PREFACE (continued 4)

Christian Social Union Addresses, Bishop Westcott.

The Christian Law

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.

Trustees

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.

"Not to Destroy, but to Fulfil"

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.

Religion in Daily Life

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.

Unfelt Creeds

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.

Fasting

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.

Fasting

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.

The Great Law of Love

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.

Soldiers of the same Army

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.

By their Works

SEPTEMBER 29

"Call him not heretic whose works attest His faith in goodness by no creed confessed. Whatever in love's name is truly done To free the bound and lift the fallen one Is done to Christ. Whoso in deed and word Is not against Him labours for our Lord. When He, who, sad and weary, longing sore For love's sweet service, sought the sisters' door, One saw the heavenly, one the human guest, But who shall say which loved the Master best?"

Whittier.

"Hast thou made much of words, and forms, and tests, And thought but little of the peace and love,— His Gospel to the poor? Dost thou condemn Thy brother, looking down, in pride of heart, On each poor wanderer from the fold of Truth?... Go thy way!— Take Heaven's own armour for the heavenly strife, Welcome all helpers in thy war with sin ... And learn through all the future of thy years To form thy life in likeness of thy Lord's!"

Plumptre.

Faith

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.

A New Creed

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 has been called

"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.

The Programme of Christianity

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: To build up the broken-hearted: To proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to them that are bound: To proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord, and the day of vengeance of our God: To comfort all that mourn: To appoint unto them that mourn in Zion, to give unto them— Beauty for Ashes, The Oil of Joy for Mourning, The Garment of Praise for the Spirit of Heaviness."

Henry Drummond.

The Lord's Supper

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.

Nominal Christians

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.

Manifestations of God

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.

Manifestations of God

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.

Manifestations of God

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.

Prayer

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.

Prayer

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 touches Him who made it." "Speak to Him, thou, for He hears, and Spirit with Spirit can meet— Closer is He than breathing, and nearer than hands and feet."

And

"More things are wrought by prayer Than this world dreams of."

Tennyson—a Memoir, by his Son.

Prayer

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.

Prayer

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.

Prayer

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.

Prayer

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, The freshness of the garden they might share, Through the long day an heavenly freshness keep, If, knowing how the day and the day's glare Must beat upon them, we would largely steep And water them betimes with dews of Prayer."

Trench.

Self-examination

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.

Confession of Sin

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.

Morbid Introspectiveness

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.

Introspection

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 Were to lose all."

Tennyson.

Our True Selves and Our Traditional Selves

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.

Un-self-consciousness

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.

Un-self-consciousness

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.

Love the Destroyer of Sin

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."

Love the Destroyer of Sin

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.

Mental Hygiene

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.

"As Night Enters, Darkness Departs"

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.

Stepping-stones

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 To one clear harp in divers tones, That men may rise on stepping stones Of their dead selves to higher things."

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.

Never Lose a Battle

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.

Living in the Present

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.

Day by Day

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 heavens are calling you and wheel around you, Displaying to you their eternal beauties, And still your eye is looking on the ground."

The Divine Comedy, Dante.

"To-day is a king in disguise: let us unmask the king as he passes."

Emerson.

Day by Day

OCTOBER 29

"Lo, here hath been dawning Another blue day; Think, wilt thou let it Slip useless away!"

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 'Twixt heaven and thee; block it not with delays: But perfect all before thou sleep'st; then say, 'There's one Sun more strung on my Bead of days.' What's good store up for Joy, the bad, well scann'd, Wash off with tears, and get thy Master's hand."

Henry Vaughan.

Gaining or Losing Ground

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, That makes the path before him always bright. "And through the heat of conflict, keeps the law In calmness made, and sees what he foresaw. "Who, not content that former worth stand fast, Looks forward persevering to the last, From well to better, daily self-surpassed."

The Happy Warrior, Wordsworth.

Pressing Forward

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.

The Evil of Brooding

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."

Aspiration

NOVEMBER 2

"If a man constantly aspires, is he not elevated?"

Thoreau.

"The thing we long for,—That we are For one transcendent moment! Before the Present, poor and bare, Can make its sneering comment! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Longing is God's fresh heavenward will With our poor earthward striving; We quench it that we may be still Content with merely living; But would we learn that heart's full scope Which we are hourly wronging, Our lives must climb from hope to hope And realise our longing! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ah! let us hope that to our praise Good God not only reckons The moments when we tread His ways, But when the spirit beckons— That some slight good is also wrought Beyond self-satisfaction, When we are simply good in thought, Howe'er we fail in action."

Lowell.

There shall never be one Lost Good

NOVEMBER 3

"Therefore to whom turn I but to Thee, the ineffable Name? Builder and Maker, Thou, of houses not made with hands! What, have fear of change from Thee Who art ever the same? Doubt that Thy power can fill the heart that Thy power expands? There shall never be one lost good! What was shall live as before; The evil is null, is nought, is silence implying sound; What was good, shall be good, with, for evil, so much good more; On the earth the broken arcs; in the heaven a perfect round. All we have willed or hoped or dreamed of good, shall exist, Not its semblance, but itself; no beauty, nor good, nor power Whose voice has gone forth, but each survives for the melodist, When eternity confirms the conception of an hour. The high that proved too high, the heroic for earth too hard, The passion that left the ground to lose itself in the sky, Are music sent up to God by the lover and the bard; Enough that He heard it once; we shall hear it by-and-bye."

Abt Vogler, Robert Browning.

Struggling

NOVEMBER 4

"If what shone afar so grand Turn to nothing in thy hand, On again, the virtue lies In the struggle, not the prize."

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 Wiser for falling."

Tennyson.

True Patience

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, But cheerly seek how to redress their harms. What though the mast be now blown overboard, The cable broke, the holding anchor lost, And half our sailors swallowed in the flood— Yet lives our Pilot still."

Shakespeare.

The Appetite for Condolence

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.'"

"The Sharp Ferule of Calamity"

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.

The Essentials of Happiness

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.

Unrest

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.

Rest

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.

The Duty of Happiness

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.

Discontent

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.

Self-centred People

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."

Contentment

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.

Contentment

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.

Discontent

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, What good I see, humbly I seek to do, And live obedient to the Law, in trust That what will come and shall come, must come well."

The Light of Asia, E. Arnold.

Magnifying Troubles

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.

Bearing Trouble

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.

The Secret of the Joy of Living

NOVEMBER 19

"We live not in our moments or our years— The Present we fling from us like the rind Of some sweet Future, which we after find Bitter to taste, or bind that in with fears, And water it beforehand with our tears— Vain tears for that which never may arrive: Meanwhile the joy whereby we ought to live, Neglected or unheeded, disappears. Wiser it were to welcome and make ours Whate'er of good, tho' small, the present brings— Kind greetings, sunshine, song of birds, and flowers, With a child's pure delight in little things; And of the griefs unborn to rest secure, Knowing that mercy ever will endure."

Archbishop Trench.

"The secret of the joy of living is the proper appreciation of what we actually possess."

Causes of Thankfulness

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, Give one thing more—a grateful heart."

George Herbert.

Causes of Thankfulness

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.

Grumbling

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.

Grumbling

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."

Grumbling

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 Thy small, thy narrow, dwarfed and cankered life, That soothing Patience shall be half the cure For ills that lesser souls keep sore with strife."

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.

Grumblers

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.

Cheerfulness

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.

Humour

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.

Humour

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.

Beauties of Nature

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, And every flower that stars the elastic sod, And every thought the happy summer brings To the pure spirit is a word of God."

Coleridge.

Sense of the Beautiful

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.

The Gospel of Beauty

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.

Nature

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.

Nature

DECEMBER 3

"The unobtrusive influences of earth, sea, and sky do their work. They pass imperceptibly and unsought into the soul."

"... Outdoor sights Sweep gradual gospels in." "Bid me work, but may no tie Keep me from the open sky" (Barnes).

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.

Holidays

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.

Books

DECEMBER 5

"But what strange art, what magic can dispose The troubled mind to change its native woes? Or lead us willing from ourselves, to see Others more wretched, more undone than we? This, Books can do;—nor this alone, they give New views to life, and teach us how to live; They soothe the grieved, the stubborn they chastise, Fools they admonish, and confirm the wise: Their aid they yield to all: they never shun The man of sorrow, nor the wretch undone: Unlike the hard, the selfish and the proud, They fly not sullen from the suppliant crowd; Nor tell to various people various things, But show to subjects, what they show to kings."

The Library, Crabbe.

Books

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.

Reading

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.

The Object of Education

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.

The Object of Education

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.

A Happy Childhood

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.

Moral Education

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.

Moral Education

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.

Moral Education

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.

Punishment

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.

Rebuking

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.

Example

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.

Wealth

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, Bishop Potter.

The Limit of Luxury

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."