PREFACE (continued 3)

Dr. John Watson.

Public Opinion

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.

Spiritual Balance and Proportion

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.

Temperance

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.

Balance

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."

Balance

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.

Sound Judgment

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.

Sound Judgment

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.

Sound Judgment

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.

Harsh Judgment

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; We judge by a word or a fancied slight; We give our fellows a mere glance each, Then brand them for ever black or white. "Meanwhile God's patience is o'er us all, He probes for motives, He waits for years; No moment with Him is mean or small, And His scales are turned by the weight of tears."

Judging

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.

Biassed Judgments

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.

Judging

JUNE 27

"The sinner's own fault? So it was. If every own fault found us out, Dogged us and hedged us round about, What comfort should we take because Not half our due we thus wrung out? "Clearly his own fault. Yet I think My fault in part, who did not pray But lagged and would not lead the way. I, haply, proved his missing link. God help us both to mind and pray."

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, Mrs. Hodgson Burnett.

"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.

Justice and Mercy

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 In others, in thyself may be; All dust is frail, all flesh is weak; Be thou the true man thou dost seek."

Whittier.

Judging

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.

Contemptuousness

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.

False Impressions

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 Is ever the blackest of lies."

Tennyson.

Truth

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 The truth thou hast that all may share. Be bold, proclaim it everywhere, They only live who dare."

Sir Lewis Morris.

"The mind can only repose upon the stability of truth."

Dr. Johnson.

Truthfulness

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.

Accuracy

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.

Truthfulness

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.

Truthfulness

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.

Truthfulness

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.

Gossip

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 A host of tongues; but let ill tidings tell Themselves when they be felt."

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.

Back-biting

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.

Gossip

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, Only the base believe what the base only utter."

"No word, once spoken, returneth Even if uttered unwillingly— Shall God excuse our rashness? That which is done, that abides."

Charles Kingsley.

Egotism

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.

Conversation

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.

Conversation

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."

Argument

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.

Argument

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 Error a fault, and truth discourtesy."

George Herbert.

"To speak wisely may not always be easy, but not to speak ill requires only silence."

Argument

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.

An Open Mind

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.

Tolerance

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.

Right Use of Speech

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.

Thoughts

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.

Culture

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.

Courtesy

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.

Courtesy

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.

Courtesy

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.

Manners

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 Where noble manners veil defect."

C. Patmore.

"The gentle minde by gentle deeds is knowne; For a man by nothing is so well bewrayed As by his manners."

Spenser.

"True politeness is perfect ease and freedom. It simply consists in treating others just as you love to be treated yourself."

Lord Chesterfield.

Manners

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."

Manners

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.

Manners

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.

Influence

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.

Influence

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.

"Quench not the Smoking Flax"

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.

"Quench not the Smoking Flax"

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.

Influence

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.

Influence

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.

Friendship

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.

Friendship

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.

Friendship

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.

Friendship

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.

Friendship

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, He will help thee in thy need. If thou sorrow, he will weep. If thou wake, he cannot sleep. Thus in every grief in heart He with thee doth bear a part."

Shakespeare.

Friendship

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.

Friendship

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.

Friendship

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.

Friendship

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 Wrongs himself more, and ever bears about A silent court of justice in his breast, Himself the judge and jury, and himself The prisoner at the bar, ever condemned."

Tennyson.

Friendship

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."

Friendship

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."

Friendship

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.

Friendship

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 Comes like a calm to the toss'd mariner."

Euripides.

Friendship

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.

Friendship

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.

Friendship

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.

Friendship

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.

Friendship

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.

Friendship

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.

Friendship

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.

Jealousy

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.

Jealousy

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.

Jealousy

AUGUST 26

"What state of mind can be so blest, As love that warms the gentle brest; Two souls in one; the same desire To grant the bliss, and to require? If in this heaven a hell we find, 'Tis all from thee, O Jealousie! Thou tyrant, tyrant of the mind. "All other ills, tho' sharp they prove, Serve to refine a perfect love; In absence, or unkind disdain Sweet hope relieves the lover's pain; But O! no cure but death we find To sett us free From Jealousie, Thou tyrant, tyrant of the mind. "False in thy glass all objects are, Some set too near, and some too far: Thou art the fire of endless might, The fire that burns and gives no light. All torments of the damned, we find In only thee, O Jealousie; Thou tyrant, tyrant of the mind."

Dryden.

Love and Remorse

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.

Love and Remorse

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.

Love and Remorse

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 We love more deeply than we know! The rain that fell upon the height Too gently to be called delight, Within the dark vale reappears As a wild cataract of tears; And love in life should strive to see Sometimes what love in death would be!"

Coventry Patmore.

Dissension

AUGUST 30

"Alas! how light a cause may move Dissension between hearts that love! Hearts that the world in vain had tried, And sorrow but more closely tied; That stood the storm when waves were rough, Yet in a sunny hour fall off, Like ships that have gone down at sea, When heaven was all tranquillity! A something, light as air—a look, A word unkind or wrongly taken— Oh! love that tempests never shook, A breath, a touch like this has shaken; And ruder words will soon rush in To spread the breach that words begin; And eyes forget the gentle ray They wore in courtship's smiling day; And voices lose the tone that shed A tenderness round all they said; Till fast declining, one by one, The sweetnesses of love are gone, And hearts, so lately mingled, seem Like broken clouds—or like the stream That smiling left the mountain's brow, As though its waters ne'er could sever, Yet, ere it reach the plain below, Breaks into floods, that part for ever. O you that have the charge of Love, Keep him in rosy bondage bound!"

Lalla Rookh, T. Moore.

Love

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! God is too near above, the Grave, beneath: And all our moments breathe Too quick in mysteries of life and death, For such a word. The eternities avenge Affections light of range; There comes no change to justify that change, Whatever comes,—Loved once."

E. B. Browning.

Unrequited Love

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.

Unrequited Love

SEPTEMBER 2

"Infancy? What if the rose-streak of morning Pale and depart in a passion of tears? Once to have hoped is no matter for scorning: Love once: e'en love's disappointment endears, A moment's success pays the failure of years."

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.

Bereavement

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.

Bereavement

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.

Death of Young Children

SEPTEMBER 5

"Nothing is left or lost, nothing of good Or lovely; but whatever its first springs Has drawn from God, returns to Him again."

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.

The Dead

SEPTEMBER 6

"The dead abide with us! Though stark and cold Earth seems to grip them, they are with us still:— They have forged our chains of being for good or ill And their invisible hands these hands yet hold. Our perishable bodies are the mould In which their strong imperishable will— Mortality's deep yearning to fulfil— Hath grown incorporate through dim time untold. "Vibrations infinite of life in death, As a star's travelling light survives its star! So may we hold our lives, that when we are The fate of those who then will draw this breath, They shall not drag us to their judgment bar, And curse the heritage which we bequeath."

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.

The Dead

SEPTEMBER 7

"I with uncovered head Salute the sacred dead, Who went and who return not. Say not so! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . We rather seem the dead that stayed behind. Blow, trumpets, all your exaltations blow! For never shall their aureoled presence lack: I see them muster in a gleaming row, With ever-youthful brows that nobler show; We find in our dull road their shining track: In every nobler mood We feel the orient of their spirit glow, Part of our life's unalterable good, Of all our saintlier aspiration: They come transfigured back, Secure from change in their high-hearted ways, Beautiful evermore, and with the rays Of morn on their white Shields of Expectation."

James Russell Lowell.

The Dead

SEPTEMBER 8

"And yet, dear heart! remembering thee, Am I not richer than of old? Safe in thy immortality, What change can reach the wealth I hold? What chance can mar the pearl and gold Thy love hath left in trust for me? And while in life's long afternoon, Where cool and long the shadows grow, I walk to meet the night that soon Shall shape and shadow overflow, I cannot feel that thou art far, Since near at need the angels are; And when the sunset gates unbar, Shall I not see thee waiting stand, And, white against the evening star, The welcome of thy beckoning hand?"

John Greenleaf Whittier.

The Dead

SEPTEMBER 9

"Lord, make me one with Thine own faithful ones, Thy Saints who love Thee, and are loved by Thee; Till the day break and till the shadows flee, At one with them in alms and orisons; At one with him who toils and him who runs, And him who yearns for union yet to be; At one with all who throng the crystal sea, And wait the setting of our moons and suns. Ah, my beloved ones gone on before, Who looked not back with hand upon the plough! If beautiful to me while still in sight, How beautiful must be your aspects now; Your unknown, well-known aspects in that light, Which clouds shall never cloud for evermore!"

Christina Rossetti.

Death

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.

Crossing the Bar

September 11

"Sunset and evening star, And one clear call for me! And may there be no moaning of the bar, When I put out to sea. "But such a tide as moving seems asleep, Too full for sound and foam, When that which drew from out the boundless deep Turns again home. "Twilight and evening bell, And after that the dark! And may there be no sadness of farewell When I embark; "For, tho' from out our bourne of Time and Place The flood may bear me far, I hope to see my Pilot face to face When I have crost the bar."

Tennyson.

Life after Death

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, But know that thou and I must part; And when, or how, or where we met, I own to me's a secret yet. "Life! we have been long together, Through pleasant and through cloudy weather; 'Tis hard to part when friends are dear; Perhaps 'twill cost a sigh, a tear;— Then steal away, give little warning, Choose thine own time; Say not Good Night, but in some brighter clime Bid me Good Morning!"

A. L. Barbauld.

Bearing Sorrow

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 And live above them with a living world."

George Eliot.

Bearing Sorrow

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.

Bearing Sorrow

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.

Bearing Sorrow

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.

The Meaning of Religion

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.

Pure Religion

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.

The Christian Law

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."