  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. 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, TrÜbner & 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 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, 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 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, 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. 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. 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. 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. 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 Whittier, Translation. 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." FÉnÉlon. "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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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 £10,000 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. JANUARY 15 "... Have good will The Light of Asia, E. Arnold. "The Past is something, but the Present more; A. H. Clough. JANUARY 16 ... "This is peace 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. 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, "Comfort me not!—for if aught be worse than failure from over-stress Lytton. JANUARY 18 THE CELESTIAL SURGEON "If I have faltered more or less 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. 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. 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. 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 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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." 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. 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, Longfellow. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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." 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." 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. 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. 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. Æsthetic 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. 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. 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. 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, 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. FEBRUARY 15 "In Life's small things be resolute and great "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, 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 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. 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.'" 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. 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 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. 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. 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 The Light of Asia, E. Arnold. 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. 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, "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. FEBRUARY 26 "Nay, never falter: no great deed is done "How dull it is to pause, to make an end, "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. BrontË. 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, "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. 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 Bayard Taylor. 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 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. 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— Lowell. 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. 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, Emerson. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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 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." 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 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. 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." 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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 "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. 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 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. 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. 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 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. 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. 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. 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." 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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 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. 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. 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. 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." 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. 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. APRIL 25 "The little hearts that know not how to forgive!" Tennyson. "Oh, make my anger pure—let no worst wrong George MacDonald. 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 BruyÈre. "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). 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. 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. 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." 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. 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, Matthew Arnold. 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 Tennyson. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. May 10 "The spectrum of Love has nine ingredients:— Patience—'Love suffereth long.' 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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 The Light of Asia, E. Arnold. "Our echoes roll from soul to soul, Tennyson. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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 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. 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 2¼d. 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. 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. 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 James Russell Lowell. MAY 30 "Conscience is harder than our enemies, 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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." JUNE 12 "What hypocrites we seem to be, whenever we talk of ourselves! Our words sound so humble, while our hearts are so proud." Guesses at Truth, edited by Archdeacon Hare. "By despising himself too much a man comes to be worthy of his own contempt." Amiel's Journal. "Just as criticism alone ministers to pride and then to death, so creation, even of the smallest kind, ministers to humility. And that stands to reason: the slightest act of shaping instantly opens before you an ever-expanding sea, and the vision of the infinite is the death of vanity and pride." The Gospel of Joy, Stopford Brooke. "Humility is the hall-mark of wisdom." Jeremy Collier. JUNE 13 "We ought to have this measure of charity for egotistical people—a willingness to suppose that they actually believe themselves to be what they assume to be. It is quite possible for a person to be in such a fog of misapprehension that everything about him—his little world, his personal interest—will loom abnormally large. When the fog is dispelled, he will see things as they are, and estimate them and himself accordingly. "Egotism of this kind is pardonable; and there is a great deal of it which is peculiar to the mists and strange refractions of youth. When the sun of a clearer and larger knowledge chases away the fog, a right-minded young person emerges from this egotistical, too self-conscious period of his life, and finds a new adjustment for himself in the great and serious world." "He who is always enquiring what people will say, will never give them opportunity to say anything great about him." "Reputation is in itself only a farthing candle, of wavering and uncertain flame, and easily blown out; but it is the light by which the world looks for and finds merit." Lowell. JUNE 14 "'Freedom' is not the power to do what we like, but to be what we ought to be." Charles Gore. "There is no commoner danger than that of accepting the code of the society in which you live as the rule of right." Bishop Temple. "Strive all your life to free men from the bondage of custom and self, the two great elements of the world that lieth in wickedness." Charles Kingsley. "What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule ... is harder, because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it." Emerson. JUNE 15 "It is not the many who reform the world; but the few who rise superior to that Public Opinion which crucified our Lord many years ago." Charles Kingsley. "We are tempted to measure ourselves by others, to acquiesce in an average standard and an average attainment. We forget that while we are not required to judge our neighbours, we are required to judge ourselves." Bishop Westcott. "Moral courage is obeying one's conscience, and doing what one believes to be right in face of a hostile majority; and moral cowardice is stifling one's conscience, and doing what is less than right to win other people's favour." Dr. John Watson. JUNE 16 "Opinion has its value and even its power: to have it against us is painful when we are among friends, and harmful in the case of the outer world. We should neither flatter opinion nor court it; but it is better, if we can help it, not to throw it on to a false scent. The first error is a meanness; the second an imprudence.... Be careful of your reputation, not through vanity, but that you may not harm your life's work, and out of love for truth. There is still something of self-seeking in the refined disinterestedness which will not justify itself, that it may feel itself superior to opinion. It requires ability to make what we seem agree with what we are,—and humility to feel that we are no great things." Amiel's Journal. "Suppose any man shall despise me. Let him look to that himself. But I will look to this, that I be not discovered doing or saying anything deserving of contempt." Marcus Aurelius. JUNE 17 "A well-governed mind learns in time to find pleasure in nothing but the true and the just." Amiel's Journal. "Not only does sympathy lead us to see the opinions of others in a truer light, it enables us to form a sounder judgment on our own; for as long as a man looks only 'on his own things,' he fails to see them in true proportion." Lucy Soulsby. "If we can live in Christ and have His life in us, shall not the spiritual balance and proportion which were His become ours too? If He were really our Master and our Saviour, could it be that we should get so eager and excited over little things? If we were His, could we possibly be wretched over the losing of a little money which we do not need, or be exalted at the sound of a little praise which we know that we only half deserve and that the praisers only half intend? A moment's disappointment, a moment's gratification, and then the ocean would be calm again and quite forgetful of the ripple which disturbed its bosom." Phillips Brooks. JUNE 18 "(Of Training...) its aim must be to bring into human character more of that unity, consistency, harmony, proportion, upon which the Greek philosophers were never weary of insisting as the essence of virtue." The Making of Character, Professor MacCunn. "Temperance.—The original term describes that sovereign self-mastery, that perfect self-control, in which the mysterious will of man holds in harmonious subjection all the passions and faculties of his nature. "Self-will is to mind what self-indulgence is to sense, the usurpation by a part of that which belongs to the whole. "In Knowledge temperance.—The Apostle counsels temperance, the just and proportionate use of every faculty and gift, and not the abolition or abandonment of any. "It is easier in many cases to pluck out the right eye or to cut off the right hand than to discipline and employ them." Bishop Westcott. JUNE 19 "Temperance is reason's girdle and passion's bridle." Jeremy Taylor. "Be wary and keep cool. A cool head is as necessary as a warm heart. In any negotiations, steadiness and coolness are invaluable; while they will often carry you in safety through times of danger and difficulty." Lord Avebury. "Place a guard over your strong points! Thrift may run into niggardliness, generosity into prodigality or shiftlessness. Gentleness may become pusillanimity, tact become insincerity, power become oppression. Characters need sentries at their points of weakness, true enough, but often the points of greatest strength are, paradoxically, really points of weakness." JUNE 20 "Culture implies all which gives a mind possession of its powers." Emerson. "There are very, very few from whom we get that higher, deeper, broader help which it is the prerogative of true excellence in judgment to bestow: help to discern, through the haste and insistence of the present, what is its real meaning and its just demand; help to give due weight to what is reasonable, however unreasonably it may be stated or defended; help to reverence alike the sacredness of a great cause and the sacredness of each individual life, to adjust the claims of general rules and special equity; help to carry with one conscientiously, on the journey towards decision, all the various thoughts that ought to tell upon the issue; help to keep consistency from hardening to obstinacy, and common sense from sinking into time-serving; help to think out one's duty as in a still, pure air, sensitive to all true signs and voices of this world, and yet unshaken by its storms." Studies in the Christian Character, Bishop Paget. JUNE 21 "We are all inclined to judge of others as we find them. Our estimate of a character always depends much on the manner in which the character affects our own interests and passions. We find it difficult to think well of those by whom we are thwarted or depressed, and we are ready to admit every excuse for the vices of those who are useful or agreeable to us." Macaulay. "To judge is to see clearly, to care for what is just, and therefore to be impartial,—more exactly, to be disinterested,—more exactly still, to be impersonal." Amiel's Journal. "Of all human faculties there is none which more enriches our lives than a sound moral judgment. Genius is rarer and more wonderful. But this surpasses even genius in the fact that it is not only in itself a virtue, but the fruitful mother of virtues. It is as Aristotle said, 'Given a sound judgment and all the virtues will follow in its train.' ......... "If the moral judgment is to be sound it must presuppose character, faculty to deliberate, and enlightenment." The Making of Character, Professor MacCunn. JUNE 22 "That is a penetrating sarcasm of George Eliot's in 'Amos Barton': 'It is so much easier to say that a thing is black, than to discriminate the particular shade of brown, blue, or green to which it really belongs. It is so much easier to make up your mind that your neighbour is good for nothing, than to enter into all the circumstances that would oblige you to modify that opinion.' Everybody needs the suggestion that is embodied in the above remark. Our judgments of men are always more or less defective. But it is the man who prides himself on his outspokenness, the man who thinks it would be cowardice to withhold an opinion of men and things, particularly if he is charged with the duty of public utterance, that needs to learn that blue or brown or green is not black, and that in nothing is so much discrimination needed as in the diagnosis of character." "Never does a man portray his own character more vividly than in his manner of portraying another." Richter. JUNE 23 "It hardly can seem strange that excellence in judgment is thus rare if we go on to think of the manifold discipline that it needs. "For we cannot deny that even physical conditions tend at least to tell on it; and most of us may have to own that there are days on which we know that we had better distrust the view we take of things. It is good counsel that a man should, if he has the chance, reconsider after his holiday any important decision that he was inclined to make just before it; that he should appeal from his tired to his refreshed self; and men need to deal strictly with the body, and to bring it into subjection, not only lest its appetites grow riotous, but also lest it trouble, with moods and miseries of its own, the exercise of judgment. "And then, with the calmness of sound health, or the control that a strong and vigilant will can sometimes gain over the encroachments of health that is not sound, there must also be the insight and resourcefulness of learning; that power to recognise, and weigh, and measure, and forecast, which comes of long watching how things move; the power that grows by constant thoughtfulness in study or in life; the distinctive ability of those who, in Hooker's phrase, are 'diligent observers of circumstances, the loose regard whereof is the nurse of vulgar folly.'" Studies in the Christian Character, Bishop Paget. JUNE 24 "How often we judge unjustly when we judge harshly. The fret and temper we despise may have its rise in the agony of some great unsuspected self-sacrifice, or in the endurance of unavowed, almost intolerable pain. Whoso judges harshly is sure to judge amiss." Christina Rossetti. "We meet and mingle, we mark men's speech; JUNE 25 "Perhaps it were better for most of us to complain less of being misunderstood, and to take more care that we do not misunderstand other people. It ought to give us pause at a time to remember that each one has a stock of cut-and-dry judgments on his neighbours, and that the chances are that most of them are quite erroneous. What our neighbour really is we may never know, but we may be pretty certain that he is not what we have imagined, and that many things we have thought of him are quite beside the mark. What he does we have seen, but we have no idea what may have been his thoughts and intentions. The mere surface of his character may be exposed, but of the complexity within we have not the faintest idea. People crammed with self-consciousness and self-conceit are often praised as humble, while shy and reserved people are judged to be proud. Some whose whole life is one subtle studied selfishness get the name of self-sacrifice, and other silent heroic souls are condemned for want of humanity." The Potter's Wheel, Dr. John Watson. "To weigh other minds by our own is the false scale by which the greater number of us miscalculate all human actions and most human characters." John Oliver Hobbes. JUNE 26 "How difficult it is to submit anything to the opinion of another person without perverting his judgment by the way in which we put the matter to him. If one says, 'For my part I think it beautiful,' or 'I think it obscure,' or the like, one inclines the hearer's imagination to that opinion, or incites it to take the contrary view." Pascal. "Human speech conveys different meanings to differently biassed minds." Pastor Pastorum, Henry Latham. "We judge of others by what we see in them: and, what is more perilous still, we are tempted to judge of ourselves by what others can see in us." Bishop Westcott. JUNE 27 "The sinner's own fault? So it was. Christina G. Rossetti. "She had the clear judicial mind which must inevitably see the tragic pitifulness of things. She had thought too much to be able to indulge in the primitive luxury of unqualified condemnation." In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim, "She was one of those lowly women who apply the severity born of their creed to themselves, and spend only the love born of the indwelling Spirit upon their neighbour." G. MacDonald. JUNE 28 "It is not even, amongst men, the best and purest who are found to be the severest censors and judges of others. Quickness to detect and expose the weakness and frailties of a fellow-man, harshness in condemning them, mercilessness in punishing them, are not the characteristics which experience would lead us to expect in a very high and noble nature.... To be gentle, pitying, forbearing to the fallen, to be averse to see or hear of human faults and vices, and when it is impossible not to see them to be pained and grieved by them, to be considerate of every extenuating circumstance that will mitigate their culpability, to delight in the detection of some redeeming excellence even in the vilest.... Is not all this the sort of conduct which, as experience teaches us, betokens, not moral apathy or indifference, but the nature which is purest and most elevated beyond all personal sympathy with vice.... If, then, human goodness is the more merciful in proportion as it approaches nearer to perfection ... might we not conclude that when goodness becomes absolutely perfect, just then will mercy reach its climax and become absolutely unlimited?" Principal Caird. "Search thine own heart. What paineth thee Whittier. JUNE 29 "It is my way when I observe any instance of folly, any queer or absurd illusion, straightway to look for something of the same type in myself, feeling sure that amid all differences there will be a certain correspondence; just as there is more or less correspondence in the natural history even of continents widely apart, and of islands in opposite zones.... "Introspection which starts with the purpose of finding out one's own absurdities is not likely to be very mischievous, yet of course it is not free from dangers any more than breathing is, or the other functions that keep us alive or active. To judge of others by oneself is in its most innocent meaning the briefest expression for our only method of knowing mankind; yet, we perceive, it has come to mean in many cases either the vulgar mistake which reduces every man's value to the very low figure at which the valuer himself happens to stand; or else, the amiable illusion of the higher nature misled by a too generous construction of the lower. One cannot give a recipe for wise judgment: it resembles appropriate muscular action, which is attained by the myriad lessons in nicety of balance and of aim that only practice can give." George Eliot. JUNE 30 "Our Lord not only told men that they were the children of God, that they should strive after their Father's likeness, and that they might approach nearer and nearer to being perfect as He is perfect: but, what was more than this, in every word He spake,—whether of teaching, or reproof, or expostulation, or in His passing words to those who received His mercies,—He treated them as God's children. Man, as man, has in His eyes a right to respect. Anger we find with our Lord often, as also surprise at slowness of heart, indignation at hypocrisy, and at the Rabbinical evasions of the Law; but never in our Lord's words or looks do we find personal disdain. Towards no human being does He show contempt. The scribe would have trodden the rabble out of existence; but there is no such thing as rabble in our Lord's eyes. The master, in the parable, asks concerning the tree, which is unproductively exhausting the soil, why cumbers it the ground; but it is not to be rooted up, till all has been tried. There it stands, and mere existence gives it claims, for all that exists is the Father's." Pastor Pastorum, Henry Latham. "Tennyson was very grand on contemptuousness. It was, he said, a sure sign of intellectual littleness. Simply to despise, nearly always meant not to understand. Pride and contempt were specially characteristic of barbarians. Real civilisation taught human beings to understand each other better, and must therefore lessen contempt. It is a little or immature or uneducated mind which readily despises. One who has travelled and knows the world in its length and breadth, respects far more views and standpoints other than his own." Tennyson—A Memoir, by his Son. JULY 1 "There are thousands and thousands of little untruths that hum and buzz and sting in society, which are too small to be brushed or driven away. They are in the looks, they are in the inflections and tones of the voice, they are in the actions, they are in reflections rather than in direct images that are represented. They are methods of producing impressions that are false, though every means by which they are produced is strictly true. There are little unfairnesses between man and man, that are said to be minor matters and that are small things; there are little unjust judgments and detractions; there are petty violations of conscience; there are ten thousand of these flags of passions in men which are called foibles or weaknesses, but which eat like moths. They take away the temper, they take away magnanimity and generosity, they take from the soul its enamel and its polish. Men palliate and excuse them, but that has nothing to do with their natural effect on us. They waste and destroy us, and that, too, in the soul's silent and hidden parts." Henry Ward Beecher. "A lie which is half a truth Tennyson. JULY 2 "Truth is the great mark at which we ought to aim in all things—truth in thought, truth in expression, truth in work. Those who habitually sacrifice truth in small things will find it difficult to pay her the respect they should do in great things." Lord Iddesleigh. "Stand upright, speak thy thought, declare Sir Lewis Morris. "The mind can only repose upon the stability of truth." Dr. Johnson. JULY 3 "Be profoundly honest. Never dare to say ... through ardent excitement or conformity to what you know you are expected to say, one word which at the moment when you say it, you do not believe. It would cut down the range of what you say, perhaps, but it would endow every word that was left with the force of ten." Phillips Brooks. "Be honest with yourself, whatever the temptation; say nothing to others that you do not think, and play no tricks with your own mind. Of all the evil spirits abroad at this hour in this world, insincerity is the most dangerous." J. A. Froude. "Truthfulness is the foundation of all personal excellence. It exhibits itself in conduct. It is rectitude, truth in action, and shines through every word and deed." Samuel Smiles. JULY 4 "We always weaken what we exaggerate." La Harpe. "It is no great advantage to have a lively wit if exactness be wanting. The perfection of a clock does not consist in its going fast, but in its keeping good time." Vauvenargues. "After much vehement talk about 'the veracities,' will come utterly unveracious accounts of things and people—accounts made unveracious by the use of emphatic words where ordinary words alone are warranted: pictures of which the outlines are correct, but the lights and shades and colours are doubly and trebly as strong as they should be." Herbert Spencer. JULY 5 "It takes two to speak truth—one to speak and another to hear." Thoreau. "Truth of intercourse is something more difficult than to refrain from open lies. It is possible to avoid falsehood and yet not tell the truth. It is not enough to answer formal questions. To reach the truth by yea and nay communications implies a questioner with a share of inspiration, such as is often found in mutual love. Yea and nay mean nothing; the meaning must have been related in the question. Many words are often necessary to convey a very simple statement; for in this sort of exercise we never hit the gold; the most that we can hope is by many arrows, more or less far off on different sides, to indicate, in the course of time, for what target we are aiming, and after an hour's talk, back and forward, to convey the purport of a single principle or a single thought." Virginibus Puerisque, R. L. Stevenson. JULY 6 "In very truth lying is a hateful and accursed vice. It is words alone that distinguish us from the brute creation, and knit us to each other. If we did but feel proper horror of it, and the fearful consequences that spring from such a habit, we would pursue it with fire and sword, and with far more justice than other crimes. I observe that parents take pleasure in correcting their children for slight faults, which make little impression on the character, and are of no real consequence. Whereas lying, in my opinion, and obstinacy, though in a less degree, are vices, the rise and progress of which ought to be particularly watched and counteracted; these grow with their growth, and when once the tongue has got a wrong set, it is impossible to put it straight again. Whence we see men, otherwise of honourable natures, slaves to this vice. If falsehood had, like truth, only one face, we should be on more equal terms with it, for we should consider the contrary to what the liar said as certain; but the reverse of truth has a hundred thousand forms, and is a field of boundless extent." Montaigne. "Every violation of truth is not only a sort of suicide in the liar, but is a stab at the health of human society." Emerson. JULY 7 "The cruellest lies are often told in silence. A man may have sat in a room for hours and not opened his teeth, and yet come out of that room a disloyal friend or a vile calumniator. And how many loves have perished because, from pride, or spite, or diffidence, or that unmanly shame which withholds a man from daring to betray emotion, a lover, at the critical point of the relation, has but hung his head and held his tongue? And, again, a lie may be told by a truth, or a truth conveyed through a lie. Truth to facts is not always truth to sentiment; and part of the truth, as often happens in answer to a question, may be the foulest calumny. A fact may be an exception; but the feeling is the law, and it is that which you must neither garble nor belie. The whole tenor of a conversation is a part of the meaning of each separate statement; the beginning and the end define and travesty the intermediate conversation. You never speak to God; you address a fellow-man, full of his own tempers: and to tell truth, rightly understood, is not to state the true facts, but to convey a true impression; truth in spirit, not truth to letter, is the true veracity." Virginibus Puerisque, R. L. Stevenson. "Truth is violated by falsehood, and it may be equally outraged by silence." Amman. JULY 8 "Gossip is a beast of prey that does not wait for the death of the creature it devours." Diana of the Crossways, G. Meredith. "Give to a gracious message Shakespeare. "Let evil words die as soon as they're spoken." George Eliot. "If there is much art in speaking, there is no less in keeping silence. There is an eloquent silence; it serves to praise and to condemn: there is a scornful silence: and there is a respectful silence." La Rochefoucauld. JULY 9 "Hear as little as you possibly can to the prejudice of others; believe nothing of the kind unless you are forced to believe it; never circulate, nor approve of those who circulate, loose reports; moderate as far as you can the censure of others; always believe that if the other side were heard a very different account would be given of the matter." Everyday Christian Life, Dean Farrar. "We must be as courteous to a man as we are to a picture, which we are willing to give the advantage of a good light." Emerson. "Refrain your tongue from back-biting; for there is no word so secret that shall go for nought, and the mouth that belieth, slayeth the soul." Wisdom i. 2. JULY 10 "When people run about to disseminate some scrap of news which they alone possess, the result is not usually beneficial either to character or to mind." Pastor Pastorum, Henry Latham. "Slander meets with no regard from noble minds, "No word, once spoken, returneth Charles Kingsley. July 11 "Above all things, let us avoid speaking too often about ourselves, and referring to our own experiences. Nothing is more disagreeable than a man who is constantly quoting himself." La Rochefoucauld. "The pest of society is egotists." Emerson. "Avoid the personal view, the small view, the critical and fault-finding view. Run away from gossip as from a pestilence, and keep in your soul great ideals and ideals to solace your solitude. They will drive out petty worries, conceits and thoughts of carking care." Ada C. Sweet. JULY 12 "The etiquette of conversation consists as much in listening politely as in talking agreeably." H. A. "The reason why so few persons are agreeable in conversation is that every one thinks more about what he shall say than about what others are saying, and because one cannot well be a good listener when one is eager to speak." La Rochefoucauld. "I am an enemy to long explanations; they deceive either the maker or the hearer, generally both." Goethe. JULY 13 "The tone of good conversation is flowing and natural; it is neither heavy nor frivolous; it is learned without pedantry, lively without noise, polished without equivocation. It is neither made up of lectures nor epigrams. Those who really converse, reason without arguing, joke without punning, skilfully unite wit and reason, maxims and sallies, ingenious raillery and severe morality. They speak of everything in order that every one may have something to say: they do not investigate too closely, for fear of wearying: questions are introduced as if by-the-bye, and are treated with rapidity; precision leads to elegance, each one giving his opinion, and supporting it with few words. No one attacks wantonly another's opinion, no one supports his own obstinately. They discuss in order to enlighten themselves, and leave off discussing where dispute would begin: every one gains information, every one recreates himself, and all go away contented; nay, the sage himself may carry away from what he has heard matter worthy of silent meditation." JULY 14 "Argument is always a little dangerous. It often leads to coolness and misunderstandings. You may gain your argument and lose your friend, which is probably a bad bargain. If you must argue, admit all you can, but try to show that some point has been overlooked. Very few people know when they have had the worst of an argument, and if they do, they do not like it. Moreover, if they know they are beaten, it does not follow that they are convinced. Indeed it is perhaps hardly going too far to say that it is very little use trying to convince any one by argument. State your case as clearly and concisely as possible, and if you shake his confidence in his own opinion it is as much as you can expect. It is the first step gained." Lord Avebury. "Speak fitly, or be silent wisely." George Herbert. "After speech silence is the greatest power in the world." Lacordaire. "It is better to remain silent than to speak the truth ill-humouredly, and so spoiling an excellent dish by covering it with bad sauce." St. Francis de Sales. JULY 15 "When opposition of any kind is necessary, drop all colour of emotion out of it and let it be seen in the white light of truth." "Nothing does reason more right than the coolness of those that offer it: For truth often suffers more by the heat of its defenders than from the arguments of its opposers." William Penn. "Be calm in arguing: for fierceness makes George Herbert. "To speak wisely may not always be easy, but not to speak ill requires only silence." JULY 16 "Prejudice is opinion without judgment." "When a positive Man hath once begun to dispute anything, his Mind is barred up against all Light and better Information. Opposition provokes him, though there be never so good Ground for it, and he seems to be afraid of nothing more, than lest he should be convinced of the Truth." La Rochefoucauld. "In proportion as we love truth more and victory less, we shall become anxious to know what it is which leads our opponents to think as they do. We shall begin to suspect that the pertinacity of belief exhibited by them must result from a perception of something we have not perceived. And we shall aim to supplement the portion of truth we have found with the portion found by them." Herbert Spencer. JULY 17 "He often thought that Dr. Arnold's maxim of being prepared each morning to consider everything an open question a good working rule. Not that one should readily change one's opinions, but should always have an open mind, never a closed one, on any question outside exact knowledge." "He that never changed any of his opinions, never corrected any of his mistakes; and he who was never wise enough to find out any mistakes in himself, will not be charitable enough to excuse what he reckons mistakes in others." Whichcote. "Narrow-mindedness is a cause of self-sufficiency. We are slow to believe what is beyond the scope of our vision." La Rochefoucauld. JULY 18 "Nothing, in our Lord's wisdom, strikes me more than His moderation with regard to error. What seems false to one man's mind may be true to that of another." Pastor Pastorum, Henry Latham. "A genuine universal tolerance is most surely attained, if we do not quarrel with the peculiar characteristics of individual men and races, but only hold fast to the conviction, that what is truly excellent is distinguished by its belonging to all mankind." Goethe to Carlyle. "New ideas want a little time to grow into shape: we know how easily a man is startled into shutting his mind against novelty when it is suddenly presented." Pastor Pastorum, Henry Latham. JULY 19 "There is no better way, I believe, in which to test the reality of our culture than by the self-discipline it teaches us to use in talk; and it may be that the chief service we can render, the chief outcome that God looks for from our higher education, is that in our homes, in the society around us, we should set a higher example of the right use of speech; the right tone and temper and reticence in conversation; the abhorrence of idle words. Neither let us think that this ever will be easy to us. We must not be affected or pedantic, we must not be always setting other people right; but we must be careful; we must keep our wishes and passions from colouring our view of things; we must take great pains to enter into the minds and feelings of others, to understand how things look to them, and we must remember that, whatever pains we take in that regard, the result is still sure to be imperfect; we must rule our moods, our likes and dislikes, with a firm hand; we must distrust our general impressions till we have frankly, faithfully examined them; we must resist the desire to say clever or surprising things; we must be resolute not to overstate our case; we must let nothing pass our lips that charity would check; we must be always ready to confess our ignorance, and to be silent.—Yes, it is a hard and long task; but it is for a high end, and in a noble service. It is that we may be able to help others; to possess our souls in days of confusion and vehemence and controversy; to grow in the rare grace of judgment; to be such that people may trust us, whether they agree with us or not. It is that we may somewhat detach ourselves from the stream of talk, and learn to listen for the voice of God, and to commit our ways to Him." Studies in the Christian Character, Bishop Paget. JULY 20 "If we are not responsible for the thoughts that pass our doors, we are at least responsible for those we admit and entertain." Charles B. Newcomb. "The pleasantest things in the world are pleasant thoughts, and the great art in life is to have as many of them as possible." BovÉe. "We lose vigour through thinking continually the same set of thoughts. New thought is new life." Prentice Mulford. JULY 21 "Culture is not an accident of birth, although our surroundings advance or retard it; it is always a matter of individual education." Hamilton W. Mabie. "The secret of culture is to learn that a few great points steadily reappear, alike in the poverty of the obscurest farm, and in the miscellany of metropolitan life, and that these few are alone to be regarded:—the escape from all false ties; courage to be what we are; and the love of what is simple and beautiful,—these, and the wish to serve, to add somewhat to the well-being of men." Emerson. "The highest we can attain to is not knowledge, but sympathy with intelligence." Thoreau. JULY 22 "Courtesy is really doing unto others as you would be done unto, and the heart of it lies in a careful consideration for the feelings of other people. It comes from putting one's self in his neighbour's place, and trying to enter into his mind, and it demands a certain suppression of one's self, and a certain delicate sympathy with one's neighbour." Dr. John Watson. "Even as one tries thus to think out the quality and work of courtesy, to understand the skill and power which it wields so quietly, to see the issues upon which it tells in the lives that are affected by it, one may begin to feel that its place is really with the great forces of character that ennoble and redeem the world; that, simply and lightly as it moves, it rests on deep self-discipline and deals with a real task; that it is far more than a decoration or luxury of leisurely excellence. But it is in contact with those who are growing perfect in it, those who never fail in it, that one may more nearly realise its greatness. In seeing how every part of life is lit and hallowed by it; how common incidents, daily duties, chance meetings, come to be avenues of brightness, and even means of grace; how points of light come quivering out upon the dull routine of business, or the conventionality of pleasure; how God is served through every hour of the day;—it is in seeing this that one may come to think it far from strange that for His beginning of miracles our Saviour chose an act of courtesy." Studies in the Christian Character, Bishop Paget. JULY 23 "Courtesy. This is Love in society, Love in relation to etiquette. 'Love doth not behave itself unseemly.' Politeness has been defined as love in trifles. Courtesy is said to be love in little things. And the one secret of politeness is to love. Love cannot behave itself unseemly." The Greatest Thing in the World, Henry Drummond. "The nearer you come into relation with a person, the more necessary do tact and courtesy become." O. W. Holmes. "Kindness is the principle of tact, and respect for others the condition of 'savoir-vivre.'" Amiel's Journal. "Life is not so short but that there is always time enough for courtesy." Emerson. JULY 24 "True politeness arises from the heart, not the head." "... The machinery of life is so apt to be heated, one keenly appreciates those who are ever deftly pouring in the cooling oil, by their patience and their tact, their sweetness and their sympathy. And one resents keenly that class of people who are honest and well meaning, but who are persistently discourteous and are not ashamed—I mean the man who is credited with what is called a bluff, blunt manner, and who credits himself with a special quality of downrightness and straightforwardness. He considers it far better to say what he thinks, and boasts that he never minces his words, and people make all kinds of excuses for him, and rather talk as if he were a very fine fellow, beside whom civil-spoken persons are little better than hypocrites. As a matter of fact, no one can calculate the pain this outspoken gentleman causes in a single day, both in his family and outside." Dr. John Watson. "There is a courtesy of the heart; it is allied to love. From it springs the purest courtesy in the outward behaviour." Goethe. JULY 25 "Manners are the happy ways of doing things. If they are superficial, so are the dew-drops, which give such a depth to the morning meadows." Emerson. "Love's perfect blossom only blows C. Patmore. "The gentle minde by gentle deeds is knowne; Spenser. "True politeness is perfect ease and freedom. It simply consists in treating others just as you love to be treated yourself." Lord Chesterfield. JULY 26 "Manners aim to facilitate life, to get rid of all impediments. They aid our dealings and conversation, as a railway aids travelling, by getting rid of all the obstructions on the road." Emerson. "Defect in manners is usually the defect of fine perceptions." Emerson. "He is beautiful in face, in port, in manners, who is absorbed in objects which he truly believes to be superior to himself." Emerson. "Familiar acts are beautiful through love." JULY 27 "Manners impress as they indicate real power. A man who is sure of his point, carries a broad and contented expression, which everybody reads. And you cannot rightly train one to an air and manner, except by making him the kind of man of whom that manner is the natural expression. Nature forever puts a premium on reality." Emerson. "A man's own good breeding is the best security against other people's ill manners." Chesterfield. "Manners are the ornament of action, and there is a way of speaking a kind word, or of doing a kind thing, which greatly enhances its value. What seems to be done with a grudge, or as an act of condescension, is scarcely accepted as a favour." S. Smiles. JULY 28 "There are many tests by which a gentleman may be known;—but there is one that never fails—How does he exercise power over those subordinate to him? How does he conduct himself towards women and children?... He who bullies those who are not in a position to resist, may be a snob, but cannot be a gentleman. He who tyrannises over the weak and helpless may be a coward, but no true man." S. Smiles. "Our servants never seem to leave us; they are paid what many people would call absurdly high wages, but I do not think that is the attraction. My mother does not see very much of them, and finds fault, when rarely necessary, with a simple directness which I have in vain tried to emulate; but her displeasure is so impersonal that there seems to be no sting in it. It is not that they have failed in their duty to herself, but they have been untrue to the larger duty to which she is herself obedient." The House of Quiet. JULY 29 "And just as we may ruin our own characters without knowing it, so we may ruin the characters of others. We are always influencing each other—a truth which I have often impressed upon you, because I feel its deep importance. We cannot help ourselves. And this influence, which we thus unconsciously exercise by our mere presence, by look, gesture, expression of face, is probably all the more potent for being unconscious. There are germs of moral health or disease continually passing from us and infecting for good or ill those about us. We read that when our Lord was on earth virtue went out of Him sometimes, and healed the bodies of those who came in contact with it. His Divine humanity was always diffusing a spiritual atmosphere of purity around Him, which attracted, they knew not how, those who came within the sphere of His influence. So it must be with us in so far as our characters are pure and unselfish and Christlike. Our very presence will influence for good all who are near us, making them purer and nobler and more unselfish, and shaming what is mean and base out of them. If, on the other hand, our characters are ignoble and impure, we shall exude, without knowing or intending it, a poisonous influence on all who come near us. Have we not sometimes felt this mysterious influence—a presence attracting, perhaps awing, us by some sort of spiritual magnetism; or, on the other hand, repelling us as by the presage of impending danger? Let us endeavour to keep this inalienable responsibility of ours always in our thoughts. And it will be a great help to test ourselves now and then by the example of our Divine Master." Life Here and Hereafter, Canon MacColl. JULY 30 "Let us reflect that the highest path is pointed out by the pure Ideal of those who look up to us, and who, if we tread less loftily, may never look so high again. Remembering this, let it suggest one generous motive for walking heedfully amid the defilements of earthly ways." N. Hawthorne. "Others are affected by what I am, and say, and do. And these others have also their sphere of influence. So that a single act of mine may spread in widening circles through a nation or humanity." Channing. "A man who lives right, and is right, has more power in his silence than another has by his words. Character is like bells which ring out sweet music, and which, when touched accidentally even, resound with sweet music." Phillips Brooks. JULY 31 "Make a great deal more of your right to praise the good than of your right to blame the bad. Never let a brave and serious struggle after truth and goodness, however weak it may be, pass unrecognised. Do not be chary of appreciation. Hearts are unconsciously hungry for it. There is little danger that appreciation shall be given too abundantly. Here and there, perhaps, in your shops and schools and households, there is some one who has too lazily sunk down upon the praise he has received for some good work, and rested in sluggish satisfaction on it; but such disasters hardly count among the unfulfilled lives which have lived meagrely and stuntedly for the lack of some simple cordial human approval of what they have honestly, however blunderingly, tried to do." Phillips Brooks. "It is a great sign of mediocrity to be always praising moderately." Vauvenargues. "'Quench not the smoking flax'—to which I add, 'Never give unnecessary pain.' The cricket is not the nightingale; why tell him so? Throw yourself into the mind of the cricket—the process is newer and more ingenious; and it is what charity commands." Amiel's Journal. AUGUST 1 "Christians are very often liable not, perhaps, to put obstacles into the way of efforts to do right so much as to refuse them the needful help, without which they have little chance of succeeding. To look coldly on while our fellows are struggling in the waves of this evil sea and never to hold out a hand or to say a word of encouragement, is very often most cruelly to depress all energy of repentance. The strong virtue that can go on its own way without being shaken by any ordinary temptation too often forgets the duty due to the weakness close to its side. By stern treatment of faults which were yet much struggled against, by cold refusal to acknowledge any except plainly successful efforts, by rejecting the approaches of those who have not yet learnt the right way, but are really wishing in their secret hearts to learn it, those who are strong not unfrequently do much harm to those who are weak." Bishop Temple. "The best we can do for each other is to remove unnecessary obstacles, and the worst—to weaken any of the motives which urge us to strive." The Standard of Life, Mrs. Bernard Bosanquet. AUGUST 2 "Even in ordinary life, contact with nobler natures arouses the feeling of unused power and quickens the consciousness of responsibility." Bishop Westcott. "Do we not all know how apt we are to become like those whom we see, with whom we spend our hours, and, above all, like those whom we admire and honour? For good and for evil, alas! For evil—for those who associate with evil or frivolous persons are too apt to catch not only their low tone, but their very manner, their very expression of face, speaking and thinking and acting.... But thank God, ... just in the same way does good company tend to make them high-minded.... I have lived long enough to see more than one man of real genius stamp his own character, thought, even his very manner of speaking, for good or for evil, on a whole school or party of his disciples. It has been said, and truly, I believe, that children cannot be brought up among beautiful pictures,—I believe, even among any beautiful sights and sounds—without the very expression of their faces becoming more beautiful, purer, gentler, nobler." Charles Kingsley. AUGUST 3 "Throw a stone into the stream, and the circles that propagate themselves are the beautiful type of all influence." Emerson. "It requires but little knowledge of society and history to assure us of the strong permeating invisible influence upon society at large of any body of men of clear thought, strong conviction, and disciplined conduct. At once many things respond to the magnetism; many are put on their mettle who would not for the world own it: many recognise their own best things more clearly in the new light shed upon them; there is instinctive moral competition. Such influences travel fast and far.... I have always myself believed that the later thought of the Roman world—the mellow stoicism of Aurelius and Epictetus in the second century, with its strong unexplained instinct for a personal and fatherly God, with its gentle and self-denying ethics, shews the tincture of the influence diffused through the thoughts and prayers, the quiet conversations or the dropped words and overheard phrases—or the bearing and countenance of a slave here or a friend there, known or perhaps not known to belong to that strange new body of people with their foolish yet arresting faith, with their practices everywhere spoken against yet of such pure and winning charm—who bore the name of the Nazarene." The Church's Failures and the Work of Christ, Bishop Talbot. AUGUST 4 "We should ever have it fixed in our memories, that by the characters of those whom we choose for our friends, our own is likely to be formed, and will certainly be judged of by the world. We ought, therefore, to be slow and cautious in contracting intimacy; but when a virtuous friendship is once established, we must ever consider it as a sacred engagement." Blair. "Might I give counsel to any young hearer, I would say unto him: Try to frequent the company of your betters. In books and life is the most wholesome society; 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. "Be slow to fall into friendship; but when thou art in, continue firm and constant." Socrates. AUGUST 5 "There is nothing so bad for man or woman as to live always with their inferiors. It is a truth so important, that one might well wish to turn aside a moment and urge it, even in its lower aspects, upon the young people who are just making their associations and friendships. Many a temptation of laziness or pride induces us to draw towards those who do not know as much or are not in some way as strong as we are. It is a smaller tax upon our powers to be in their society. But it is bad for us. I am sure that I have known men, intellectually and morally very strong, the whole development of whose intellectual and moral life has suffered and been dwarfed, because they have only accompanied with their inferiors, because they have not lived with men greater than themselves. Whatever else they lose, they surely must lose some culture of humility. If I could choose a young man's companions, some should be weaker than himself, that he might learn patience and charity; many should be as nearly as possible his equals, that he might have the full freedom of friendship; but most should be stronger than he was, that he might for ever be thinking humbly of himself and be tempted to higher things." Phillips Brooks. AUGUST 6 "For good or evil a man's moral and spiritual outlook is altered by the outlook of his comrade. It is inevitable, and in all true comradeship it makes for truth, and generosity, and freedom. It is an incalculable enlargement of human responsibility, because it constitutes us, in a measure, guardians each of the other's soul. And yet, it is never the suppression of a weak individuality by a strong one. That is not even true discipleship, but spiritual tyranny. What the play of two personalities brings about is a fuller, deeper self-realisation on either side. The experience of comradeship, with all the new knowledge and insight that it brings into a life, can leave no ideal unchanged, but the change is not of the nature of a substitution, but of continuous growth. It is not mental or moral bondage, but deliverance from both. "And it is the deliverance from bondage to ourselves. It is our refuge from pride. More than all else, comradeship teaches us to walk humbly with God. For while God's trivial gifts may allow us to grow vain and self-complacent, His great gifts, if we once recognise them, make us own our deep unworthiness, and bow our heads in unspeakable gratitude. We may have rated our deserts high, and taken flattery as our just due; we may have competed for the world's prizes, and been filled with gratified ambition at securing them. But however high we rate ourselves, in the hour in which the soul is conscious of its spiritual comrades, we know that God's great infinite gift of human love is something we have never earned, could never earn by merit or achievement, by toil, or prayer, or fasting. It has come to us straight out of the heart of the eternal Fatherhood; and all our pride and vanity fall away, and our lives come again to us as the lives of little children." Comradeship, May Kendall. AUGUST 7 "Friendship is a plant which cannot be forced. True friendship is no gourd, springing in a night and withering in a day." Charlotte BrontË. "Blessed are they who have the gift of making friends, for it is one of God's best gifts. It involves many things, but, above all, the power of going out of one's self, and appreciating whatever is noble and loving in another." Thomas Hughes. "Friendship cannot be permanent unless it becomes spiritual. There must be fellowship in the deepest things of the soul, community in the highest thoughts, sympathy with the best endeavours." Hugh Black. AUGUST 8 "Our chief want in life is, somebody who shall make us do what we can. This is the service of a friend." Emerson. "The end of friendship is for aid and comfort through all the passages of life and death." Emerson. "Every man rejoices twice when he has a partner of his joy. A friend shares my sorrow, and makes it but a moiety; but he swells my joy, and makes it double." Jeremy Taylor. "He that is thy friend indeed, Shakespeare. AUGUST 9 "To begin with, how can life be worth living, to use the words of Ennius, which lacks that repose which is to be found in the mutual good-will of a friend? What can be more delightful than to have some one to whom you can say everything with the same absolute confidence as to yourself? Is not prosperity robbed of half its value if you have no one to share your joy? On the other hand, misfortunes would be hard to bear if there were not some one to feel them even more acutely than yourself." Cicero. "Comradeship is one of the finest facts, and one of the strongest forces in life." Hugh Black. "... All I can do is to urge on you to regard friendship as the greatest thing in the world; for there is nothing which so fits in with our nature, or is so exactly what we want in prosperity or adversity." Cicero. August 10 "Beware lest thy friend learn to tolerate one frailty of thine, and so an obstacle be raised to the progress of thy love." Thoreau. "That he had 'a genius for friendship' goes without saying, for he was rich in the humility, the patience and the powers of trust, which such a genius implies. Yet his love had, too, the rarer and more strenuous temper which requires 'the common aspiration,' is jealous for a friend's growth, and has the nerve to criticise. It is the measure of what he felt friendship to be, that he has defined religion in the terms of it." Of Henry Drummond, George Adam Smith. "All men have their frailties, and whoever looks for a friend without imperfection will never find what he seeks. We love ourselves notwithstanding our faults, and we ought to love our friends in like manner." Cyrus. AUGUST 11 "... For instance, it often happens that friends need remonstrance and even reproof. When these are administered in a kindly spirit they ought to be taken in good part. But somehow or other there is truth in what my friend Terence says in his Andria: 'Compliance gets us friends, plain speaking hate.' "Plain speaking is a cause of trouble, if the result of it is resentment, which is poison to friendship; but compliance is really the cause of much more trouble, because by indulging his faults it lets a friend plunge into headlong ruin. But the man who is most to blame is he who resents plain speaking and allows flattery to egg him on to his ruin.... If we remonstrate, it should be without bitterness; if we reprove, there should be no word of insult.... But if a man's ears are so closed to plain speaking that he cannot bear to hear the truth from a friend, we may give him up in despair. This remark of Cato's, as so many of his did, shews great acuteness: 'There are people who owe more to bitter enemies than to apparently pleasant friends: the former often speak the truth, the latter never.' Besides, it is a strange paradox that the recipients of advice should feel no annoyance where they ought to feel it, and yet feel so much where they ought not. They are not at all vexed at having committed a fault, but very angry at being reproved for it." Cicero. "Men of character like to hear of their faults; the other class do not." Emerson. "Before giving advice we must have secured its acceptance, or rather, have made it desired." Amiel's Journal. AUGUST 12 "The friendship of Jesus was not checked or foiled by the discovery of faults or blemishes in those whom He had taken into His life. Even in our ordinary human relations we do not know what we are engaging to do when we become the friend of another. 'For better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health,' runs the marriage covenant. The covenant in all true friendship is the same. We pledge our friend faithfulness, with all that faithfulness includes. We know not what demands upon us this sacred compact may make in years to come. Misfortune may befall our friend, and he may require our aid in many ways. Instead of being a help he may become a burden. But friendship must not fail, whatever its cost may be. When we become the friend of another, we do not know what faults and follies in him closer acquaintance may disclose to our eyes. But here, again, ideal friendship must not fail." Personal Friendships of Jesus, J. R. Miller. "For he that wrongs his friend Tennyson. AUGUST 13 "Treat your friends for what you know them to be. Regard no surfaces. Consider not what they did, but what they intended." Thoreau. "What makes us so changeable in our friendships, is our difficulty to discern the qualities of the soul, and the ease with which we detect those of the intellect." "Judge not thy friend until thou standest in his place." Rabbi Hillel. "Criticism often takes from the tree caterpillars and blossoms together." AUGUST 14 "There are two elements that go to the composition of friendship, each so sovereign that I can detect no superiority in either, no reason why either should be first named. One is Truth ... the other is Tenderness." Emerson. "The essence of friendship is entireness, a total magnanimity and trust.... A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him I may think aloud." Emerson. "People do not sufficiently remember that in every relation of life, as in the closest one of all, they ought to take one another 'for better for worse.' That, granting the tie of friendship, gratitude, esteem, be strong enough to have existed at all, it ought, either actively or passively, to exist for ever. And seeing we can at best know our neighbour, companion, or friend as little, as alas! we often find he knoweth of us, it behoveth us to trust him with the most patient fidelity, the tenderest forbearance; granting unto all his words and actions that we do not understand, the utmost limit of faith that common sense and Christian justice will allow. Nay, these failing, is there not left Christian charity? which being past believing and hoping, still endureth all things." AUGUST 15 "Mutual respect implies discretion and reserve even in love itself; it means preserving as much liberty as possible to those whose life we share. We must distrust our instinct of intervention, for the desire to make our own will prevail is often disguised under the mask of solicitude." Amiel's Journal. "Everything that is mine, even to my life, I may give to one I love, but the secret of my friend is not mine to give." Philip Sidney. "When true friends part they should lock up one another's secrets and change the keys." Feltham. AUGUST 16 "So true it is that nature abhors isolation, and ever leans upon something as a stay and support; and this is found in its most pleasing form in our closest friend." Cicero. "And great and numerous as are the blessings of friendship, this certainly is the sovereign one, that it gives us bright hopes for the future and forbids weakness and despair. In the face of a true friend a man sees as it were a second self. So that where his friend is he is; if his friend be rich, he is not poor; though he be weak, his friend's strength is his; and in his friend's life he enjoys a second life after his own is finished." Cicero. "In distress a friend Euripides. AUGUST 17 "A man only understands what is akin to something already existing in himself." Amiel's Journal. "There are some to whom we speak almost in a language of our own, with the confidence that all our broken hints are recognised with a thrill of kinship, and our half-uttered thoughts discerned and shared: some with whom we need not cramp our meaning into the dead form of an explicit accuracy, and with whom we can forecast that we shall walk together in undoubting sympathy even over tracks of taste and belief which we may never yet have touched." Faculties and Difficulties for Belief and Disbelief, Bishop Paget. "Talking with a friend is nothing else but thinking aloud." Addison. AUGUST 18 "And though Aristotle does well to warn us that absence dissolves friendship, it is happily none the less true that friend may powerfully influence friend though the two be by no means constant associates. Even far removal in place, or in occupation, or in fortunes, cannot arrest influence. For once any man has true friends, he never again frames his decisions, even those that are most secret, as if he were alone in the world. He frames them habitually in the imagined company of his friends. In their visionary presence he thinks and acts; and by them, as visionary tribunal, he feels himself, even in his unspoken intentions and inmost feelings, to be judged. In this aspect friendship may become a supreme force both to encourage and restrain. For it is not simply what our friends expect of us that is the vital matter here. They are often more tolerant of our failings than is perhaps good for us. It is what in our best moments we believe that they expect of us. For it is then that they become to us, not of their own choice but of ours, a kind of second conscience, in whose presence our weaknesses and backslidings become 'that worst kind of sacrilege that tears down the invisible altar of trust.'" The Making of Character, Professor MacCunn. AUGUST 19 "Few things are more fatal to friendship than the stiffness which cannot take a step towards acknowledgment." Life of F. W. Crossley, Rendel Harris. "Do not discharge in haste the arrow which can never return: it is easy to destroy happiness; most difficult to restore it." Herder. "Discord harder is to end than to begin." Spenser. "Think of this doctrine—that reasoning beings were created for one another's sake; that to be patient is a branch of justice, and that men sin without intending it." Marcus Aurelius. AUGUST 20 "We should learn from Jesus that the essential quality in the heart of friendship is not the desire to have friends, but the desire to be a friend; not to get good and help from others, but to impart blessing to others. Many of the sighings for friendship which we have are merely selfish longings,—a desire for happiness, for pleasure, for the gratification of the heart, which friends would bring. If the desire were to be a friend, to do others good, to serve and to give help, it would be a far more Christlike longing, and would transform the life and character." Personal Friendships of Jesus, J. R. Miller. "To love is better, nobler, more elevating, and more sure, than to be loved. To love is to have found that which lifts us above ourselves; which makes us capable of sacrifice; which unseals the forces of another world. He who is loved has gained the highest tribute of earth; he who loves has entered into the spirit of heaven. The love which comes to us must always be alloyed with the sad sense of our own unworthiness. The love which goes out from us is kept bright by the ideal to which it is directed." Bishop Westcott. AUGUST 21 "Friendships that have been renewed require more care than those that have never been broken off." La Rochefoucauld. "Broken friendship may be soldered, but never made sound." Spanish Proverb. "A friend once won need never be lost, if we will be only trusty and true ourselves. Friends may part, not merely in body, but in spirit for a while. In the bustle of business and the accidents of life, they may lose sight of each other for years; and more, they may begin to differ in their success in life, in their opinions, in their habits, and there may be, for a time, coldness and estrangement between them, but not for ever if each will be trusty and true. For then they will be like two ships who set sail at morning from the same port, and ere night-fall lose sight of each other, and go each on its own course and at its own pace for many days, through many storms and seas, and yet meet again, and find themselves lying side by side in the same haven when their long voyage is past." Charles Kingsley. AUGUST 22 "The most fatal disease of friendship is gradual decay or dislike, hourly increased by causes too slender for complaint and too numerous for removal. Those who are angry may be reconciled, those who have been injured may receive a recompense; but when the desire of pleasing, and willingness to be pleased, is silently diminished, the renovation of friendship is hopeless: as when the vital powers sink into languor, there is no longer any use for the physician." The Idler. "... There is such a disaster, so to speak, as having to break off friendship.... In such cases friendships should be allowed to die out gradually by an intermission of intercourse. They should, as I have been told that Cato used to say, rather be unstitched than torn in twain.... For there can be nothing more discreditable than to be at open war with a man with whom you have been intimate.... Our first object then should be to prevent a breach; our second to secure that if it does occur, our friendship should seem to have died a natural rather than a violent death." Cicero. AUGUST 23 "Friends—those relations that one makes for one's self." Deschamps. "Some one asked Kingsley what was the secret of his strong joyous life; and he answered, 'I had a friend.'" "The years have taught some sweet, some bitter lessons—none wiser than this: to spend in all things else, but of old friends to be most miserly." Lowell. "The best wish for us all is, that when we grow old, as we must do, the fast friends of our age may be those we have loved in our youth." Mason. AUGUST 24 "Jealousy is a terrible thing. It resembles love, only it is precisely love's contrary. Instead of wishing for the welfare of the object loved, it desires the dependence of that object upon itself, and its own triumph. Love is the forgetfulness of self; jealousy is the most passionate form of egotism, the glorification of a despotic, exacting, and vain ego, which can neither forget nor subordinate itself. The contrast is perfect." Amiel's Journal. "Jealousy is a secret avowal of inferiority." Massillon. AUGUST 25 "We are not jealous of what we give up, but of what is wrested from our unwilling hands. The first is always ours, the second never can be. ......... "Jealousy is not love, but it is the two-edged sword that parts true love from counterfeit. At its touch, the knowledge of what it is to love without reward, thrills heart and brain, sharp and clear, almost a vision of hell. Then if we are base, we die to love; but if we are noble, it is to ourselves we die. ......... "It is only what we surrender willingly that is ours always, as the wave never loses what it surrenders to the sea." Turkish Bonds, May Kendall. AUGUST 26 "What state of mind can be so blest, Dryden. AUGUST 27 "We should get a lesson in friendship's ministry. Too many wait until those they love are dead, and then bring their alabaster boxes of affection and break them. They keep silent about their love when words would mean so much, would give such cheer, encouragement, and hope, and then, when the friend lies in the coffin, their lips are unsealed and speak out their glowing tribute on ears that heed not the laggard praise. Many persons go through life, struggling bravely with difficulty, temptation, and hardship, carrying burdens too heavy for them, pouring out their love in unselfish serving of others, and yet are scarcely ever cheered by a word of approval or commendation, or by delicate tenderness of friendship; then, when they lie silent in death, a whole circle of admiring friends gathers to do them honour. Every one remembers a personal kindness received, a favour shown, some help given, and speaks of it in grateful words. Letters full of appreciation, commendation, and gratitude are written to sorrowing friends. Flowers are sent and piled about the coffin, enough to have strewn every hard path of the long years of struggle. How surprised some good men and women would be, after lives with scarcely a word of affection to cheer their hearts, were they to awake suddenly in the midst of their friends, a few hours after their death, and hear the testimonies that are falling from every tongue, the appreciation, the grateful words of love, the rememberings of kindness! They had never dreamed in life that they had so many friends, that so many had thought well of them, that they were helpful to so many." Personal Friendships of Jesus, J. R. Miller. AUGUST 28 "When our indignation is borne in submissive silence, we are apt to feel twinges of doubt afterwards as to our own generosity, if not justice; how much more when the object of our anger has gone into everlasting silence, and we have seen his face for the last time in the meekness of death." George Eliot. "All about us move, these common days, those who would be strengthened and comforted by the good cheer that we could give. Let us not reserve all the flowers for coffin-lids. Let us not keep our alabaster boxes sealed and unbroken till our loved ones are dead. Let us show kindness when kindness will do good. It will make sorrow all the harder to bear if we have to say beside our dead, 'I might have brightened the way a little, if only I had been kinder.'" Personal Friendships of Jesus, J. R. Miller. "I like not only to be loved, but to be told I am loved. The realm of silence is large enough beyond the grave." George Eliot. AUGUST 29 "Oh! do not let us wait to be just or pitiful or demonstrative towards those we love until they or we are struck down by illness or threatened with death! Life is short, and we have never too much time for gladdening the hearts of those who are travelling the dark journey with us. Oh, be swift to love, make haste to be kind!" Amiel's Journal. "Too soon, too soon comes Death to show Coventry Patmore. AUGUST 30 "Alas! how light a cause may move Lalla Rookh, T. Moore. AUGUST 31 "Love is the first and the last and the strongest bond in experience. It conquers distance, outlives all changes, bears the strain of the most diverse opinions." The Mind of the Master, Dr. John Watson. "Say never, ye loved once! E. B. Browning. September 1 "It was the old problem, of love that may not even spend itself for those it loves. Some hold that the purpose of such privation—as bitter to the spirit as the loss of light, and warmth, and air to the body—is to teach men to love God, and not their fellow-men. Rather, it is to teach them to love human beings more, with love not separate from the love of God, but near to His own heart. Such love is never fruitless, though it may seem to be. Our longing to serve personally is often only longing for the personal reward of service; and love that serves in finite fashion often misses the mark. We hurt where we desire to heal: we bind a greater burden on the life whose load we only strive to lighten. God's cross is always a crown: our crowns are often crosses. The cup of water that we put to our friend's lips is from a poisoned spring. Only the cup that we give God to bear to him, is always pure and cool." Turkish Bonds, May Kendall. SEPTEMBER 2 "Infancy? What if the rose-streak of morning R. Browning. "It looks like a waste of life, that mowing down of our best years by a relentless passion which itself falls dead on the top of them. But it is not so. Every year I live I am more convinced that the waste of life lies in the love we have not given, the powers we have not used, the selfish prudence which will risk nothing, and which, shirking pain, misses happiness as well. No one ever yet was the poorer in the long run for having once in a lifetime 'let out all the length of the reins.'" Red Pottage, Mary Cholmondeley. SEPTEMBER 3 "If we still love those we lose, can we altogether lose those we love?" The Newcomes, Thackeray. "They that love beyond the World cannot be separated by it. "Death cannot kill what never dies. Nor can Spirits ever be divided that love and live in the same Divine Principle; the Root and Record of their Friendship. "If Absence be not Death, neither is it theirs. "Death is but Crossing the World, as Friends do the Seas; they live in one another still. "For they must needs be present, that love and live in that which is omnipresent. "In this Divine Glass they see Face to Face; and their converse is Free as well as Pure. "This is the Comfort of Friends, that though they may be said to Die, yet their Friendship and Society are, in the best Sense, ever present, because Immortal." William Penn. SEPTEMBER 4 "Parting and forgetting? What faithful heart can do these? Our great thoughts, our great affections, the Truths of our life, never leave us. Surely they cannot separate from our consciousness; shall follow it whithersoever that shall go; and are of their nature divine and immortal." Thackeray. "I can only say that I sympathise with your grief, and if faith means anything at all it is trusting to those instincts, or feelings, or whatever they may be called, which assure us of some life after this." Tennyson—a Memoir, by his Son. "What is it when a child dies? It is the great head-master calling that child up into his own room, away from all the under-teachers, to finish his education under his own eye, close at his feet. The whole thought of a child's growth and development in heaven instead of here on earth, is one of the most exalting and bewildering on which the mind can rest." Phillips Brooks. SEPTEMBER 5 "Nothing is left or lost, nothing of good On an Early Death, Trench. "When one comes to the loss of young children—a sad perplexity—let it not be forgotten that they were given. If in the hour of bitterest grief it were asked of a bereaved mother whether she would prefer never to have possessed in order that she might never have lost—her heart would be very indignant. No little child has ever come from God and stayed a brief while in some human home—to return again to the Father—without making glad that home and leaving behind some trace of heaven. A family had counted themselves poorer without those quaint sayings, those cunning caresses, that soft touch, that sudden smile. This short visit was not an incident: it was a benediction. The child departs, the remembrances, the influence, the associations remain. If one should allow us to have Sarto's Annunciation for a month, we would thank him: when he resumed it for his home he would not take everything, for its loveliness of maid and angel is now ours for ever. And if God recalls the child He lent, then let us thank Him for the loan, and consider that what made that child the messenger of God—its purity, modesty, trustfulness, gladness—has passed into our soul." The Potter's Wheel, Dr. John Watson. SEPTEMBER 6 "The dead abide with us! Though stark and cold Mathilde Blind. "We are learning, by the help of many teachers, the extent and the authority of the dominion which the dead exercise over us, and which we ourselves are shaping for our descendants. "We feel, as perhaps it was impossible to feel before, how at every moment influences from the past enter our souls, and how we in turn scatter abroad that which will be fruitful in the distant future. It is becoming clear to us that we are literally parts of others and they of us." Bishop Westcott. SEPTEMBER 7 "I with uncovered head James Russell Lowell. SEPTEMBER 8 "And yet, dear heart! remembering thee, John Greenleaf Whittier. SEPTEMBER 9 "Lord, make me one with Thine own faithful ones, Christina Rossetti. SEPTEMBER 10 "Most persons have died before they expire—died to all earthly longings, so that the last breath is only, as it were, the locking of the door of the already deserted mansion. The fact of the tranquillity with which the great majority of dying persons await this locking of those gates of life through which its airy angels have been coming and going from the moment of the first cry, is familiar to those who have been often called upon to witness the last period of life. Almost always there is a preparation made by Nature for unearthing a soul, just as on the smaller scale there is for the removal of a milk tooth. The roots which hold human life to earth are absorbed before it is lifted from its place. Some of the dying are weary, and want rest, the idea of which is almost inseparable, in the universal mind, from death. Some are in pain, and want to be rid of it, even though the anodyne be dropped, as in the legend, from the sword of the Death-Angel. And some are strong in faith and hope, so that, as they draw near the next world, they would fain hurry toward it, as the caravan moves faster over the sands when the foremost travellers send word along the file that water is in sight. Though each little party that follows in a foot-track of its own will have it that the water to which others think they are hastening is a mirage, not the less has it been true in all ages, and for human beings of every creed which recognised a future, that those who have fallen, worn out by their march through the Desert, have dreamed at least of a River of Life, and thought they heard its murmurs as they lay dying." The Professor at the Breakfast Table, O. W. Holmes. September 11 "Sunset and evening star, Tennyson. SEPTEMBER 12 "If the immediate life after death be only sleep, and the spirit between this life and the next should be folded like a flower in a night slumber, then the remembrance of the past might remain, as the smell and colour do in the sleeping flower; and in that case the memory of our love would last as true, and would live pure and whole within the spirit of my friend until after it was unfolded at the breaking of the morn, when the sleep was over." Tennyson—a Memoir, by his Son. "Life! I know not what thou art, A. L. Barbauld. SEPTEMBER 13 "It is dangerous to abandon oneself to the luxury of grief; it deprives one of courage, and even of the wish for recovery." Amiel's Journal. "Its way of suffering is the witness which a soul bears to itself." Amiel's Journal. "We must bury our dead joys George Eliot. SEPTEMBER 14 "Sorrow brings also a temptation to exactingness. It may be that friends are very helpful to us. Let us take care that no selfishness mingles with our love for their companionship, with our claims for their sympathy. "What, for the time, at any rate, is all the world to us, can only be a small part of another's life. "And one must struggle, as time goes on, to take what comes in one's way of sympathy, of kindness, of companionship, but one must also try never to exact sympathy, to allow ourselves to feel neglected, or slighted, or forgotten. "This is a hard lesson—sometimes. "The whole of one's nature becomes sensitive, easily wounded, easily depressed." Canon Scott Holland. SEPTEMBER 15 "Selfishness in Sorrow is another temptation. One is so apt to become absorbed in one's Sorrow. "It is quite possible to become almost selfish in one's spiritual life under the stress of great Sorrow. "To see everything, every lesson, every allusion, solely from one's own point of view, to grow too fond of thinking of one's burden.... "The hard path of daily duty is the only path to tread, not because one is thinking of oneself, but because one wishes to forget oneself, and to think only of God, and of those that remain. "Self-denial: to put self last, not out of sight, but last, that is what one is always called to do, and it is a sad bit of disloyalty to God's grace if one becomes more selfish in Sorrow." Canon Scott Holland. SEPTEMBER 16 "A great Sorrow which changes life altogether is apt to produce a certain irritability, a sort of nervous jar. "Very often this is an affair of nerves, of physical health, but it is well to watch—'watch and pray.' "All sorts of things will jar and hurt us. People will do and say things with perfect unconsciousness that they are wounding us to the quick. Some careless allusion, some chance speech, will set our nerves quivering.... The worries, the jarring incidents, the introduction of discordant topics in the very presence of death, the disappointments, are all to lead us upwards. It is a rough bit of road on which we are set to walk, and the sharp stones cut our feet, but every step brings us nearer God. "Do not let temper mar the days of Sorrow. "There most probably will be something to try our temper. Who does not know the trials which seem peculiar to a break-up, a change in our outward life? Who has not seen real Christians giving way to peevishness, fretfulness, petty dislikes, petty jealousies of near relations, of those who may be taking the place of the one they mourn? Perhaps there is nothing which so mars and spoils the religious life as bad temper and selfishness. "Nothing which is so apt to make outsiders shrug their shoulders at those who make frequent Communions, and go much to Church, and who, especially in dark hours, give way to crossness. There is no better name." Canon Scott Holland. SEPTEMBER 17 "The meaning of religion is a rule of life; it is an obligation to do well; if that rule, that obligation, is not seen, your thousand texts will be to you like the thousand lanterns to the blind man. As he goes about the house in the night of his blindness, he will only break the glass and burn his feet and fingers: and so you, as you go through life in the night of your ignorance, will only break and hurt yourselves on broken laws. "Before Christ came, the Jewish religion had forbidden many evil things; it was a religion that a man could fulfil, I had almost said, in idleness; all he had to do was to pray and to sing psalms, and to refrain from things forbidden. Do not deceive yourselves; when Christ came, all was changed. The injunction was then laid upon us not to refrain from doing, but to do. At the last day He is to ask us not what sins we have avoided, but what righteousness we have done, what we have done for others, how we have helped good and hindered evil: what difference has it made to this world and to our country and our family and our friends, that we have lived. The man who has been only pious and not useful will stand with a long face on that great day, when Christ puts to him His questions. "But this is not all that we must learn: we must beware everywhere of the letter that kills, seek everywhere for the spirit that makes glad and strong. For example, these questions that we have just read are again only the letter. We must study what they mean, not what they are. We are told to visit them that are in prison. A good thing, but it were better if we could save them going there. We are told to visit the sick; it were better still, and we should so better have fulfilled the law, if we could have saved some of them from falling sick." The Life of R. L. Stevenson, Graham Balfour. SEPTEMBER 18 "Righteousness in the Old Testament is not a theological, but an ethical word, and has to do not with a person's creed, but with a person's character." Dr. John Watson. "In those days men were working their passage to Heaven by keeping the Ten Commandments, and the hundred and ten other commandments which they had manufactured out of them. Christ said, I will show you a more simple way. If you do one thing, you will do these hundred and ten things, without ever thinking about them. If you love, you will unconsciously fulfil the whole law.... Love is the rule for fulfilling all rules, the new commandment for keeping all the old commandments, Christ's one secret of the Christian life." The Greatest Thing in the World, Henry Drummond. "Pure religion as taught by Jesus Christ is a life, a growth, a divine spirit within, coming out in love and sympathy, and helpfulness to our fellow-men." H. W. Thomas. SEPTEMBER 19 "We are often reminded that Christ left no code of commandments. It is in Him—in His Person and His work—the Law lies. He has given indeed for our instruction some applications of the negative precepts of the Decalogue to the New Order. He has added some illustrations of positive duties, almsgiving, prayer, fasting. He has set up an ideal and a motive for life; and, at the same time, He has endowed His Church with spiritual power, and has promised that the Paraclete, sent in His Name, shall guide it into all the Truth. (The fundamental principle of the Christian Social Union is "to claim for the Christian Law the ultimate authority to rule social practice.") "The Christian Law, then, is the embodiment of the Truth for action in forms answering to the conditions of society from age to age. The embodiment takes place slowly, and it can never be complete. It is impossible for us to rest indolently in the conclusions of the past. In each generation the obligation is laid on Christians to bring new problems of conduct and duty into the Divine light, and to find their solution under the teaching of the Spirit. The unceasing effort to fulfil the obligation establishes the highest prerogative of man, and manifests the life of the Church. From this effort there can be no release; and the effort itself becomes more difficult as human relations grow fuller, wider, more complex." Christian Social Union Addresses, Bishop Westcott. SEPTEMBER 20 "The sanction of this Law (the Christian Law) is not fear of punishment, but that self-surrender to an ever-present Lord, of those who are His slaves at once and His friends, which is perfect freedom. This Law animates the heart of him who receives it with the invigorating truth that character is formed rather by what we do than by what we refrain from doing. It requires that every personal gift and possession should minister to the common welfare, not in the way of ransom, or as a forced loan, but as an offering of love. It reaches to the springs of action, and gives to the most mechanical toil the dignity of a divine service. It makes the strong arm co-operate in one work with the warm heart and the creative brain. It constrains the poet and the artist to concentrate their magnificent powers on things lovely and of good report, to introduce us to characters whom to know is a purifying discipline, and to fill the souls of common men with visions of hidden beauty and memories of heroic deeds. It enables us to lift up our eyes to a pattern of human society which we have not yet dared to contemplate, a pattern which answers to the constitution of man as he was made in the Divine image to gain the Divine likeness. It forbids us to seek repose till, as far as lies in us, all labour is seen to be not a provision for living, but a true human life; all education a preparation for the vision of God here and hereafter; all political enterprise a conscious hastening of the time when the many nations shall walk in the light of the holy city, and the kings of the earth bring their glory into it." Christian Social Union Addresses, Bishop Westcott. SEPTEMBER 21 "For the Christian there can be but one ideal, the perfect development of every man for the occupation of his appointed place, for the fulfilment of his peculiar office in the 'Body of Christ'; and as a first step towards this, we are all bound as Christians to bring to our country the offering of our individual service in return for the opportunities of culture and labour which we receive from its organisation. We are all as Christians trustees and stewards of everything which we possess, of our time, our intellect, our influence, no less than of our riches. We ourselves are not our own: still less can we say of that which we inherit or acquire, 'It is my own.' We all belong, in the fulness of life 'in Christ,' to our fellow-citizens, and our nation belongs to mankind. What we hold for a time is to be administered for the relief of distresses, and for the elevation of those among whom we are placed. Personal and social egoism are equally at variance with this conception of humanity. The repression of individuality and the individual appropriation of the fruits of special vigour and insight equally tend to impoverish the race. Service always ready to become sacrifice is the condition of our growth, and the condition of our joy." Christian Social Union Addresses, Bishop Westcott. SEPTEMBER 22 "Christ took the world as He found it, He left it as it was. He had no quarrel with existing institutions. He did not overthrow the Church—He went to Church. He said nothing against politics—He supported the government of the country. He did not denounce society—His first public action was to go to a marriage. His great aim, in fact, outwardly, and all along, was to be as normal, as little eccentric as possible. The true fanatic always tries the opposite. The spirit alone was singular in Jesus; a fanatic always spoils his cause by extending it to the letter. Christ came not to destroy, but to fulfil. A fanatic comes not to fulfil, but to destroy. If we would follow the eccentricity of our Master, let it not be in asceticism, in denunciation, in punctiliousness, and scruples about trifles, but in largeness of heart, singleness of eye, true breadth of character, true love to men, and heroism for Christ." The Ideal Life, Henry Drummond. "Religion has been treated as if it were a special exercise of a special power, not as if it were the possible loftiness of everything that a man could think or be or do." Phillips Brooks. SEPTEMBER 23 "If we want to get religion into life, or anything whatever in us into life, we are bound to have no contentment, no rest, no dreaming, no delays, till we get thought into shape, feeling into labour, some conviction, some belief, some idea, into form without us, among the world of men. This is the main principle, and it applies to every sphere of human effort. So much for the habit whereby we gain power to bring religion into daily life. "Righteousness, shaped from within to without in the world of men, is justice, and the doing of justice. This is the first need of commonwealths, the first duty of individuals, and the practical religion of both. A still higher form into which we may put our religion in life is in doing the things which belong to love; and love is the higher form because it secures justice. These are the things we should shape into life because we love them. To be faithful always to that which we believe to be true; to be faithful to our principles and our conscience when trial comes, or when we are tempted to sacrifice them for place or pelf; to be faithful to our given word; to keep our promises when we might win favour by eluding or breaking them; to cling to intellectual as well as to moral truth; to so live among men that they may know where we are; to fly our flag in the storm as well as in the calm. It is to pass by with contempt the dark cavern where men worship Mammon; to fix our thought and effort on the attainment of righteousness in public and in private homes, to have the courage to attempt what seems impossible through love of the ideals of truth and beauty, and to prefer to die on the field of work and self-devotion rather than to live in idleness and luxury." Stopford Brooke. SEPTEMBER 24 "There are also some who forget that the laws of the spiritual world are no less inflexible and inviolable than those of the physical world; that conduct is everything; and that the faith which saves, and which, working by love, makes conduct, is something much deeper and more substantial than the muttering of an unfelt creed, or than the melancholy presumption that to think ourselves saved is by itself a passport into the everlasting habitations." Bishop Thorold. "Holiness is an infinite compassion for others: Greatness is to take the common things of life and walk truly among them: Happiness is a great love and much serving." "Heaven does not make holiness, but holiness makes heaven." Phillips Brooks. SEPTEMBER 25 "It makes me half afraid, half angry, to see the formal, mechanical way in which people do what they call their 'Lenten Penances,' and then rush off, only with increased ardour, to their Easter festivities. Literal fasting does not suit me—it makes me irritable and uncomfortable, and certainly does not spiritualise me; so I have always tried to keep my Lents in the nobler and more healthful spirit of Isaiah lviii. I have kept them but poorly, after all; still, I am sure that is the true way of keeping them." Letters from Bishop Fraser's Lancashire Life, Archdeacon Diggle. "God does not call us to give up some sin or some harmful self-indulgence in Lent that we may resume it at Easter." The Guided Life, Canon Body. SEPTEMBER 26 "Fasting comes by nature when a man is sad, and it is in consequence the natural token of sadness: when a man is very sad, for the loss of relations or the like, he loses all inclination for food. But every outward sign that can be displayed at will is liable to abuse, and so men sometimes fasted when they were not really sad, but when it was decorous to appear so. Moreover a kind of merit came to be attached to fasting as betokening sorrow for transgressions; and at last it came to be regarded as a sort of self-punishment which it was thought the Almighty would accept in lieu of inflicting punishment Himself. Our Lord does not decry stated fasts or any other Jewish practices, they had their uses and would last their times; only He points men to the underlying truth which was at the bottom of the ordinance." Pastor Pastorum, Henry Latham. SEPTEMBER 27 "Those who go to Christ and not to custom for their view of that which is essential in religion, know the infinitesimal value of profession and ceremonies, beside the great law of love to our neighbour." F. W. Farrar. "Not only the happiness but the efficiency of the passive virtues, love as a power, as a practical success in the world, is coming to be recognised. The fact that Christ led no army, that He wrote no book, built no church, spent no money, but that He loved, and so conquered, this is beginning to strike men. And Paul's argument is gaining adherents, that when all prophecies are fulfilled, and all our knowledge is obsolete, and all tongues grow unintelligible, this thing, Love, will abide and see them all out one by one into the oblivious past. This is the hope for the world, that we shall learn to love, and in learning that, unlearn all anger and wrath and evil-speaking and malice and bitterness." The Ideal Life, Henry Drummond. SEPTEMBER 28 "To him, as to so many, truth is so infinitely great that all we can do with our poor human utterances is to try and clothe it in such language as will make it clear to ourselves, and clear to those to whom God sends us with a message; but meanwhile above us and our thoughts—above our broken lights—God in His mercy, God in His love, God in His infinite nature is greater than all." Tennyson—a Memoir, by his Son. "Are not all true men that live, or that ever lived, soldiers of the same army, enlisted under heaven's captaincy, to do battle against the same enemy—the empire of darkness and wrong? Why should we mis-know one another, fight not against the enemy, but against ourselves, from mere difference of uniform?" Carlyle. SEPTEMBER 29 "Call him not heretic whose works attest Whittier. "Hast thou made much of words, and forms, and tests, Plumptre. SEPTEMBER 30 "Faith is the communication of the Divine Spirit by which Christ as the revealed God dwells in our heart. It is the awakening of the Spirit of Adoption whereby we cry, 'Abba Father.'" T. H. Green. "He thought with Arthur Hallam, that 'the essential feelings of religion subsist in the utmost diversity of forms,' that 'different language does not always imply different opinions, nor different opinions any difference in real faith.' 'It is impossible,' he said, 'to imagine that the Almighty will ask you, when you come before Him in the next life, what your particular form of creed was; but the question will rather be, "Have you been true to yourself and given in My name a cup of cold water to one of these little ones?"'" Tennyson—a Memoir, by his Son. "Religion consists not in knowledge, but in a holy life." Bishop Taylor. October 1 "Imagine a body of Christians who should take their stand on the Sermon of Jesus, and conceive their creed on His lines. Imagine how it would read, 'I believe in the Fatherhood of God; I believe in the words of Jesus; I believe in the clean heart; I believe in the service of love; I believe in the unworldly life; I believe in the Beatitudes; I promise to trust God and follow Christ, to forgive my enemies, and to seek after the righteousness of God.' Could any form of words be more elevated, more persuasive, more alluring? Do they not thrill the heart and strengthen the conscience? Liberty of thought is allowed; liberty of sinning is alone denied." The Mind of the Master, Dr. John Watson. The Sermon on the Mount "The text-book of duty." Phillips Brooks. "The Magna Charta of the Kingdom of God." Neander. "Christ's manifesto, and the constitution of Christianity." Dr. John Watson. "The great proclamation, which by one effort lifted mankind on to that new and higher ground on which it has been painfully struggling ever since, but on the whole with sure but slow success, to plant itself, and maintain sure foothold." T. Hughes. OCTOBER 2 "There may be Worship without Words." Longfellow. "All the world is the temple of God. Its worship is ministration. The commonest service is Divine service." George MacDonald. The Programme of Christianity. "To preach good tidings unto the meek: Henry Drummond. OCTOBER 3 "The Lord's Supper, the right and need of every man to feed on God, the bread of divine sustenance, the wine of divine inspiration offered to every man, and turned by every man into what form of spiritual force the duty and the nature of each man required, how grand and glorious its mission might become! No longer the mystic source of unintelligible influence; no longer, certainly, the test of arbitrary orthodoxy; no longer the initiation rite of a selected brotherhood; but the great sacrament of man!... There is no other rallying place for all the good activity and worthy hopes of man. It is in the power of the great Christian Sacrament, the great human sacrament, to become that rallying place. Think how it would be, if some morning all the men, women, and children in this city who mean well, from the reformer meaning to meet some giant evil at the peril of his life to the school-boy meaning to learn his day's lesson with all his strength, were to meet in a great host at the table of the Lord, and own themselves His children, and claim the strength of His bread and wine, and then go out with calm, strong, earnest faces to their work. How the communion service would lift up its voice and sing itself in triumph, the great anthem of dedicated human life! Ah, my friends, that, nothing less than that, is the real Holy Communion of the Church of the living God." Phillips Brooks. OCTOBER 4 "The bane of the Church of God, the dishonour of Christ, the laughing-stock of the world, is in that far too numerous body of half-alive Christians who choose their own cross, and shape their own standard, and regulate their own sacrifices, and measure their own devotions; whose cross is very unlike the Saviour's, whose standard is not that of as much holiness as they can attain, but of as little holiness as they can safely be content with to be saved; whose sacrifices do not deprive them from one year's end to another of a single comfort, or even a real luxury, and whose devotions can never make their dull hearts burn with love of Christ." Bishop Thorold. "Men find Christ through their fellow-men, and every glimpse they get of Him is a direct message from Himself." Henry Drummond. OCTOBER 5 "The distinguishing mark of religion is not so much liberty as obedience, and its value is measured by the sacrifices which it can extract from the individual." Amiel's Journal. "There is perhaps no human soul which never hungers after God. Men's unbelief in lies is often quoted against them, by the liar especially. But we believe—not when we are told about, but when we are shown—Christ." Turkish Bonds, May Kendall. "Let your lives preach." George Fox. OCTOBER 6 "For how, as a matter of fact, do we grow to know God? Let me refer you to Professor Flint's book on Theism for the best answer I know. We begin to know God as we begin to know our fellow-man—through His manifestations. We may be tempted to think that we cannot know what we cannot see, but in a perfectly true sense we never see our fellow-man: we see his manifestations; we see his outward appearance. We hear what he says; we notice what he does, and we infer from all this what his unseen character is like, what the man is in himself; so similarly and as surely we learn to know God. We see what He has done in nature and in history; we see what He is doing to-day; we read what He has conveyed to us for our instruction 'in sundry times and in divers manners'; and so we learn to listen for and to love 'the still small voice' in which He speaks to our hearts. One knowledge is as gradual and yet as sure and certain and logical as the other." Work in Great Cities, Bishop Winnington Ingram. OCTOBER 7 "It is human character or developed humanity that conducts us to our notion of the character Divine.... In proportion as the mysteries of man's goodness unfold themselves to us, in that proportion do we obtain an insight into God's." J. B. Mozley. "If you want your neighbour to know what the Christ spirit will do for him, let him see what it has done for you." Henry Ward Beecher. "When a man lives with God, his voice shall be as sweet as the murmur of the brook and the rustle of the corn." Emerson. OCTOBER 8 "'We do not present our supplications before Thee for our righteousness, but for Thy great mercies. O Lord, hear; O Lord, forgive; O Lord, hearken and do.'—Dan. ix. 18, 19. "Every true prayer has its background and its foreground. The foreground of prayer is the intense, immediate desire for a certain blessing which seems to be absolutely necessary for the soul to have; the background of prayer is the quiet earnest desire that the will of God, whatever it may be, should be done. What a picture is the perfect prayer of Jesus in Gethsemane! In front burns the strong desire to escape death and to live; but, behind, there stands, calm and strong, the craving of the whole life for the doing of the will of God.... Leave out the foreground—let there be no expression of the wish of him who prays—and there is left a pure submission which is almost fatalism. Leave out the background—let there be no acceptance of the will of God—and the prayer is only an expression of self-will, a petulant claiming of the uncorrected choice of him who prays. Only when the two, foreground and background, are there together,—the special desire resting on the universal submission, the universal submission opening into the special desire,—only then is the picture perfect and the prayer complete!" Phillips Brooks. OCTOBER 9 "About prayer he said: 'The reason why men find it hard to regard prayer in the same light in which it was formerly regarded is that we seem to know more of the unchangeableness of Law. But I believe that God reveals Himself in each individual soul. Prayer is, to take a mundane simile, like opening a sluice between the great ocean and our little channels when the great sea gathers itself together and flows in at full tide.' 'Prayer on our part is the highest aspiration of the soul.'" "A Breath that fleets beyond this iron world And "More things are wrought by prayer Tennyson—a Memoir, by his Son. OCTOBER 10 "There can be no objection to praying for certain special things. God forbid! I cannot help doing it, any more than a child in the dark can help calling for its mother. Only it seems to me that when we pray, 'Grant this day that we run into no kind of danger,' we ought to lay our stress on the 'run' rather than on the 'danger,' to ask God not to take away the danger by altering the course of nature, but to give us light and guidance whereby to avoid it." Charles Kingsley. "Special prayer is based upon a fundamental instinct of our nature. And in the fellowship which is established in prayer between man and God, we are brought into personal union with Him in Whom all things have their being. "In this lies the possibility of boundless power; for when the connection is once formed, who can lay down the limits of what man can do in virtue of the communion of his spirit with the Infinite Spirit?" Bishop Westcott. October 11 "It is abundantly clear that answered prayer encourages faith and personal relations in a way which broad principles only cannot effect. As the Spectator put it many years ago, much that would be positively bad for us if given without prayer, is good if sent in answer. We feel (do we not?) that all the evil of the world springs from mistrust of God. Nothing can recover us from this state of alienated unrest like answered prayer." Life of F. W. Crossley, Rendel Harris. "Prayer will in time make the human countenance its own divinest altar; years upon years of true thoughts, like ceaseless music shut up within, will vibrate along the nerves of expression until the lines of the living instrument are drawn into correspondence, and the harmony of visible form matches the unheard harmonies of the mind." The Choir Invisible, James Lane Allen. OCTOBER 12 "Pray, till prayer makes you forget your own wish, and leave it or merge it in God's will. The divine wisdom has given us prayer, not as a means whereby to obtain the good things of earth, but as a means by which we learn to do without them; not as a means whereby we escape evil, but as a means whereby we become strong to meet it. 'There appeared an angel unto Him from heaven, strengthening Him.' This was the true reply to the prayer of Christ." F. W. Robertson. "Never let us get into the common trick of calling unbelief—resignation; of asking, and then because we have not faith to believe, putting in a 'Thy will be done' at the end. Let us make God's Will our will, and so say 'Thy will be done.'" Charles Kingsley. OCTOBER 13 "Accustom yourself gradually to let your mental prayer spread over all your daily external occupations. Speak, act, work quietly, as though you were praying, as indeed you ought to be. "Do everything without excitement, simply in the spirit of grace. So soon as you perceive natural activity gliding in, recall yourself quietly into the Presence of God. Hearken to what the leadings of grace prompt, and say and do nothing but what God's Holy Spirit teaches. You will find yourself infinitely more quiet, your words will be fewer and more effectual, and while doing less, what you do will be more profitable. It is not a question of a hopeless mental activity, but a question of acquiring a quietude and peace in which you readily advise with your Beloved as to all you have to do." FÉnÉlon. "A blessing such as this our hearts might reap, Trench. OCTOBER 14 "It is my custom every night to run all over the words and actions of the past day; for why should I fear the sight of my errors when I can admonish and forgive myself? I was a little too hot in such a dispute: my opinion might have been as well spared, for it gave offence, and did no good at all. The thing was true; but all truths are not to be spoken at all times." Seneca. Resolves. "To try to be thoroughly poor in spirit, meek, and to be ready to be silent when others speak. "To learn from every one. "To try to feel my own insignificance. "To believe in myself and the powers with which I am entrusted. "To try to make conversation more useful, and therefore to store my mind with facts, but to guard against a wish to shine. "To try to despise the principle of the day 'every man his own trumpeter,' and to feel it a degradation to speak of my own doings, as a poor braggart. "To speak less of self and to think less. "To contend one by one against evil thoughts. "To try to fix my thoughts in prayer without distraction. "To watch over a growing habit of uncharitable judgment." F. W. Robertson's Life. OCTOBER 15 "An immense quantity of modern confession of sin, even when honest, is merely a sickly egotism which will rather gloat over its own evil than lose the centralisation of its interest in itself." Ethics of the Dust, John Ruskin. "The fit of low spirits which comes to us when we find ourselves overtaken in a fault, though we flatter ourselves to reckon it a certain sign of penitence, and a set-off to the sin itself which God will surely take into account, is often nothing more than vexation and annoyance with ourselves, that, after all our good resolutions and attempts at reformation, we have broken down again." The Ideal Life, Henry Drummond. "And be you sure that sorrow without resolute effort at amendment is one of the most contemptible of all human frailties; deserving to be despised by men, and certain to be rejected by God." Bishop Temple. OCTOBER 16 "Plainly there is one danger in all self-discipline which has to be most carefully watched and guarded against, that, namely, of valuing the means at the expense of the end, and so falling into either self-righteousness or formalism, and very probably into uncharitableness also. If we esteem our obedience to rule, and self-imposed restraints, for their own sake, we effectually destroy their power to train and elevate. I suppose this is the real mistake of a false asceticism, which sees the merit rather in the amount of discipline undergone than in the character and self-conquest to be gained by it." Bishop Walsham How. "... It is a clear view of higher motives, which at once reveals and defeats our meaner impulses; which assists the discipline of proper self-searching, by making it healthy and hopeful; and resists any habit of morbid introspectiveness with its fatal tendency to paralyse activity of character." Canon Knox Little. OCTOBER 17 "Beware of despairing about yourself." St. Augustine. "Any man who is good for anything, if he is always thinking about himself, will come to think himself good for nothing very soon. It is only a fop or a fool who can bear to look at himself all day long, without disgust. And so the first thing for a man to do, who wants to use his best powers at their best, is to get rid of self-consciousness, to stop thinking about himself and how he is working, altogether." Phillips Brooks. "On somehow. To go back Tennyson. OCTOBER 18 "I have sometimes thought that this facility of men in believing that they are still what they once meant to be—this undisturbed appropriation of a traditional character which is often but a melancholy relic of early resolutions, like the worn and soiled testimonial to soberness and honesty carried in the pocket of a tippler whom the need of a dram has driven into peculation—may sometimes diminish the turpitude of what seems a flat, barefaced falsehood. It is notorious that a man may go on uttering false assertions about his own acts till he at last believes in them: is it not possible that sometimes in the very first utterance there may be a shade of creed-reciting belief, a reproduction of a traditional self which is clung to against all evidence? There is no knowing all the disguises of the lying serpent. "When we come to examine in detail what is the sane mind in the sane body, the final test of completeness seems to be a security of distinction between what we have professed and what we have done; what we have aimed at and what we have achieved; what we have invented and what we have witnessed or had evidenced to us; what we think and feel in the present and what we thought and felt in the past." George Eliot. OCTOBER 19 "An unconscious, easy, selfish person shocks less and is more easily loved than one who is laboriously and egotistically unselfish. There is at least no fuss about the first; but the other parades his sacrifices, and so sells his favours too dear. Selfishness is calm, a force of nature: you might say the trees are selfish. But egoism is a piece of vanity; it must always take you into its confidence; it is uneasy, troublesome, searching; it can do good, but not handsomely; it is uglier, because less dignified, than selfishness itself." "If a man has self-surrender pressed incessantly upon him, this keeps the idea of self ever before his view. Christ does not cry down self, but He puts it out of a man's sight by giving him something better to care for, something which shall take full and rightful possession of his soul. The Apostles, without ever having any consciousness of sacrificing self, were brought into a habit of self-sacrifice by merging all thoughts for themselves in devotion to a Master and a cause, and in thinking what they could do to serve it themselves." Pastor Pastorum, Henry Latham. OCTOBER 20 "Think as little as possible about any good in yourself; turn your eyes resolutely from any view of your acquirement, your influence, your plan, your success, your following: above all, speak as little as possible about yourself. The inordinateness of our self-love makes speech about ourselves like the putting of the lighted torch to the dried wood which has been laid in order for the burning. Nothing but duty should open our lips upon this dangerous theme, except it be in humble confession of our sinfulness before our God. Again, be specially upon the watch against those little tricks by which the vain man seeks to bring round the conversation to himself, and gain the praise or notice which the thirsty ears drink in so greedily; and even if praise comes unsought, it is well, whilst men are uttering it, to guard yourself by thinking of some secret cause for humbling yourself inwardly to God; thinking into what these pleasant accents would be changed if all that is known to God, and even to yourself, stood suddenly revealed to man." Bishop Wilberforce. "Those who have never sought to attain true humility ... have yet to learn how it lies at the root of all our dear Lord's teaching.... The first step towards the inner life is to attain a childlike spirit in Heavenly things.... It is solely God's gift." Grou. OCTOBER 21 "It is quite idle, by force of will, to seek to empty the angry passions out of our life. Who has not made a thousand resolutions in this direction, only and with unutterable mortification to behold them dashed to pieces with the first temptation? The soul is to be made sweet not by taking the acidulous fluids out, but by putting something in—a great love, God's great love. This is to work a chemical change upon them, to renovate and regenerate them, to dissolve them in its own rich fragrant substance. If a man let this into his life, his cure is complete; if not, it is hopeless." The Ideal Life, Henry Drummond. "The secret of success consists not in the habit of making numerous resolutions about various faults and sins, but in one great, absorbing, controlling purpose to serve God and do His will! If this be the controlling motive of life, all other motives will be swept into the force of its mighty current and guided aright." OCTOBER 22 "For the most of us the more hopeful plan is to overcome our passions by thinking of something else. This something else need by no means be a serious thing. For it happens sometimes that ideas that do not soar above trivialities may nevertheless have sent down such roots into a man's life, and become so fruitful of suggestion, that they prove more effective allies than more imposing and pretentious resources. Whence it comes that a sport, or a pastime, have before now weaned many from cares and sorrows which seemed proof against even the consolations of religion. Be it granted that, severely construed, this is a proof of the frivolity of human nature. But it is none the less an illustration of the expulsive power of ideas." The Making of Character, Professor MacCunn. "He proposed to make sin impossible by replacing it with love. If sin be an act of self-will, each person making himself the centre, then Love is the destruction of sin, because Love connects instead of isolating. No one can be envious, avaricious, hard-hearted; no one can be gross, sensual, unclean, if he loves. Love is the death of all bitter and unholy moods of the soul, because Love lifts the man out of himself and teaches him to live in another." The Mind of the Master, Dr. John Watson. OCTOBER 23 "It is poor strategy to wage against evil feelings or propulsions a war of mere repression. We have seen that this is so in educational control of others. It is not less so in control of ourselves. If we would really oust our evil proclivities, we must cultivate others that are positively good. It is not enough to hate our failings or our vices with a perfect hatred. We must love something else. In other words, we must contrive to open mind and heart to tenants in whose presence unwelcome intruders, unable to find a home, will torment us only for a season and at last take their departure. 'There is a mental just as much as a bodily hygiene.'" The Making of Character, Professor MacCunn. "Moses said, 'Do this or do that.' Jesus refrained from regulations—He proposed that we should love. Jesus, while hardly mentioning the word, planted the idea in His disciples' minds, that Love was Law. For three years He exhibited and enforced Love as the principle of life, until, before He died, they understood that all duty to God and man was summed up in Love. Progress in the moral world is ever from complexity to simplicity. First one hundred duties; afterwards they are gathered into ten commandments; then they are reduced to two: love of God and love of man; and, finally, Jesus says His last word: 'This is My commandment, that ye love one another, as I have loved you.'" The Mind of the Master, Dr. John Watson. OCTOBER 24 "If sin be a principle in a man's life, then it is evident that it cannot be affected by the most pathetic act in history exhibited from without; it must be met by an opposite principle working from within. If sin be selfishness, as Jesus taught, then it can only be overcome by the introduction of a spirit of self-renunciation. Jesus did not denounce sin: negative religion is always impotent. He replaced sin by virtue, which is a silent revolution. As the light enters, the darkness departs, and as soon as one renounced himself, he had ceased from sin." The Mind of the Master, Dr. John Watson. "'Why could not we cast him out?' "Let His love fill you with love, and then the conquering of your sins by His help shall be in its course one long enthusiasm and at the end a glorious success. That is your hope; and that hope, if you will, you may seize to-day." Phillips Brooks. OCTOBER 25 "The block of granite which was an obstacle in the pathway of the weak, becomes a stepping-stone in the pathway of the strong." Carlyle. "Out of difficulties grow miracles." "I hold it truth with him who sings Tennyson. "Why wilt thou defer thy good purpose from day to day? Arise and begin this very instant, and say, 'Now is the time to be doing, now is the time to be striving, now is the fit time to amend myself.'" Thomas À Kempis. OCTOBER 26 "A fourth maxim is 'never if possible to lose a battle.' And none can be sounder. For it is always to be remembered that a single lapse involves here something worse than a simple failure. The alternative is not between good habit or no habit, but between good habit and bad. For, as Professor Bain points out, the characteristic difficulty here lies in the fact that in the moral life rival tendencies are in constant competition for mastery over us. The loss of a battle here is therefore worse than a defeat. It strengthens the enemy, whether this enemy be some powerful passion, or nothing more than the allurements of an easy life. It has worse effects still. For if by persistence in well-doing we all of us create a moral tradition for our individual selves, so do we by every failure hang in the memory a humiliating and paralysing record of defeat." The Making of Character, Professor MacCunn. "If one surrender himself to Jesus, and is crucified on His cross, there is no sin he will not overcome, no service he will not render, no virtue to which he will not attain." The Mind of the Master, Dr. John Watson. OCTOBER 27 "Be not anxious about to-morrow. Do to-day's duty, fight to-day's temptation, and do not weaken and distract yourself by looking forward to things which you cannot see, and could not understand, if you saw them." Charles Kingsley. "Do not disturb thyself by thinking of the whole of thy life. Let not thy thoughts at once embrace all the various troubles which thou mayest expect to befall thee: but on every occasion ask thyself, What is there in this which is intolerable and past bearing? for thou wilt be ashamed to confess. In the next place remember that neither the future nor the past pains thee, but only the present. But this is reduced to a very little, if thou only circumscribest it, and chidest thy mind, if it is unable to hold out against even this." Marcus Aurelius. "Finish every day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. To-morrow is a new day; begin it well and serenely and with too high a spirit to be cumbered with your old nonsense. This day is all that is good and fair. It is too dear, with its hopes and invitations, to waste a moment on the yesterdays." Emerson. OCTOBER 28 "By trying to take in the idea of life as a whole we only give ourselves mental indigestion; a day at a time is as much as a man can healthily swallow." Edna Lyall. "Think that this day will never dawn again. The Divine Comedy, Dante. "To-day is a king in disguise: let us unmask the king as he passes." Emerson. OCTOBER 29 "Lo, here hath been dawning Carlyle. "The perfection of moral character consists in this, in passing every day as the last, and in being neither violently excited, nor torpid, nor playing the hypocrite." Marcus Aurelius. "When night comes, list thy deeds; make plain the way Henry Vaughan. OCTOBER 30 "Gaining or losing all the time is our condition, morally and spiritually. We cannot stand utterly still. If we are not improving we are losing ground. Outside forces compel that, in addition to the forces that are working within. We are pressing forward and being helped in that direction, or we are being pressed backward and are yielding to that pressure. Let us not deceive ourselves with the idea that even though we are making no progress we are at least holding our own. We can no more stand still than time can." "Whose high endeavours are an inward light, The Happy Warrior, Wordsworth. OCTOBER 31 "Plutarch records that when Simonides offered to teach Themistocles the art of memory the latter said: 'Teach me rather the art of forgetting.' How much the world needs to learn that art. Paul spoke of forgetting the things that are behind. We should forget our mistakes and failures, so far as these cause discouragement. We should forget our successes if they cause pride or preoccupy the mind. We should forget the slights that have been put upon us or the insults that have been given us. To remember these is to be weak and miserable, if not worse. He who says he can forgive but he cannot forget is deceived by the sound of words. Forgiveness that is genuine involves forgetfulness of the injury. True forgiveness means a putting away of the wrong behind the back and remembering it no more. That is what God does when He forgives, and that is what we all must do if we truly forgive." "... It is wise to forget past errors. There is a kind of temperament which, when indulged, greatly hinders growth in real godliness. It is that rueful, repentant, self-accusing temper, which is always looking back, and microscopically observing how that which is done might have been better done. Something of this we ought to have. A Christian ought to feel always that he has partially failed, but that ought not to be the only feeling. Faith ought ever to be a sanguine, cheerful thing; and perhaps in practical life we could not give a better account of faith than by saying, that it is, amidst much failure, having the heart to try again. Our best deeds are marked by imperfection; but if they really were our best, 'forget the things that are behind'—we shall do better next time." F. W. Robertson. NOVEMBER 1 "Throughout the Gospel history we discern our Lord's care to keep men in a fit condition to serve God by active work. All that would impair their efficiency is to be shunned. Now, to repine and brood over some past error cuts the sinews of action; from this the Apostles therefore are always diverted, and they are to be watchful to prevent others from sinking into dejection and folding their hands in despair. A man who is hopeless has no heart for work, but when he is so far encouraged as to be able to exert himself his despondency soon disappears." Pastor Pastorum, Henry Latham. "Disappointment should always be taken as a stimulant, and never viewed as a discouragement." C. B. Newcomb. "I always loved 'At evening time it shall be light,' and I am sure it comes true to many a young troubled soul, which in its youthful zeal and impatience cannot help eating its heart out over its own and other people's failings and imperfections, and has not yet learnt the patience which comes from realising that in this world we see but the beginning of things." NOVEMBER 2 "If a man constantly aspires, is he not elevated?" Thoreau. "The thing we long for,—That we are Lowell. NOVEMBER 3 "Therefore to whom turn I but to Thee, the ineffable Name? Abt Vogler, Robert Browning. NOVEMBER 4 "If what shone afar so grand R. M. Milnes. "One would like one's own failures to be one's friends' stepping stones.... I am trying to teach myself that if one has been working, one has not necessarily been working to good purpose, and that one may waste strength and forces of all sorts, as well as time." Mrs. Ewing's Letters. "Rise ... as children learn, be thou Tennyson. NOVEMBER 5 "There are those who think it is Christian patience to sit down by the wayside to endure the storm, crying in themselves, 'God is hard on me, but I will bear His smiting'; but their endurance is only idleness which is ignoble, and hiding from the battle which is cowardice. Or they cry, 'I am the victim of Fate, but I will be patient'—as if any one could be a victim if God be love, or as if there were such a thing as blind fate, when the order of the world is to lead men into righteousness; when to be victor and not victim is the main word of that order. No, the severity of the battle is to force us into self-forgetfulness; and this lazy resignation, this wailing patience, is mere self-remembrance. The true patience is activity of faith and hope and righteousness in the cause of men for the sake of God's love of them; is in glad proclamation of the gospel; is in wielding the sword of the Truth of God against all that injures mankind." The Gospel of Joy, Stopford Brooke. "Wise men ne'er sit and wail their loss, Shakespeare. NOVEMBER 6 "It is right to exercise a great deal of self-restraint in speaking of our troubles, and not to let the appetite for condolence grow on us." Studies in the Christian Character, Bishop Paget. "Carlyle says, 'My father had one virtue which I should try to imitate—he never spoke of what was disagreeable and past,' and my mother was the same; she turned her back at once upon the last months, which she put away for ever like a sealed volume." The Story of my Life, Augustus Hare. "Hacket's motto, 'Serve God and be cheerful.'" NOVEMBER 7 "It is to keep a man awake, to keep him alive to his own soul and its fixed design of righteousness, that the better part of moral and religious education is directed; not only that of words and doctors, but the sharp ferule of calamity under which we are all God's scholars till we die." The Life of R. L. Stevenson, Graham Balfour. "The best help is not to bear the troubles of others for them, but to inspire them with courage and energy to bear their burdens for themselves and meet the difficulties of life bravely." Lord Avebury. NOVEMBER 8 "We weigh ourselves down with burdens of sorrow which are the results of our selfish thoughts and selfish desires; and every one of these burdens lessens our power to live righteously in ourselves, and to live usefully for others." The Gospel of Joy, Stopford Brooke. "When you find yourself overpowered, as it were by melancholy, the best way is to go out, and do something kind to somebody or other." Letters of Spiritual Counsel, Keble. "The grand essentials of happiness are, something to do, something to love, and something to hope for." Chalmers. "Happiness is easy when we have learnt to renounce." Mme. de StaËl. NOVEMBER 9 "Self-interest is but the survival of the animal in us. Humanity only begins for man with self-surrender." Amiel's Journal. "What are the chief causes of Unrest? If you know yourself, you will answer Pride, Selfishness, Ambition. As you look back upon the past years of your life, is it not true that its unhappiness has chiefly come from the succession of personal mortifications and almost trivial disappointments which the intercourse of life has brought you? Great trials come at lengthened intervals, and we rise to breast them; but it is the petty friction of our everyday life with one another, the jar of business or of work, the discord of the domestic circle, the collapse of our ambition, the crossing of our will, the taking down of our conceit, which make inward peace impossible. Wounded vanity, then, disappointed hopes, unsatisfied selfishness—these are the old, vulgar, universal sources of man's unrest." Pax Vobiscum, Henry Drummond. NOVEMBER 10 "Now, what is the first step towards the winning of that rest? It is the giving up of self-will and the receiving of God's will as our own—and what that means is clear. It is to make our life at one with God's character, with justice and purity, with truth and love, with mercy and joy. It is the surrender of our own pleasure and the making of God's desire for us the master of our life. That is the first step—a direction of the soul to God. The second has to do with mankind. It is the replacing of all self-love by the love of our fellow-men; a direction of the soul to God through man. "These two ways are in reality one; and there is no other way, if we search the whole world over, in which we may attain rest. Simple as it sounds, it is the very last way many of us seek. We fight against this truth, and it has to be beaten into us by pain. Clear as it seems, it is a secret which is as difficult to discover as the Elixir of Life, but it is so difficult because we do not will to discover it." The Gospel of Joy, Stopford Brooke. NOVEMBER 11 "I cannot think but that the world would be better and brighter if our teachers would dwell on the Duty of Happiness as well as the Happiness of Duty." Lord Avebury. "Reflect upon your present blessings, of which every man has many; not on your past misfortunes, of which all men have some." Dickens. "Half the world is on the wrong scent in the pursuit of happiness. They think it consists in having and getting, and in being served by others. It consists in giving and in serving others." Henry Drummond. NOVEMBER 12 "He or she that is idle, be they of what condition they will, never so rich, so well allied, fortunate, happy—let them have all things in abundance and felicity that heart can wish and desire,—all contentment—so long as he, or she, or they are idle, they shall never be pleased, never well in mind or body, but weary still, sickly still, vexed still, loathing still, weeping, sighing, grieving, suspecting, offended with the world, with every object, wishing themselves gone or dead, or else carried away with some foolish phantasy or other." Burton. "We are never more discontented with others than when we are discontented with ourselves. The consciousness of wrong-doing makes us irritable, and our heart in its cunning quarrels with what is outside it, in order that it may deafen the clamour within." Amiel's Journal. "Look within. Within is the fountain of good, and it will ever bubble up, if thou wilt ever dig." Marcus Aurelius. NOVEMBER 13 "It is self-centred people that are lonely—the richer the gift, the richer the giver. No one was ever the worse for giving." F. F. MontrÉsor. "Misanthropy is always traceable to some vicious experience or imperception—to some false reading in the lore of right and wrong, or it proceeds from positive defects in ourselves, from a departure from things simple and pure, whereby we forfeit happiness without losing the sense of the proper basis on which it rests; yet even thus perverted by the prejudices of the world, we still find a soothing pleasure in contemplating that happiness which belongs to simplicity and virtue." Acton. "The largest and most comprehensive natures are generally the most cheerful, the most loving, the most hopeful, the most trustful. It is the wise man, of large vision, who is the quickest to discern the moral sunshine gleaming through the darkest cloud." NOVEMBER 14 "Contentment comes neither by culture nor by wishing; it is reconciliation with our lot, growing out of an inward superiority to our surroundings." J. K. McLean. "If you wish to be miserable, think about yourself, about what you want, what you like, what respect people ought to pay you; and then to you nothing will be pure. You will spoil everything you touch, you will make misery for yourself out of everything which God sends you: you will be as wretched as you choose." Charles Kingsley. "Do not let your head run upon that which is none of your own, but pick out some of the best of your circumstances, and consider how eagerly you would wish for them, were they not in your possession." Marcus Aurelius. NOVEMBER 15 "Man seeks pleasure and self—great unforeseen results follow. Man seeks God and others—and there follows pleasure." Arnold Toynbee. "The true felicity of life is to be free from perturbations; to understand our duties towards God and man; to enjoy the present without any serious dependence upon the future. Not to amuse ourselves with either hopes or fears, but to rest satisfied with what we have. The great blessings of mankind are within our reach; but we shut our eyes, and, like people in the dark, we fall foul upon the very thing we search for, without finding it. Tranquillity is the state of human perfection, it raises us as high as we can go, and makes every man his own supporter; whereas he that is borne up by anything else may fall. He that judges right and perseveres in it, enjoys a perpetual calm; he takes a true prospect of things; he observes an order, measure, a decorum in all his actions; he has a benevolence in his nature; and squares his life according to reason, and draws to himself love and admiration. Without a certain and unchangeable judgment, all the rest is but fluctuation. Liberty and serenity of mind must necessarily ensue upon the mastering of those things which either allure or affright us, when, instead of those flashy pleasures we shall find ourselves possessed of joys transporting and everlasting." Seneca. "Nothing can bring you peace but yourself, nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principle." Emerson. NOVEMBER 16 "Discontent is want of self-reliance; it is infirmity of will." Emerson. "To repel one's cross is to make it heavier." Amiel's Journal. "She had that rare sense which discerns what is unalterable; and submits to it without murmuring." George Eliot. "But for me, The Light of Asia, E. Arnold. NOVEMBER 17 "Another weight is the cares of life. We keep so many which we might shake off, that it is more than pitiful. We encourage fears for our life, our future, our wealth, till all our days are harassed out of peace, till the very notion of trust in God is an absurdity. We waste life away in petty details, spending infinite trouble on transient things, magnifying the gnats of life into elephants, tormenting ourselves and others over household disturbances, children, servants, little losses, foolish presentiments, our state of health, our finances,—till every one around us is infected with our disease of fret and worry. This is indeed to weight our soul. Our life with God, our work for man, are dragged to earth." The Gospel of Joy, Stopford Brooke. "I pack my troubles in as little compass as I can for myself, and never let them annoy others." Southey. NOVEMBER 18 "Once open the door to trouble, and its visits are three-fold; first, anticipation; second, in actual presence; third, in living it over again. Therefore never anticipate trouble, make as little of its presence as possible, forget it as soon as past." "It is better to employ our minds in bearing the ills we have, than in providing against those which may never befall us." La Rochefoucauld. "Let us be of good cheer, remembering that the misfortunes hardest to bear are those which never come." Lowell. "If you want to be cheerful, jes' set yer mind on it an' do it. Can't none of us help what traits we start out in life with, but we kin help what we end up with. When things first got to goin' wrong with me, I says, 'Oh, Lord, whatever comes, keep me from gettin' sour.'... Since then I've made it a practice to put all my worries down in the bottom of my heart, then set on the lid an' smile." Lovey Mary, Alice Hegan Rice. NOVEMBER 19 "We live not in our moments or our years— Archbishop Trench. "The secret of the joy of living is the proper appreciation of what we actually possess." NOVEMBER 20 "I sleep, I eat and drink, I read and meditate, I walk in my neighbour's pleasant fields, and see the varieties of natural beauties, and delight in all that in which God delights—that is, in virtue and wisdom, in the whole creation, and in God Himself. And he that hath so many causes of joy, and so great, is very much in love with sorrow and peevishness, who loses all these pleasures, and chooses to sit down upon his little handful of thorns." Jeremy Taylor. "Where much is given, much shall be required. There are never privileges to enjoy without corresponding duties to fulfil in return." Phillips Brooks. "Thou that hast given so much to me, George Herbert. NOVEMBER 21 ON LEAVING A HOME FOR INCURABLES "It didn't seem much to be able to walk away, to look back, to remember what we had seen; and yet how is it that we are not on our knees in gratitude and thankfulness for every active motion of the body, every word we speak, every intelligent experience and interest that passes through our minds?" Miss Thackeray. "Nothing raises the price of a blessing like its removal; whereas, it was its continuance which should have taught us its value." Hannah More. "O God, animate us to cheerfulness! May we have a joyful sense of our blessings, learn to look on the bright circumstances of our lot, and maintain a perpetual contentedness." Channing. NOVEMBER 22 "His eyes were bright with intelligence and trained powers of observation; and they were beautiful with kindliness, and with the well-bred habit of giving complete attention to other people and their affairs when he talked with them. He had a rare smile ... but the real beauty of such mouths as his comes from the lips being restrained into firm and sensitive lines, through years of self-control and fine sympathies.... Under-bred and ill-educated women are, as a general rule, much less good-looking than well-bred and highly-educated ones, especially in middle life; not because good features and pretty complexions belong to one class more than to another, but because nicer personal habits and stricter discipline of the mind do.... And if, into the bargain, a woman has nothing to talk about but her own and her neighbour's everyday affairs, and nothing to think about to keep her from continually talking, life, my dear child, is so full of little rubs, that constant chatter of this kind must almost certainly be constant grumbling. And constant grumbling makes an ugly under-lip, a forehead wrinkled with frowning, and dull eyes that see nothing but grievances." A Bad Habit, Mrs. Ewing. NOVEMBER 23 "Cultivate the habit of never putting disagreeables into words, even if it be only the weather which is in question; also of never drawing other people's attention to words or things which will irritate them." Lucy Soulsby. "A cucumber is bitter—Throw it away.—There are briars in the road—Turn aside from them.—This is enough. Do not add, And why were such things made in the world?" Marcus Aurelius. "Patience under adverse circumstances will often bring about favourable results, while complaint only accentuates and fixes the cause of complaint. Avoid mention of the disagreeable things that may come into your life. If you cannot be patient you can at least be silent. The secret of success lies not so much in knowing what to say as in what to avoid saying." NOVEMBER 24 "If you have not slept, or if you have slept, or if you have a headache, or sciatica, or leprosy, or thunder-stroke, I beseech you by all the angels to hold your peace, and not pollute the morning, to which all the housemates bring serene and pleasant thoughts, by corruptions and groans." Emerson. "Walk thy way greatly! So do thou endure C. Greene. "Our personal interests, by the force of their importunity, exclude all larger sympathies if these are not already matured before the conflict begins. In the press of the world we lose sight of life, if the life is not within us." Bishop Westcott. NOVEMBER 25 "There is a sect, unfortunately known to most in this land, under the denomination of Grumblers, whose fundamental maxim is—whatever is, is wrong. Wherever they are found, and they are found almost everywhere, they operate as a social poison; and though they contrive to embitter the enjoyments of everybody about them, they perpetually assume that themselves are the only aggrieved persons, and with such art as to be believed, till thoroughly known. They have often some excellent qualities, and the appearance of many amiable ones; but rank selfishness is their chief characteristic, accompanied by inordinate pride and vanity. They have a habit of laying the consequences of their own sins, whether of omission or of commission, upon others; and, covered with faults, they flatter themselves they 'walk blameless.' Where their selfishness, pride, or vanity are interested, they exhibit signs of boundless zeal, attention, and affection, to which those who are not aware of their motives, are the dupes; but the very moment their predominant feelings are offended, they change from April to December. They have smiles and tears at command for their holiday humour; but in 'the winter of their discontent,' there is no safety from the bitterest blasts. Their grievances are seldom real, or if real, are grossly exaggerated, and are generally attributed to themselves; for, absorbed in their own feelings, they are wonderful losers of opportunities. In conclusion, I think it would be for their advantage, as it certainly would be for that of the rest of the world, if they were made subject to some severe discipline; and I would suggest for the first, second, and third offence, bread and water and the treadmill, for one, two, and three months respectively; for the fourth offence, transportation for seven years to Boothia Felix, or some such climate; and any subsequent delinquency I would make capital, and cause the criminal to be shut up with some offender in equal degree, there to grumble each other to death." The Original, Thomas Walker. NOVEMBER 26 "'Tis a Dutch proverb that 'paint costs nothing,' such are its preserving qualities in damp climates. Well, sunshine costs less, yet is finer pigment. And so of cheerfulness, or a good temper, the more it is spent, the more of it remains." Emerson. "Mirth is like a flash of lightning that breaks through a gloom of clouds and glitters for a moment. Cheerfulness keeps up a kind of daylight in the mind and fills it with a steady and perpetual serenity." Addison. "Always laugh when you can; it is a cheap medicine. Merriment is a philosophy not well understood. It is the sunny side of existence." Byron. "Fortune will call at the smiling gate." Japanese Proverb. NOVEMBER 27 "The sense of humour is the oil of life's engine. Without it, the machinery creaks and groans. No lot is so hard, no aspect of things is so grim, but it relaxes before a hearty laugh." G. S. Merriam. "It was a novel with a purpose, and its purpose was to show that it is only by righteousness that men and nations prevail; also that there is much that is humorous in life as well as much that is holy, and that healing virtue lies in laughter as well as in prayers and tears." Isabel Carnaby, Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler. "I dare not tell you how high I rate humour, which is generally most fruitful in the highest and most solemn human spirits. Dante is full of it, Shakespeare, Cervantes, and almost all the greatest have been pregnant with this glorious power. You will find it even in the Gospel of Christ." Tennyson—a Memoir, by his Son. NOVEMBER 28 "Gird up the loins of your mind, be sober." 1 Peter i. 13. "A merry heart doeth good like a medicine." Prov. xvii. 22. "Gravity ... I mean simply that grave and serious way of looking at life which, while it never repels the true light-heartedness of pure and trustful hearts, welcomes into a manifest sympathy the souls of men who are oppressed and burdened, anxious and full of questions which for the time at least have banished all laughter from their faces.... Gravity has a delicate power of discrimination. It attracts all that it can help, and it repels all that could harm it or be harmed by it. It admits the earnest and simple with a cordial welcome. It shuts out the impertinent and insincere inexorably. "The gravity of which I speak is not inconsistent with the keenest perception of the ludicrous side of things. It is more than consistent with—it is even necessary to—humour. Humour involves the perception of the true proportions of life.... It has softened the bitterness of controversy a thousand times. You cannot encourage it too much. You cannot grow too familiar with the books of all ages which have in them the truest humour, for the truest humour is the bloom of the highest life. Read George Eliot and Thackeray, and, above all, Shakespeare. They will help you to keep from extravagances without fading into insipidity. They will preserve your gravity while they save you from pompous solemnity." Phillips Brooks. NOVEMBER 29 "There are few of us that are not rather ashamed of our sins and follies as we look out on the blessed morning sunlight, which comes to us like a bright-winged angel beckoning us to quit the old path of vanity that stretches its dreary length behind us." George Eliot. "That man is blessed who every day is permitted to behold anything so pure and serene as the western sky at sunset, while revolutions vex the world." Thoreau. "So then believe that every bird that sings, Coleridge. NOVEMBER 30 "No man receives the true culture of a man in whom the sensibility to the beautiful is not cherished; and I know of no condition in life from which it should be excluded. Of all luxuries this is cheapest and the most to hand; and it seems to me to be the most important to those conditions where coarse labour tends to give a grossness to the mind. From the diffusion of the sense of beauty in ancient Greece, and of the taste for music in modern Germany, we learn that the people at large may partake of refined gratifications which have hitherto been thought to be necessarily restricted to a few." Channing. "Music—there is something very wonderful in music. Words are wonderful enough, but music is more wonderful. It speaks not to our thoughts as words do, it speaks straight to our hearts and spirits, to the very core and root of our souls. Music soothes us, stirs us up; it puts noble feelings into us; it melts us to tears, we know not how; it is a language by itself, just as perfect, in its way, as speech, as words; just as divine, just as blessed. Music has been called the speech of angels; I will go farther, and call it the speech of God Himself. "The old Greeks, the wisest of all the heathen, made a point of teaching their children music, because, they said, it taught them not to be self-willed and fanciful, but to see the beauty of order, the usefulness of rule, the divineness of law." Good News of God Sermons, Charles Kingsley. DECEMBER 1 "Beauty is far too much neglected. It never belongs to criticism; it ought by right to be always bound up with creation. What it is, is hard to define; but, whenever anything in nature or in the thoughts and doings of man awakens a noble desire of seeing more of it; kindles pure love of it; seems to open out before us an infinite of it which allures us into an endless pursuit; stimulates reverence, and makes the heart leap with joy—there is beauty, and with it always is imagination, the shaping power. "The capacity for seeing beauty with the heart is one of the first necessities for such a life in a living world as I now urge upon you. When you see it, you always see more and more of it. And the more you see it, the more love and reverence you will feel in your heart; and the less you will care to criticise, and the more you will care to create. The world needs it now, and the glory of it, more almost than anything else, for nearly all the world has lost the power of seeing it. The monied men want it; the scientific men want it; the artists themselves have of late betrayed it; the business men want it. The middle-class and the aristocracy are almost destitute of it; the working men abide in conditions in which its outward forms are absent. To give them the power to see all that is lovely in nature, in human thought, in art, and in the noble acts of men—that is a great part of your work, and you should realise it, and shape it day by day." The Gospel of Joy, Stopford Brooke. DECEMBER 2 "To the body and mind which have been cramped by noxious work or company, nature is medicinal, and restores their tone. The tradesman, the attorney, comes out of the din and craft of the street, and sees the sky and the woods, and is a man again. In their eternal calm, he finds himself." Emerson. "Nature is loved by what is best in us." Emerson. "Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass under the trees on a summer's day, listening to the murmur of water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is by no means waste of time." Lord Avebury. DECEMBER 3 "The unobtrusive influences of earth, sea, and sky do their work. They pass imperceptibly and unsought into the soul." "... Outdoor sights The Making of Character, Professor MacCunn. "The cheerfulness of heart which springs up in us from the survey of Nature's works, is an admirable preparation for gratitude. The mind has gone a great way towards praise and thanksgiving that is filled with such a secret gladness: a grateful reflection on the Supreme Cause who produces it, sanctifies the soul, and gives it its proper value. Such an habitual disposition of mind consecrates every field and wood, turns an ordinary walk into a morning or evening sacrifice, and will improve those transient gleams of joy, which naturally brighten up and refresh the soul on such occasions, into an inviolable and perpetual state of bliss and happiness." Addison. DECEMBER 4 "There are only two rules for a successful holiday; the first is to earn it, the second is to have just enough holiday to make the prospect of work pleasant. Periods of rest we all need, but labour and not rest is the synonym of life. From these periods of rest we should return with a new appetite for the duties of common life. If we return dissatisfied, enervated, without heart for work, we may be sure our holiday has been a failure. If we return with the feeling that it is good to plunge into the mid-stream of life again, we may know by this sign that we are morally braced and strengthened by our exodus. The wise man will never allow his holiday to be a time of mere idleness. He will turn again to the books that interest him, he will touch the fringe of some science for which his holiday gives him opportunity, or he will plunge into physical recreation, and shake off the evil humours of the body in active exercise. The failure of holidays lies very much in the fact that nothing of this sort is attempted. The holiday is simply a series of aimless days, and the natural result is ennui. The supreme purpose of a holiday should be to regain possession of ourselves. He who does this comes back from his holiday as from a sanctuary." W. J. Dawson. DECEMBER 5 "But what strange art, what magic can dispose The Library, Crabbe. DECEMBER 6 "Narrowness may be met by recourse to the larger life revealed in Literature. There is no stronger plea for Biography, Drama, or Romance, or for any imaginative expansion of interests, than that founded upon the need for them as counteractives of the pitiable contractedness of outlook begotten of Division of Labour." The Making of Character, Professor MacCunn. "When I consider what some books have done for the world, and what they are doing, how they keep up our hope, awaken new courage and faith, soothe pain, give an ideal life to those whose hours are cold and hard, bind together distant ages and foreign lands, create new worlds of beauty, bring down truth from heaven; I give eternal blessings for this gift, and thank God for books." James Freeman Clarke. DECEMBER 7 "Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking makes what we read ours. We are of the ruminating kind, and it is not enough to cram ourselves with a great load of collections; unless we chew them over again they will not give us strength and nourishment." Locke. "In the course of our reading we should lay up in our minds a store of goodly thoughts in well-wrought words, which should be a living treasure of knowledge always with us, and from which, at various times, and amidst all the shifting of circumstances, we might be sure of drawing some comfort, guidance, and sympathy." Helps. DECEMBER 8 "We shall be agreed, I assume, that the object of Education is to train for life, and not for a special occupation; to train the whole man for all life, for life seen and unseen, for the unseen through the seen and in the seen; to train men in a word and not craftsmen, to train citizens for the Kingdom of God. As we believe in God and the world to come, these must be master thoughts. "We shall be agreed further that with this object in view, education must be so ordered as to awaken, to call into play, to develop, to direct, to strengthen powers of sense and intellect and spirit, not of one but of all: to give alertness and accuracy to observation: to supply fulness and precision to language: to arouse intelligent sympathy with every form of study and occupation: to set the many parts and aspects of the world before the growing scholar in their unity: to open the eyes of the heart to the eternal of which the temporal is the transitory sign. "We shall be agreed again that the elements of restraint alike and of personal development which enter into education will be used to harmonise the social and individual instincts, and to inspire the young, when impressions are most easy and most enduring, with the sense of fellowship and the passion for service. "We shall be agreed once more that the noblest fruit of education is character, and not acquirements: character which makes the simplest life rich and beneficent, character which for a Christian is determined by a true vision of God, of whom, through whom, unto whom, are all things." Christian Social Union Addresses, Bishop Westcott. DECEMBER 9 "The entire object of true education is to make people not merely do the right things, but enjoy the right things—not merely industrious, but to love industry—not merely learned, but to love knowledge—not merely pure, but to love purity—not merely just, but to hunger and thirst after justice." The Crown of Wild Olive, John Ruskin. "Our great mistake in education is, as it seems to me, the worship of book-learning—the confusion of instruction and education. We strain the memory instead of cultivating the mind.... The important thing is not so much that every child should be taught, as that every child should be given the wish to learn.... If we succeed in giving the love of learning, the learning itself is sure to follow." Lord Avebury. DECEMBER 10 "A happy childhood is one of the best gifts that parents have it in their power to bestow; second only to implanting the habit of obedience which puts the child in training for the habit of obeying himself, later on." Diana Tempest, Mary Cholmondeley. "The main duty of those who care for the young is to secure their wholesome, their entire growth; for health is just the development of the whole nature in its due sequences and proportions: first the blade—then the ear—then, and not till then, the full corn in the ear; and thus, as Dr. Temple wisely says, 'not to forget wisdom in teaching knowledge.' If the blade be forced, and usurp the capital it inherits; if it be robbed by you, its guardian, of its birthright, or squandered like a spendthrift, then there is not any ear, much less any corn; if the blade be blasted or dwarfed in our haste and greed for the full shock and its price, we spoil all three. It is not easy to keep this always before one's mind, that the young 'idea' is in a young body, and that healthy growth and harmless passing of the time are more to be cared for than what is vainly called accomplishment." Dr. John Brown. December 11 "Remember that the aim of your discipline should be to produce a self-governing being, not to produce a being to be governed by others. Were your children fated to pass their lives as slaves, you could not too much accustom them to slavery during their childhood; but as they are by-and-by to be free men, with no one to control their daily conduct, you cannot too much accustom them to self-control while they are still under your eye. This is it which makes the system of discipline by natural consequences so especially appropriate to the social state which we in England have now reached. In feudal times, when one of the chief evils the citizen had to fear was the anger of his superiors, it was well that during childhood parental vengeance should be a chief means of government. But now that the citizen has little to fear from any one—now that the good or evil which he experiences is mainly that which in the order of things results from his own conduct, he should from his first years begin to learn, experimentally, the good or evil consequences which naturally follow this or that conduct. Aim, therefore, to diminish the parental government, as fast as you can substitute for it in your child's mind that self-government arising from a foresight of results.... "All transitions are dangerous; and the most dangerous is the transition from the restraint of the family circle to the non-restraint of the world. Hence the importance of pursuing the policy we advocate, which, by cultivating a boy's faculty of self-restraint, by continually increasing the degree in which he is left to his self-restraint, and by so bringing him, step by step, to a state of unaided self-restraint, obliterates the ordinary sudden and hazardous change from externally-governed youth to internally-governed maturity. Let the history of your domestic rule typify, in little, the history of our political rule. At the outset, autocratic control, where control is really needful; by-and-by an incipient constitutionalism, in which the liberty of the subject gains some express recognition; successive extensions of this liberty of the subject, gradually ending in parental abdication." Education, Herbert Spencer. DECEMBER 12 "Self-government with tenderness,—here you have the condition of all authority over children. The child must discover in us no passion, no weakness of which he can make use; he must feel himself powerless to deceive or to trouble us; then he will recognise in us his natural superiors, and he will attach a special value to our kindness, because he will respect it. The child who can rouse in us anger, or impatience, or excitement, feels himself stronger than we, and a child only respects strength. The mother should consider herself as her child's sun, a changeless and ever radiant world, whither the small restless creature, quick at tears and laughter, light, fickle, passionate, full of storms, may come for fresh stores of light, warmth and electricity, of calm and of courage. The mother represents goodness, providence, law; that is to say, the divinity under that form of it which is accessible to childhood. If she is herself passionate, she will inculcate on her child a capricious and despotic God, or even several discordant gods. The religion of a child depends on what its mother and its father are, and not on what they say. The inner and unconscious ideal which guides their life is precisely what touches the child; their words, their remonstrances, their punishments, their bursts of feeling, even, are for him merely thunder and comedy; what they worship—this it is which his instinct divines and reflects. "The child sees what we are, behind what we wish to be. Hence his reputation as a physiognomist. He extends his power as far as he can with each of us; he is the most subtle of diplomatists. Unconsciously he passes under the influence of each person about him, and reflects it while transforming it after his own nature. He is a magnifying mirror. This is why the first principle of education is: train yourself; and the first rule to follow if you wish to possess yourself of a child's will is: master your own." Amiel's Journal. DECEMBER 13 "All wise teachers, I believe, recognise now that the best way of dealing with naughty children is to absorb their whole attention with some interest, which will not only leave no energy to spare for naughtiness, but will of itself tend to organise their minds, to subordinate mental elements to a purpose, and so to develop character." The Standard of Life, Mrs. Bernard Bosanquet. "Discipline, like the bridle in the hand of a good rider, should exercise its influence without appearing to do so, should be ever active, both as a support and as a restraint, yet seem to lie easily in hand. It must be always ready to check or to pull up, as occasion may require; and only when the horse is a runaway, should the action of the curb be perceptible." Guesses at Truth, edited by Archdeacon Hare. "If 'Pas trop gouverner' is the best rule in politics, it is equally true of discipline." Children's Rights, Kate Douglas Wiggin. DECEMBER 14 "Punishments, then, must in the first place be proportionate to the offence, lest, by an undiscriminating severity or an undiscriminating leniency, distinctions of moral desert be blurred or effaced. "Secondly, they must be analogous to the offence. The greedy must be starved, the insolent humbled, the idle compelled to work. Otherwise the imposition will not effectually go home to the offender. "Thirdly, punishments ought to be exemplary. Since they needs must come, it is not enough that they should simply open the eyes of the culprit, by giving him his deserts. They must be utilised as object-lessons for the behoof of that large class, the culprits in potentiality. "Fourthly, they ought to be economical. 'It is good that they should suffer,' we sometimes say; and so it is, so long as suffering, in itself always an evil, do not exceed the quantum that is lamentably needful, needful, that is, to vindicate authority, to stigmatise the offence, and to impress the offender. "Fifthly, punishments ought to be reformatory. Not only must they never, by vindictiveness in him who gives, and degradation in him who receives, impair the instincts and resolves for a better life; they must be devised in the belief, or at least in the hope, that these instincts and resolves exist, though they may be inhibited by the evil proclivities which punishment is meant to crush. The killing of what is bad must always look to the liberation of what is good. "Finally, punishments ought to insist upon, and to define indemnity, so that the wrong-doer, in things small or great, may be forced to repair, so far as this is possible, the irreparable mischief which offence implies." The Making of Character, Professor MacCunn. DECEMBER 15 "The gentleness of our Lord in rebuking, has an effect which gentleness often has, it awakens compunctions in those to whom it is shown. A child, who by severity is set on its defence or drawn into falsehood, is often melted into full confession by being loved and trusted more than it deserves." Pastor Pastorum, Henry Latham. "Our Lord's reply is again gentle; to be hard on a fault that was confessed would have dried up that confidence which flowed so freely." Pastor Pastorum, Henry Latham. "Better make penitents by gentleness than hypocrites by severity." S. Francis de Sales. DECEMBER 16 "Children have more need of models than of critics." Joubert. "It is by imitation, far more than by precept, that we learn everything; and what we learn thus we acquire not only more effectually, but more pleasantly. This forms our manners, our opinions, our lives." Burke. "Meanwhile there is much that we can do. It need not be said that home is the most effective school of character. On the duties of home I cannot dwell now. But there is a more general influence of common tone and habits of which serious account ought to be taken. We are at all times unconsciously educating others by our own example. Our standard of duty in the discharge of business and in the use of leisure necessarily influences the desires and the actions of those who look to us for guidance. The young are quick-eyed critics, and the sight of quiet devotion to work, of pleasure sought in common things—and all truly precious things are common—will enforce surely and silently some great lessons of school. We do not, as far as I can judge, rate highly enough our responsibility for the customary practices of society. Not infrequently we neutralise our teaching through want of imagination by failing to follow out the consequences of some traditional custom. We seem to be inconsiderate when we are only ignorant." Bishop Westcott. DECEMBER 17 "Christ did not denounce wealth any more than He denounced pauperism. He did not abhor money; He used it. He did not abhor the company of rich men; He sought it. He did not invariably scorn or even resent a certain profuseness of expenditure. With a fine discrimination, He, while habitually discouraging it, yet recognised that, here and there, there was place for it. What he denounced was the love of, the lust of riches; the vulgar snobbishness that chose exclusively the fellowship or the ways of rich men; the habit of extravagance; in one word, greed and luxury and self-indulgence. He taught men, first of all and last of all, that they were stewards, that in the final analysis of men and things neither they nor theirs were their own. We must not only affirm the brotherhood of man: we must live it. For then the State, and in the State, the home, the Church, and the individual shall become the incarnation of a regenerated humanity, and earth, this earth, our earth, here and to-day, the vestibule of heaven!" The Citizen in Relation to the Industrial Situation, DECEMBER 18 "The expenditure of money is no easy matter. It is wrong to let the poor want. It is wrong to starve the nature which asks for other things than food. There is only one principle of guidance. Whatever is done must be done in thought for others, and not in thought for ourselves. Money on luxuries which end in ourselves is wrongly spent; money spent on luxuries—on scents, sounds and sights—which directly or indirectly pass on to others is rightly spent. The limit of luxury is the power of sharing." The Service of God, Canon Barnett. "All that depends on individual choice—our recreations, our expenditure—can be brought to one test, which we are generally able to apply: Does this or that help me to do my work more effectively? To us most literally, even if the confession overwhelms us with shame, whatsoever is not of faith is sin." Bishop Westcott. "Imitate a little child.... While you gather and use this world's goods with one hand, always let your other be fast in your Heavenly Father's hand, and look round from time to time, and make sure that He is satisfied." S. Francis de Sales. DECEMBER 19 "I will take heart to lay down what I hold to be a fundamental rule, that, while we endeavour to gain the largest and keenest power of appreciating all that is noblest in nature and art and literature, we must seek to live on as little as will support the full vigour of our life and work. The standard cannot be fixed. It will necessarily vary, within certain limits, according to the nature and office of each man. But generally we shall strive diligently to suppress all wants which do not tend through their satisfaction to create a nobler type of manhood, and individually we shall recognise no wants which do not express what is required for the due cultivation of our own powers and the fulfilment of that which we owe to others. We shall guard ourselves against the temptations of artificial wants which the ingenuity of producers offers in seductive forms. We shall refuse to admit that the caprice of fashion represents any valuable element in our constitution, or calls into play any faculties which would otherwise be unused, or encourages industry. On the contrary, we shall see in the dignity and changelessness of Eastern dress a typical condemnation of our restless inconstancy. We shall perceive, and act as perceiving, that the passion for novelty is morally and materially wasteful: that it distracts and confuses our power of appreciating true beauty: that it tends to the constant displacement of labour: that it produces instability both in the manufacture and in the sale of goods to the detriment of economy. We shall, to sum up all in one master-principle, estimate value and costs in terms of life, as Mr. Ruskin has taught us; and, accepting this principle, we shall seek nothing of which the cost to the producer so measured exceeds the gain to ourselves." Christian Social Union Addresses, Bishop Westcott. DECEMBER 20 "If money be not thy servant, it will be thy master. The covetous man cannot so properly be said to possess wealth, as that wealth may be said to possess him." Bacon. "The covetous man is like the camel, with a great haunch on his back; heaven's gate must be made higher and broader, or he will hardly get in." Adams. "Who shuts his hand hath lost his gold, George Herbert. "Wealth in every form, material, intellectual, moral, has to be administered for the common good. God only can say of any possession 'My own.'" Bishop Westcott. DECEMBER 21 "How the sting of poverty, or small means, is gone when one keeps house for one's own comfort, and not for the comfort of one's neighbours." Dinah Maria Muloch. "I wish that more of us had the courage to be poor; that the world had not gone mad after fashion and display; but so it is, and the blessings we might have are lost in the effort to get those which lie outside the possible." Alice Carey. "To have what we want is riches; but to be able to do without is power." George MacDonald. DECEMBER 22 "The truest hospitality is shown not in the effort to entertain, but in the depth of welcome. What a guest loves to come for, and come again, is not the meal, but those who sit at the meal. If we remembered this, more homes would be habitually thrown open to win the benedictions upon hospitality. It is our ceremony, not our poverty, it is self-consciousness oftener than inability to be agreeable that makes us willing to live cloistered. Seldom is it that pleasantest homes to visit are the richest. The real compliment is not to apologise for the simple fare. That means trust, and trust is better than fried oysters." W. C. Gannett. "Hospitality must be for service, and not for show, or it pulls down the host." Emerson. DECEMBER 23 "I pray you, O excellent wife, not to cumber yourself and me to get a rich dinner for this man or this woman who has alighted at our gate, nor a bedchamber made ready at too great a cost. These things, if they are curious in, they can get for a dollar at any village. But let this stranger, if he will, in your looks, in your accent and behaviour, read in your heart and earnestness, your thought and will, which he cannot buy at any price in any village or city, and which he may well travel fifty miles and dine sparely and sleep hard in order to behold. Certainly, let the board be spread and let the bed be dressed for the traveller; but let not the emphasis of hospitality lie in these things. Honour to the house where they are simple to the verge of hardship, so that there the intellect is awake and reads the laws of the universe." Emerson. "I should count myself fortunate if my home were remembered for some inspiring quality of faith, charity and aspiring intelligence." Hamilton W. Mabie. DECEMBER 24 A CHRISTMAS CAROL "It chanced upon the merry, merry Christmas Eve, Charles Kingsley. DECEMBER 25 "And now once more comes Christmas Day. Once more, borne abroad on the words of simple-minded shepherds, runs the story. God and man have met, in visible, actual union, in a life which is both human and divine.... Lift up yourselves to the great meaning of the Day, and dare to think of your Humanity as something so sublimely precious that it is worthy of being made an offering to God. Count it a privilege to make that offering as complete as possible, keeping nothing back, and then go out to the pleasures and duties of your life, having been truly born anew into His Divinity, as He was born into our Humanity, on Christmas Day." Phillips Brooks. "Let not the hearts, whose sorrow cannot call Coleridge. DECEMBER 26 "But Christmas is not only the mile-mark of another year, moving us to thoughts of self-examination: it is a season, from all its associations, whether domestic or religious, suggesting thoughts of joy. A man dissatisfied with his endeavours is a man tempted to sadness. And in the midst of the winter, when his life runs lowest and he is reminded of the empty chairs of his beloved, it is well he should be condemned to this fashion of the smiling face. Noble disappointment, noble self-denial, are not to be admired, not even to be pardoned, if they bring bitterness. It is one thing to enter the kingdom of heaven maimed; another to maim yourself and stay without. And the kingdom of heaven is of the childlike, of those who are easy to please, who love and who give pleasure." Across the Plains, R. L. Stevenson. DECEMBER 27 "To grow old is more difficult than to die, because to renounce a good once and for all, costs less than to renew the sacrifice day by day and in detail. To bear with one's own decay, to accept one's own lessening capacity, is a harder and rarer virtue than to face death. There is a halo round tragic and premature death; there is but a long sadness in declining strength. But look closer: so studied, a resigned and religious old age will often move us more than the heroic ardour of young years. The maturity of the soul is worth more than the first brilliance of its faculties, or the plenitude of its strength, and the eternal in us can but profit from all the ravages made by time. There is comfort in this thought." Amiel's Journal. "To know how to grow old is the master-work of wisdom, and one of the most difficult chapters in the great art of living." Amiel's Journal. DECEMBER 28 "We must not take the faults of our youth into our old age; for old age brings with it its own faults." Goethe. "It is only to the finest natures that age gives an added beauty and distinction; for the most persistent self has then worked its way to the surface, having modified the expression, and to some extent, the features, to its own likeness." Mathilde Blind. "The most beautiful existence, it seems to me, would be that of a river which should get through all its rapids and waterfalls not far from its rising, and should then in its widening course form a succession of rich valleys, and in each of them a lake equally but diversely beautiful, to end, after the plains of age were past, in the ocean where all that is weary and heavy-laden comes to seek for rest." Amiel's Journal. DECEMBER 29 "Neither toil, nor the end of toil in oneself or in the world, is all vanity, in spite of the preacher; but there is enough vanity in both to make one sit loose to them. What seems to grow fairer to me as life goes by is the love and grace and tenderness of it; not its wit and cleverness and grandeur of knowledge—grand as knowledge is—but just the laughter of little children and the friendship of friends, the cosy talk by the fireside, the sight of flowers and the sound of music." J. R. Green. "Life is sweet, brother.... There's night and day, brother, both sweet things; sun, moon and stars, brother, all sweet things; there's likewise the wind on the heath. Life is very sweet, brother; who would wish to die?" Borrow. DECEMBER 30 "Be patient still; suffer us yet a while longer; with our broken purposes of good, with our idle endeavours against evil, suffer us a while longer to endure, and (if it may be) help us to do better. Bless to us our extraordinary mercies; if the day come when these must be taken, brace us to play the man under affliction. Be with our friends; be with ourselves. Go with each of us to rest; if any dream, be their dreams quiet; if any awake, temper to them the dark hours of watching; and when the day returns, return to us our sun and comforter, and call us up with morning faces and with morning hearts—eager to labour—eager to be happy, if happiness shall be our portion—and if the day be marked for sorrow, strong to endure it." Vailima Prayers, R. L. Stevenson. DECEMBER 31 "Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky Tennyson. |
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