shade grows and bitter rue!"
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL.
Conscience
MAY 30
"Conscience is harder than our enemies,
Knows more, accuses with more nicety,
Nor needs to question Rumour if we fall
Below the perfect model of our thought."
GEORGE ELIOT.
"If a man has nothing to reproach himself with, he can bear anything."
PHILLIPS BROOKS.
"Character is the ground of trust and the guarantee for good living, and
that character only is sound which rests upon a good conscience and a
clean heart and a strong will."
Dr. JOHN WATSON.
Repentance
MAY 31
"What is true contrition? Sorrow for sin in itself, not for sin's
consequences."
_The Guided Life_, Canon BODY.
"Remorse and repentance are two very different things. Repentance leads
back to life; but remorse ends often in the painless apathy and fatal
mortification of despair."
Dean FARRAR.
"Penitence is like the dawn.... It is the breaking of the light in the
soul,--dark enough sometimes no doubt, but a darkness giving place
steadily to the growing light."
Bishop WALSHAM HOW.
Heredity
JUNE 1
"The father says of his profligate son whom he has never done one wise
or vigorous thing to make a noble and pure-minded man: 'I cannot tell
how it has come. It has not been my fault. I put him into the world and
this came out.' The father whose faith has been mean and selfish says
the same of his boy who is a sceptic. Everywhere there is this cowardly
casting off of responsibilities upon the dead circumstances around us.
It is a very hard treatment of the poor, dumb, helpless world which
cannot answer to defend itself. It takes us as we give ourselves to it.
It is our minister fulfilling our commissions for us upon our own souls.
If we say to it, 'Make us noble,' it does make us noble. If we say to
it, 'Make us mean,' it does make us mean. And then we take the nobility
and say, 'Behold, how noble I have made myself.' And we take the
meanness and say, 'See how mean the world has made me.'"
PHILLIPS BROOKS.
"Speaking of ancestors--'What right have I to question them, or judge
them, or bring them forward in my life as being responsible for my
nature? If I roll back the responsibility to them, had they not fathers?
and had not their fathers fathers? and if a man rolls back his deeds
upon those who are his past, then where will responsibility be found at
all, and of what poor cowardly stuff is each of us?"
_The Mettle of the Pasture_, JAMES LANE ALLEN.
Heredity
JUNE 2
"This tracing of the sin to its root now suggests this further
topic--its cure. Christianity professes to cure anything. The process
may be slow, the discipline may be severe, but it can be done. But is
not temper a constitutional thing? Is it not hereditary, a family
failing, a matter of temperament, and can _that_ be cured? Yes, if there
is anything in Christianity. If there is no provision for that, then
Christianity stands convicted of being unequal to human need. What
course then did the father take, in the case before us, to pacify the
angry passions of his ill-natured son? Mark that he made no attempt in
the first instance to reason with him! To do so is a common mistake, and
utterly useless both with ourselves and others. We are perfectly
convinced of the puerility of it all, but that does not help us in the
least to mend it. The malady has its seat in the affections, and
therefore the father went there at once. Reason came in its place, and
the son was supplied with valid arguments--stated in the last verse of
the chapter--against his conduct, but he was first plied with love."
_The Ideal Life_, HENRY DRUMMOND.
Heredity
JUNE 3
"Any insistence on heredity would have depreciated responsibility, and
Jesus held every man to his own sin. Science and theology have joined
hands in magnifying heredity and lowering individuality, till a man
comes to be little more than the resultant of certain forces, a
projectile shot forth from the past, and describing a calculated course.
Jesus made a brave stand for each man as the possessor of will-power,
and master of his life. He sadly admitted that a human will might be
weakened by evil habits of thought, He declared gladly that the Divine
Grace reinforced the halting will: but, with every qualification,
decision still rested in the last issue with the man. 'If Thou wilt,
Thou canst make me clean,' as if his cure hinged on the Divine Will. Of
course, I am willing, said Jesus, and referred the man back to his
inalienable human rights. Jesus never diverged into metaphysics, even to
reconcile the freedom of the human will with the sovereignty of the
Divine. His function was not academic debate, it was the solution of an
actual situation. Logically, men might be puppets; consciously, they
were self-determinating, and Jesus said with emphasis, 'Wilt thou?'"
_The Mind of the Master_, Dr. JOHN WATSON.
"Even natural disposition, of which we make so much when we speak of
heredity, is only a tendency till habit takes it and sets it and hardens
it and drives it to a settled goal."
HUGH BLACK.
Bearing Criticism
JUNE 4
"When people detect in us what are actually imperfections and faults, it
is clear that they do us no wrong, since it is not they who cause them;
and it is clear, too, that they do us a service, inasmuch as they help
us to free ourselves from an evil, namely, the ignorance of these
defects. We should not be angry because they know them and despise us,
for it is right that they should know us for what we are, and that they
should despise us if we are despicable.
"Such are the feelings which would rise in a heart filled with equity
and justice. What then should we say of our own heart when we see in it
a quite contrary frame of mind? For is it not a fact that we hate the
truth and those who tell it us, that we love those who deceive
themselves in our favour, and that we wish to be esteemed by them as
other than we really are?"
PASCAL.
"A man should never be ashamed to say he has been in the wrong, which is
but saying, in other words, that he is wiser to-day than he was
yesterday."
POPE.
Faults
JUNE 5
"Too many take the ready course to deceive themselves; for they look
with both eyes on the failings and defects of others, and scarcely give
their good qualities half an eye: on the contrary, in themselves they
study to the full their own advantages, while their weaknesses and
defects (as one says) they skip over, as children do the hard words in
their lessons that are troublesome to read; and making this uneven
parallel, what wonder if the result be a gross mistake of themselves."
Archbishop LEIGHTON.
"To hide a fault with a lie is to replace a blot by a hole."
"It is a great folly not to part with your own faults, which is
possible, but to try instead to escape from other people's faults, which
is impossible."
MARCUS AURELIUS.
"The greatest of faults, I should say, is to be conscious of none."
CARLYLE.
Obstinacy
JUNE 6
"Obstinacy is will asserting itself without being able to justify
itself. It is persistence without a plausible motive. It is the tenacity
of self-love substituted for the tenacity of reason or conscience."
_Amiel's Journal._
"If any man is able to convince me and show me that I do not think or
act right, I will gladly change; for I seek the truth by which no man
was ever injured. But he is injured who abides in his error and
ignorance."
MARCUS AURELIUS.
"It is never too late to give up our prejudices."
THOREAU.
"When one's character is naturally firm, it is well to be able to yield
upon reflection."
VAUVENARGUES.
Calumny
JUNE 7
"Any man of many transactions can hardly expect to go through life
without being subject to one or two very severe calumnies. Amongst these
many transactions, some few will be with very ill-conditioned people,
with very ignorant people, or, perhaps, with monomaniacs; and he cannot
expect, therefore, but that some narrative of a calumnious kind will
have its origin in one of these transactions. It may be fanned by any
accidental breeze of malice or ill-fortune, and become a very serious
element of mischief to him. Such a thing is to be looked upon as pure
misfortune coming in the ordinary course of events; and the way to treat
it is to deal with it as calmly and philosophically as with any other
misfortune. As some one has said, the mud will rub off when it is dry,
and not before. The drying will not always come in the calumniated man's
time, unless in favourable seasons, which he cannot command."
HELPS.
"If any one tells you such a one has spoken ill of you, do not refute
them in that particular; but answer, had he known all my vices, he had
not spoken only of that one."
EPICTETUS.
Calumny
JUNE 8
"I am beholden to calumny that she hath so endeavoured and taken pains
to belie me. It shall make me set a surer guard on myself, and keep a
better watch upon my actions."
BEN JONSON.
"As to people saying a few idle words about us, we must not mind that,
any more than the old church-steeple minds the rooks cawing about it."
GEORGE ELIOT.
"The power men possess to annoy me I give them."
EMERSON.
"Assailed by scandal and the tongue of strife, His only answer was--a
blameless life."
COWPER.
Flattery
JUNE 9
"Flattery is a false coinage which would have no currency but for our
vanity."
LA ROCHEFOUCAULD.
"If we did not flatter ourselves, the flattery of others could do us no
harm."
LA ROCHEFOUCAULD.
"Self-love is the greatest Flatterer in the World."
LA ROCHEFOUCAULD.
"The Devil has no stauncher ally than want of perception."
PHILIP H. WICKSTEAD.
Pride
JUNE 10
"There are two states or conditions of pride. The first is one of
self-approval, the second one of self-contempt. Pride is seen probably
at its purest in the last."
_Amiel's Journal._
"The foundation of pride is the wish to respect one's self, whatever
others may think; the mainspring of vanity is the craving for the
admiration of others, no matter at what cost to one's self-respect."
_The Heart of Rome_, F. MARION CRAWFORD.
"Any revelation of greatness overwhelms petty thoughts.... The presence
of death turns enemies into friends. In the same way the petty feelings
of pride and vanity would lose much of their power if people had the
overwhelming feeling which comes from the contemplation of Almightiness,
All-goodness, and All-love. There would be a marked change in all human
relations if men turned from the presence of the Thrice Holy to face one
another; if thoughts of self and for self were driven out of their minds
by worship."
_The Service of God_, Canon BARNETT.
Conceit
JUNE 11
"It is indeed a desirable thing to be well descended, but the glory
belongs to our ancestors."
PLUTARCH.
"Conceit spoils many an excellency. Some persons are so proud of their
goodness, or of their attainments, or of their position, or of their
character, or of their family, that they become offensive to many who
would otherwise be won by their merit. Pride mars, blights, and withers
whatever it touches. It begets assumptions that are very belittling as
well as hard to bear. A man weakens his influence and retards his
personal and public interests by giving it full control. Its exhibition
may be natural; but noble manhood, high moral character, regard to the
feelings of others and Christianity all demand its suppression."
Humility
JUNE 12
"What hypocrites we seem to be, whenever we talk of ourselves! Our words
sound so humb
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