SELECTED BY THE REV. J. H. VINCENT, D.D.

[July 6.]

It is true that the task which God lays upon us all is the same—the unceasing surrender of their own wishes to the higher aims which he successively sets before them. But with men of passionate temperament and selfish habits, who are therefore at every turn exposed by circumstances to violent temptation, their natural wishes are, for the most part, so obviously sinful that, though the struggle of renouncing them may be hard, the duty of doing so is clear and pressing. And when such turn to God, their falls in attempting the Christian walk are often frequent enough, or at least their battles with temptation severe enough, to teach them the evil and weakness of their own heart. With men, on the other hand, of calm, pure and affectionate disposition, and trained in conscientious habits, so many of their wishes are for things harmless, or even good in themselves, that it is less easy to see why and how they are to be given up. Such men, just, kindly, and finding much of their own happiness in that of others, live, for the most part, in harmonious relations with those around them, and have little to disturb their consciences beyond the fear of falling short in the path of duty on which they have already entered. But they are exposed to many perils, more insidious, because less startling, than those which beset their more fiercely tempted brethren. They are in danger of depending too much on the respect and love which others so readily yield them; of valuing themselves on a purity which, if ever one of struggle, has come to be one of taste; of prizing intellectual clearness above moral insight and vigor; of mistaking the pleasure they feel in the performance of duty, for real submission to the will of God; and above all, of shrinking from new truths which would, for the time, confuse their belief, and break up the calm symmetry of their lives.

For … different natures require and receive a very different discipline from God. Sometimes it is by outward affliction that God speaks to souls, thus sinking into the lethargy of formalism; and the loss of friends, or health, or influence suddenly seems to cut off, as it were, half the means of serving him, and to rouse long-forgotten temptations to rise up against his will. Sometimes, on the other hand, he speaks to them inwardly, by opening their eyes to heights of holiness which they had never before steadily contemplated. They now suddenly perceive that many of the fancied duties which have till now occupied their lives and satisfied their consciences, have long ceased to be duties, and have come to be mere habits or pleasures; and that while they have been thus living in self love, unseen and unrepented of, they might have been coming to the knowledge of the higher obligations to which they have been so blind, but which were all implied in their first belief if they had but continued to read it with a single eye.—From Susanna Winkworth, in “Tauler’s Life and Times.”

[July 13.]

Especially, too, if they be distracted and disheartened (as such are wont to be) by the sin and confusion of the world; by the amount of God’s work which still remains undone, and by their own seeming incapacity to do it, they will take heart from the history of John Tauler and his fellows, who, in a far darker and more confused time than the present, found a work to do and strength to do it; who, the more they retired into the recesses of their own inner life, found there that fully to know themselves was to know all men, and to have a message for all men; and who by their unceasing labors of love proved that the highest spiritual attainments, instead of shutting a man up in lazy and Pharisaic self-contemplation, drive him forth to work as his Master worked before him, among the poor, the suffering, and the fallen.

Let such take heart, and toil on in faith at the duty which lies nearest to them. Five hundred years have passed since Tauler and his fellows did their simple work, and looked for no fruit from it, but the saving of one here and there from the nether pit. That was enough for which to labor; but without knowing it, they did more than that. Their work lives, and will live forever, though in forms from which they would have perhaps shrunk had they foreseen them. Let all such therefore take heart. They may know their own weakness; but they know not the power of God in them. They may think sadly that they are only palliating the outward symptoms of social and moral disease; but God may be striking, by some unconscious chance blow of theirs, at a sort of evil which they never suspected. They may mourn over the failure of some seemingly useful plan of their own; but God may be, by their influence, sowing the seed of some plan of his own, of which they little dream. For every good deed comes from God. His is the idea, his the inspiration, and his its fulfillment in time; and therefore no good deed but lives and grows with the everlasting life of God himself. And as the acorn, because God has given it “a forming form,” and life after its kind, bears within it not only the builder oak, but shade for many a herd; food for countless animals, and last, the gallant ship itself, and the materials of every use to which nature or art can put it and its descendants after it throughout all time; so does every good deed contain within itself endless and unexpected possibilities of other good, which may and will grow and multiply forever, in the genial light of him whose eternal mind conceived it, and whose eternal spirit will forever quicken it, with that life of which he is the giver and the Lord.—From Rev. Charles Kingsley, in “Preface to Tauler’s Sermons.”

[July 20.]

It astonishes all thought to observe the minuteness of God’s government, and of the natural and common processes which he carries on from day to day. His dominions are spread out, system above system, filling all height and latitude, but he is never lost in the magnificent. He descends to an infinite detail, and builds a little universe in the smallest things. He carries on a process of growth in every tree and flower and living thing; accomplishes in each an internal organization, and works the functions of an internal laboratory, too delicate all for eye or instrument to trace. He articulates the members and impels the instincts of every living mote that shines in the sunbeam. As when we ascend toward the distant and the vast, so when we descend toward the minute, we see his attention acuminated and his skill concentrated on his object; and the last discernible particle dies out of our sight with the same divine glory on it, as on the last orb that glimmers in the skirt of the universe.

The works of Christ are, if possible, a still brighter illustration of the same truth. Notwithstanding the vast stretch and compass of the work of redemption, it is a work of the most humble detail in its style of execution. The Savior could have preached a sermon on the mount every morning. Each night he could have stilled the sea, before his astonished disciples, and shown the conscious waves lulling into peace under his feet. He could have transfigured himself before Pilate and the astonished multitudes of the temple. He could have made visible ascensions in the noon of every day, and revealed his form standing in the sun, like the angel of the apocalypse. But this was not his mind. The incidents of which his work is principally made up, are, humanly speaking, very humble and unpretending. The most faithful pastor in the world was never able, in any degree, to approach the Savior, in the lowliness of his manner and his attention to humble things. His teachings were in retired places, and his illustrations drawn from ordinary affairs. If the finger of faith touched him in the crowd, he knew the touch and distinguished also the faith. He reproved the ambitious housewifery of an humble woman. After he had healed a poor being, blind from his birth—a work transcending all but divine power—he returned and sought him out, as the most humble Sabbath-school teacher might have done; and when he had found him, cast out and persecuted by men, he taught him privately the highest secrets of his Messiahship. When the world around hung darkened in sympathy with his cross, and the earth was shaking with inward amazement, he himself was remembering his mother, and discharging the filial cares of a good son. And when he burst the bars of death, its first and final conqueror, he folded the linen clothes and the napkin, and laid them in order apart, showing that in the greatest things he had a set purpose also concerning the smallest. And thus, when perfectly scanned, the work of Christ’s redemption, like the material universe, is seen to be a vast orb of glory, wrought up out of finished particles.—Horace Bushnell.

[July 27.]

He who would sympathize must be content to be tried and tempted. There is a hard and boisterous rudeness in our hearts by nature, which requires to be softened down. We pass by suffering gaily, carelessly; not in cruelty, but unfeelingly, because we do not know what suffering is. We wound men by our looks and our abrupt expressions without intending it, because we have not been taught the delicacy, and the tact, and the gentleness, which can only be learned by the wounding of our own sensibilities. There is a haughty feeling of uprightness which has never been on the verge of falling, that requires humbling. There is an inability to enter into difficulties of thought which marks the mind to which all things have been presented superficially, and which has never experienced the horror of feeling the ice of doubt crashing beneath the feet. Therefore, if you aspire to be a son of consolation; if you would partake of the priestly gift of sympathy; if you would pour something beyond commonplace consolation into a tempted heart; if you would pass through the intercourse of daily life with the delicate tact which never inflicts pain; if to that most acute of human ailments, mental doubt, you are ever to give effectual succor—you must be content to pay the price of the costly education. Like him, you must suffer—being tempted.

But remember it is being tempted in all points, yet without sin, that makes sympathy real, manly, perfect, instead of a mere sentimental tenderness. Sin will teach you to feel for trials. It will not enable you to judge them; nor to help them in time of need with any certainty.

Lastly, it is this same human sympathy which qualifies Christ for judgment. It is written that the Father hath committed all judgment to him, because he is the Son of Man.

The sympathy of Christ is a comforting subject. It is, besides, a tremendous subject; for on sympathy the awards of heaven will be built.… A sympathy for that which is pure implies a repulsion of that which is impure. Hatred of evil is in proportion to the strength of love for good. To love intensely good is to hate intensely evil.… Win the mind of Christ now, or else his sympathy for human nature will not save you from, but only insure, a recoil of abhorrence at last.—F. W. Robertson.