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Title: Daily Thoughts - selected from the writings of Charles Kingsley by his wife
Author: Kingsley, Charles, 1819-1875
Language: English
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Transcribed from the 1885 Macmillan and Co. edition by David Price, email
ccx074@pglaf.org
DAILY THOUGHTS
Selected from the Writings
OF
CHARLES KINGSLEY
BY HIS WIFE
SECOND EDITION
London
MACMILLAN AND CO.
1885
_Printed by_ R. & R. CLARK, _Edinburgh_.
_This little Volume_, _selected from the MS. Note-books_, _Sermons and
Private Letters_, _as well as from the published Works of my Husband_,
_is dedicated to our children_, _and to all who feel the blessing of his
influence on their daily life and thought_.
_F. E. K._
_July_ 10, 1884.
January.
Welcome, wild North-easter!
Shame it is to see
Odes to every zephyr:
Ne'er a verse to thee.
. . . . .
Tired we are of summer,
Tired of gaudy glare,
Showers soft and steaming,
Hot and breathless air.
Tired of listless dreaming
Through the lazy day:
Jovial wind of winter
Turn us out to play!
Sweep the golden reed-beds;
Crisp the lazy dyke;
Hunger into madness
Every plunging pike.
Fill the lake with wild-fowl;
Fill the marsh with snipe;
While on dreary moorlands
Lonely curlew pipe.
Through the black fir forest
Thunder harsh and dry,
Shattering down the snow-flakes
Off the curdled sky.
. . . . .
Come; and strong within us
Stir the Viking's blood;
Bracing brain and sinew:
Blow, thou wind of God!
_Ode to North-east Wind_.
New Year's Day. January 1. {3}
Gather you, gather you, angels of God--
Freedom and Mercy and Truth;
Come! for the earth is grown coward and old;
Come down and renew us her youth.
Wisdom, Self-sacrifice, Daring, and Love,
Haste to the battlefield, stoop from above,
To the day of the Lord at hand!
_The Day of the Lord_. 1847.
The Nineteenth Century. January 2.
Now, and at no other time: in this same nineteenth century lies our work.
Let us thank God that we are here now, and joyfully try to understand
_where_ we are, and what our work is _here_. As for all superstitions
about "the good old times," and fancies that _they_ belonged to God,
while this age belongs only to man, blind chance, and the evil one, let
us cast them from us as the suggestions of an evil lying spirit, as the
natural parents of laziness, pedantry, fanaticism, and unbelief. And
therefore let us not fear to ask the meaning of this present day, and of
all its different voices--the pressing, noisy, complex present, where our
workfield lies, the most intricate of all states of society, and of all
schools of literature yet known.
_Introductory Lecture_, _Queen's College_.
1848.
Forward. January 3.
Let us forward. God leads us. Though blind, shall we be afraid to
follow? I do not see my way: I do not care to: but I know that He sees
His way, and that I see Him.
_Letters and Memories_. 1848.
The Noble Life. January 4.
Be good, sweet maid, and let who will be clever;
Do noble things, not dream them all day long;
And so make life, and death, and that For Ever
One grand sweet song.
_A Farewell_. 1856.
Live in the present that you may be ready for the future.
_MS._
Duty and Sentiment. January 5.
God demands not _sentiment_ but _justice_. The Bible knows nothing of
"the religious sentiments and emotions" whereof we hear so much talk
nowadays. It speaks of _Duty_. "Beloved, if God so loved us, we _ought_
to love one another."
_National Sermons_. 1851.
The Everlasting Harmony. January 6.
If thou art living a righteous and useful life, doing thy duty orderly
and cheerfully where God has put thee, then thou in thy humble place art
humbly copying the everlasting harmony and melody which is in heaven; the
everlasting harmony and melody by which God made the world and all that
therein is--and behold it was very good--in the day when the morning
stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy over the new-
created earth, which God had made to be a pattern of His own perfection.
_Good News of God Sermons_. 1859.
The Keys of Death and Hell. January 7.
Fear not. Christ has the keys of death and hell. He has been through
them and is alive for evermore. Christ is the _first_, and was loving
and just and glorious and almighty before there was any death or hell.
And Christ is the _last_, and will be loving and just and glorious and
almighty as ever, in that great day when all enemies shall be under His
feet, and death shall be destroyed, and death and hell shall be cast into
the lake of fire.
_MS. Sermon_. 1857.
A Living God. January 8.
Here and there, among rich and poor, there are those whose heart and
flesh, whose conscience and whose intellect, cry out for the _Living_
God, and will know no peace till they have found Him. For till then they
can find no explanation of the three great human questions--Where am I?
Whither am I going? What must I do?
_Sermons on the Pentateuch_. 1862.
The Fairy Gardens. January 9.
Of all the blessings which the study of Nature brings to the patient
observer, let none, perhaps, be classed higher than this, that the
farther he enters into those fairy gardens of life and birth, which
Spenser saw and described in his great poem, the more he learns the awful
and yet comfortable truth, that they do not belong to him, but to One
greater, wiser, lovelier than he; and as he stands, silent with awe, amid
the pomp of Nature's ever-busy rest, hears as of old, The Word of the
"Lord God walking among the trees of the garden in the cool of the day."
_Glaucus_. 1855.
Love. January 10.
Oh! Love! Love! Love! the same in peasant and in peer! The more
honour to you, then, old Love, to _be_ the same thing in this world which
_is_ common to peasant and to peer. They say that you are blind, a
dreamer, an exaggerator--a liar, in short! They just know nothing about
you, then. You will not see people as they seem--as they have become, no
doubt; but why? Because you see them as they ought to be, and are in
some deep way eternally, in the sight of Him who conceived and created
them!
_Two Years Ago_, chap. xiv. 1856.
Life--Love. January 11.
We must live nobly to love nobly.
_MS._
The Seed of Good. January 12.
Never was the young Abbot heard to speak harshly of any human being.
"When thou hast tried in vain for seven years," he used to say, "to
convert a sinner, then only wilt thou have a right to suspect him of
being a worse man than thyself." That there is a seed of good in all
men, a divine word and spirit striving with all men, a gospel and good
news which would turn the hearts of all men, if abbots and priests could
but preach it aright, was his favourite doctrine, and one which he used
to defend, when at rare intervals he allowed himself to discuss any
subject, from the writings of his favourite theologian, Clement of
Alexandria.
Above all, Abbot Philamon stopped by stern rebuke any attempt to revile
either heretics or heathens. "On the Catholic Church alone," he used to
say, "lies the blame of all heresy and unbelief; for if she were but for
one day that which she ought to be, the world would be converted before
nightfall."
_Hypatia_, chap. xxx. 1852.
Danger of Thinking vaguely. January 13.
Watch against any fallacies in your ideas which may arise, not from
disingenuousness, but from allowing yourself in moments of feeling to
think vaguely, and not to attach precise meaning to your words. Without
any cold caution of expression, it is a duty we owe to God's truth, and
to our own happiness and the happiness of those around us, to think and
speak as correctly as we can. Almost all heresy, schism, and
misunderstandings, between either churches or individuals who ought to be
one, have arisen from this fault of an involved and vague style of
thought.
_MS._ 1842.
The Possession of Faith. January 14.
I don't want to possess a faith, I want a faith which will possess me.
_Hypatia_, chap. xvii. 1852.
The Eternal Life. January 15.
Eternally, and for ever, in heaven, says St. John, Christ says and is and
does what prophets prophesied of Him that He would say and be and do. "I
am the Root and the Offspring of David, the bright Morning Star. And let
him that is athirst, come: and whosoever will, let him take of the Water
of Life freely." For ever Christ calls to every anxious soul, every
afflicted soul, to every man who is ashamed of himself, and angry with
himself, and longs to live a gentler, nobler, purer, truer, and more
useful life, "Come, and live for ever the eternal life of righteousness,
holiness, and peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit, which is the one true
and only salvation bought for us by the precious blood of Christ our
Lord." Amen.
_Water of Life Sermons_. 1865
The Golden Cup of Youth. January 16.
Ah, glorious twenty-one, with your inexhaustible powers of doing and
enjoying, eating and hungering, sleeping and sitting up, reading and
playing! Happy are those who still possess you, and can take their fill
of your golden cup, steadied, but not saddened, by the remembrance that
for all things a good and loving God will bring them to judgment!
Happier still those who (like a few) retain in body and soul the health
and buoyancy of twenty-one on to the very verge of forty, and, seeming to
grow younger-hearted as they grow older-headed, can cast off care and
work at a moment's warning, laugh and frolic now as they did twenty years
ago, and say with Wordsworth--
"So was it when I was a boy,
So let it be when I am old,
Or let me die."
_Two Years Ago_, chap. xix. 1856.
Work and Duty. January 17.
If a man is busy, and busy about his duty, what more does he require for
time or for eternity?
_Chalk Stream Studies_. 1856.
Members of Christ. January 18.
. . . Would you be humble, daughter?
You must look up, not down, and see yourself
A paltry atom, sap-transmitting vein
Of Christ's vast vine; the pettiest joint and member
Of His great body. . . .
. . . Let thyself die--
And dying, rise again to fuller life.
To be a whole is to be small and weak--
To be a part is to be great and mighty
In the one spirit of the mighty whole--
The spirit of the martyrs and the saints.
_Saint's Tragedy_, Act ii. Scene vi.
1847.
Beauty a Sacrament. January 19.
Never lose an opportunity of seeing anything beautiful. Beauty is God's
handwriting--a way-side sacrament; welcome it in every fair face, every
fair sky, every fair flower, and thank Him for it, who is the Fountain of
all loveliness, and drink it in simply and earnestly with all your eyes;
it is a charmed draught, a cup of blessing.
_True Words to Brave Men_. 1844.
The Ideal of Rank. January 20.
With Christianity came in the thought that domination meant
responsibility, that responsibility demanded virtue. The words which
denoted Rank came to denote, likewise, high moral excellencies. The
_nobilis_, or man who was known, and therefore subject to public opinion,
was bound to behave nobly. The gentle-man--gentile-man--who respected
his own gens, or family, or pedigree, was bound to be gentle. The
courtier who had picked up at court some touch of Roman civilisation from
Roman ecclesiastics was bound to be courteous. He who held an "honour,"
or "edel" of land, was bound to be honourable; and he who held a
"weorthig," or "worthy," thereof, was bound himself to be worthy.
_Lectures on Ancien Regime_. 1866.
An Indulgent God. January 21.
A merely indulgent God would be an unjust God, and a cruel God likewise.
If God be just, as He is, then He has boundless pity for those who are
weak, but boundless wrath for the strong who misuse the weak. Boundless
pity for those who are ignorant, misled, and out of the right way; but
boundless wrath for those who mislead them and put them out of the right
way.
_Discipline Sermons_. 1867.
The Fifty-First Psalm. January 22.
It is such utterances as these which have given for now many hundred
years their priceless value to the little Book of Psalms ascribed to the
shepherd outlaw of the Judean hills, which have sent the sound of his
name into all lands throughout all the world. Every form of human
sorrow, doubt, struggle, error, sin--the nun agonising in the cloister;
the settler struggling for his life in Transatlantic forests; the pauper
shivering over the embers in his hovel and waiting for kind death; the
man of business striving to keep his honour pure amid the temptations of
commerce; the prodigal son starving in the far country and recollecting
the words which he learnt long ago at his mother's knee; the peasant boy
trudging afield in the chill dawn and remembering that the Lord is his
Shepherd, therefore he will not want--all shapes of humanity have found,
and will find to the end of time, a word said here to their inmost
hearts. . . .
_Sermons on David_. 1866.
Waiting for Death. January 23.
Death, beautiful, wise, kind Death, when will you come and tell me what I
want to know? I courted you once and many a time, brave old Death, only
to give rest to the weary. That was a coward's wish--and so you would
not come. . . . I was not worthy of you. And now I will not hunt you
any more, old Death. Do you bide your time, and I mine. . . . Only when
you come, give me not rest but work. Give work to the idle, freedom to
the chained, sight to the blind!
_Two Years Ago_, chap. xv. 1856.
The One Refuge. January 24.
Safe! There is no safety but from God, and that comes by prayer and
faith.
_Hypatia_. 1852.
Future Identity. January 25.
I believe that the union of those who have loved here will in the next
world amount to perfect identity, that they will look back on the
expressions of affection here as mere meagre strugglings after and
approximation to the union which then will be perfect. Perfect!
_Letters and Memories_. 1842.
Friendship. January 26.
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.
_Water of Life Sermons_.
Night and Morning. January 27.
It is morning somewhere or other now, and it will be morning here again
to-morrow. "Good times and bad times and all times pass over." I learnt
that lesson out of old Bewick's Vignettes, and it has stood me in good
stead this many a year.
_Two Years Ago_, chap. i. 1856.
Communion with the Blessed Dead. January 28.
Shall we not recollect the blessed dead above all in Holy Communion, and
give thanks for them there--at that holy table at which the Church
triumphant and the Church militant meet in the communion of saints? Where
Christ is they are; and, therefore, if Christ be there, may not they be
there likewise? May not they be near us though unseen? like us claiming
their share in the eternal sacrifice, like us partaking of that spiritual
body and blood which is as much the life of saints in heaven as it is of
penitent sinners on earth? May it not be so? It is a mystery into which
we will not look too far. But this at least is true, that they are with
Him where He is.
_MS. Sermon_.
The Great Law. January 29.
True rest can only be attained as Christ attained it, through labour.
True glory can only be attained in earth or heaven through
self-sacrifice. Whosoever will save his life shall lose it; whosoever
will lose his life shall save it.
_All Saints' Day Sermons_. 1870.
The Coming Kingdom. January 30.
There is a God-appointed theocracy promised to us, and which we must wait
for, when all the diseased and false systems of this world shall be swept
away, and Christ's feet shall stand on the Mount of Olives, and the
twelve apostles shall sit on twelve thrones judging the twelve tribes of
Israel! All this shall come, and blessed is that servant whom his Lord
when He cometh shall find ready! All this we shall not see before we
die, but we shall see it when we rise in the perfect material and
spiritual ideal, in the kingdom of God!
_Letters and Memories_.
Christ's Coming. January 31.
Christ may come to us when our thoughts are cleaving to the ground, and
ready to grow earthy of the earth--through noble poetry, noble music,
noble art--through aught which awakens once more in us the instinct of
the true, the beautiful, and the good. He may come to us when our souls
are restless and weary, through the repose of Nature--the repose of the
lonely snow-peak and of the sleeping forest, of the clouds of sunset and
of the summer sea, and whisper Peace. Or He may come, as He comes on
winter nights to many a gallant soul--not in the repose of Nature, but in
her rage--in howling storm and blinding foam and ruthless rocks and
whelming surge--and whisper to them even so--as the sea swallows all of
them which _it_ can take--of calm beyond, which this world cannot give
and cannot take away.
And therefore let us say in utter faith, Come as Thou seest best--but in
whatsoever way Thou comest, Even so come, Lord Jesus. Amen.
_Last Sermon_. _MS._ 1874.
SAINTS' DAYS, FASTS, & FESTIVALS.
Since we gave up at the Reformation the superstitious practice of praying
to the saints, Saints' Days have sunk--and, indeed, sunk too much--into
neglect. We forget too often still, that though praying to any saint or
angel, or other created being, is contrary both to reason and Scripture,
yet it is according to reason and to Scripture to commemorate them. That
is, to remember them, to study their characters, and to thank God for
them,--both for the virtues He bestowed on them, and the example which He
has given us in them.
_MS. Sermon_.
JANUARY 6.
The Epiphany,
Manifestation of Christ to the Gentiles.
On this day the Lord Jesus was first shown to the Gentiles. The word
Epiphany means "showing." The Wise Men were worshippers of the true God,
though in a dim confused way; and they had learnt enough of what true
faith, true greatness was, not to be staggered and fall into unbelief
when they saw the King of the Jews laid, not in a palace, but in a
manger, tended by a poor village maiden. And therefore God bestowed on
them the great honour that they first of all--Gentiles--should see the
glory and the love of God in the face of Jesus Christ. God grant that
they may not rise up against us in the Day of Judgment and condemn us!
They had but a small spark, a dim ray, of the Light which lighteth every
man who cometh into the world; but they were more faithful to that little
than many of us, who live in the full sunshine of the Gospel, with
Christ's Spirit, Christ's Sacraments, Christ's Churches,--means of grace
and hopes of glory of which they never dreamed.
_Town and Country Sermons_.
JANUARY 25.
Conversion of St. Paul, Apostle and Martyr.
How did St. Paul look on his past life? There is no sentimental
melancholy in him. He is saved, and he knows it. He is an Apostle, and
he stands boldly on his dignity. He is cheerful, hopeful, joyful. And
yet, when he speaks of the past, it is with noble shame and sorrow that
he calls himself the chief of sinners, not worthy to be called an
Apostle, because he persecuted the Church of Christ. What he is, he will
not deny; what he was, he will not forget; lest he should forget that in
him, that is, in his flesh--his natural character--dwelleth no good
thing; lest he should forget that the good which he does, _he_ does not,
but Christ which dwelleth in him; lest he should grow careless, puffed
up, self-indulgent; lest he should neglect to subdue his evil passions;
and so, after preaching to others, himself become a castaway.
_Town and Country Sermons_.
February.
. . . Every winter,
When the great sun has turned his face away,
The earth goes down into the vale of grief,
And fasts, and weeps, and shrouds herself in sables,
Leaving her wedding garments to decay;
Then leaps in spring to his returning kisses.
_Saint's Tragedy_, Act iii. Scene i.
Out of the morning land,
Over the snow-drifts,
Beautiful Freya came,
Tripping to Scoring.
White were the moorlands,
And frozen before her;
Green were the moorlands,
And blooming behind her.
Out of her gold locks
Shaking the spring flowers,
Out of her garments
Shaking the south wind,
Around in the birches
Awaking the throstles,
Love and love-giving,
Came she to Scoring.
. . . . .
_The Longbeard's Saga_. 1852.
Virtue. February 1.
The first and last business of every human being, whatever his station,
party, creed, capacities, tastes, duties, is morality; virtue, virtue,
always virtue. Nothing that man will ever invent will absolve him from
the universal necessity of being good as God is good, righteous as God is
righteous, holy as God is holy.
_Sermons on David_. 1866.
Happiness. February 2.
God has not only made things beautiful; He has made things happy;
whatever misery there is in the world there is no denying that. Misery
is the exception; happiness is the rule. No rational man ever heard a
bird sing without feeling that the bird was happy, and that if God made
that bird He made it to be happy, and He takes pleasure in its happiness,
though no human ear should ever hear its song, no human heart should ever
share in its joy.
_All Saints' Day Sermons_. 1871.
A Dream of the Future. February 3.
God grant that the day may come when in front of the dwellings of the
poor we may see real fountains--not like the drinking-fountains, useful
as they are, which you see here and there about the streets, with a tiny
dribble of water to a great deal of expensive stone, but real fountains,
which shall leap, and sparkle, and plash, and gurgle, and fill the place
with life and light and coolness; and sing in the people's ears the
sweetest of all earthly songs--save the song of a mother over her
child--the song of "The Laughing Water."
_The Air Mothers_. 1872.
Bondage of Custom. February 4.
Strive all your life to free men from the bondage of _custom_ and _self_,
the two great elements of the world that lieth in wickedness.
_MS. Letter_. l842.
Henceforth let no man peering down
Through the dim glittering mine of future years
Say to himself, "Too much! this cannot be!"
To-day and custom wall up our horizon:
Before the hourly miracle of life
Blindfold we stand, and sigh, as though God were not.
_Saint's Tragedy_, Act i. Scene ii.
1847.
The Childlike Mind. February 5.
There comes a time when we must _narrow_ our sphere of thought much, that
we may _truly enlarge_ it! we must, _artificialised_ as we _have_ been,
return to the rudiments of life, to children's pleasures, that we may
find easily, through their transparent simplicity, spiritual laws which
we may apply to the more intricate spheres of art and science.
_MS. Letter_. 1842.
Unselfish Prayer. February 6.
The Lord's Prayer teaches that we are members of a family, when He tells
us to pray not "_My_ Father" but "Our Father;" not "_my_ soul be saved,"
but "Thy kingdom come;" not "give _me_" but "give _us_ our daily bread;"
not "forgive me," but "forgive _us_ our trespasses," and that only as we
forgive others; not "lead _me_ not," but "lead _us_ not into temptation;"
not "deliver _me_," but "deliver _us_ from evil." After _that_ manner
our Lord tells us to pray, and in proportion as we pray in that manner,
just so far, and no farther, will God hear our prayers.
_National Sermons_. 1850.
God is Light. February 7.
All the deep things of God are bright, for God is Light. God's arbitrary
will and almighty power may seem dark by themselves though deep, but that
is because they do not involve His moral character. Join them with the
fact that He is a God of mercy as well as justice; remember that His
essence is love, and the thunder-cloud will blaze with dewy gold, full of
soft rain and pure light.
_MS. Letter_. 1844.
The Veil Lifted. February 8.
Science is, I verily believe, like virtue, its own exceeding great
reward. I can conceive few human states more enviable than that of the
man to whom--panting in the foul laboratory, or watching for his life in
the tropic forest--Isis shall for a moment lift her sacred veil and show
him, once and for ever, the thing he dreamed not of, some law, or even
mere hint of a law, explaining one fact: but explaining with it a
thousand more, connecting them all with each other and with the mighty
whole, till order and meaning shoots through some old chaos of scattered
observations. Is not that a joy, a prize, which wealth cannot give nor
poverty take away? What it may lead to he knows not. Of what use it may
be he knows not. But this he knows, that somewhere it must lead, of some
use it will be. For it is a truth.
_Lectures on Science and Superstition_.
1866.
All Science One. February 9.
Physical and spiritual science seem to the world to be distinct. One
sight of God as we shall some day see Him will show us that they are
indissolubly and eternally the same.
_MS._
Passion and Reason. February 10.
Passion and reason in a healthy mind ought to be inseparable. We need
not be passionless because we reason correctly. Strange to say, one's
feelings will often sharpen one's knowledge of the truth, as they do
one's powers of action.
_MS._ 1843.
Enthusiasm and Tact. February 11.
. . . People smile at the "enthusiasm of youth"--that enthusiasm which
they themselves secretly look back at with a sigh, perhaps unconscious
that it is partly their own fault that they ever lost it. . . . Do not
fear being considered an enthusiast. What matter? But pray for _tact_,
the true tact which love alone can give, to prevent scandalising a weak
brother.
_Letters and Memories_. 1842.
Be earnest, earnest, earnest; mad, if thou wilt:
Do what thou dost as if the stake were heaven, And that thy last deed ere
the judgment-day.
When all's done, nothing's done. There's rest above--
Below let work be death, if work be love!
_Saint's Tragedy_, Act ii. Scene viii. 1847.
The Eternal Good. February 12.
"God hath showed thee what is good," . . . what is good in itself, and of
itself--the one very eternal and absolute good, which was with God and in
God and from God, before all worlds, and will be for ever, without
changing, or growing less or greater, eternally the same good--the good
which would be just as good and just and right and lovely and glorious if
there were no world, no men, no angels, no heaven, no hell, and God were
alone in His own abyss.
_Sermons for the Times_. 1855.
Awfulness of Words. February 13.
A difference in words is a very awful and important difference; a
difference in words is a difference in things. Words are very awful and
wonderful things, for they come from the most awful and wonderful of all
beings, Jesus Christ, THE WORD. He puts words into men's minds. He made
all things, and He made words to express those things. And woe to those
who use the wrong words about anything.
_Village Sermons_. 1848.
A Wise Woman. February 14.
What wisdom she had she did not pick off the hedge, like blackberries.
God is too kind to give away wisdom after that useless fashion. So she
had to earn her wisdom, and to work hard, and suffer much ere she
attained it. And in attaining she endured strange adventures and great
sorrows; and yet they would not have given her the wisdom had she not had
something in herself which gave her wit to understand her lessons, and
skill and courage to do what they taught her. There had been many names
for that something before she was born, there have been many names for it
since, but her father and mother called it the Grace of God.
_Unfinished Novel_. 1869.
Charity the one Influence. February 15.
The older we grow, the more we understand our own lives and histories,
the more we shall see that the spirit of wisdom is the spirit of love;
that the true way to gain influence over our fellow-men is to have
charity towards them. That is a hard lesson to learn; and all those who
learn it generally learn it late; almost--God forgive us--too late.
_Westminster Sermons_.
The Ascetic Painters. February 16.
We owe much (notwithstanding their partial and Manichean idea of beauty)
to the early ascetic painters. Their works are a possession for ever. No
future school of religious art will be able to rise to eminence without
learning from them their secret. They taught artists, and priests, and
laymen, too, that beauty is only worthy of admiration when it is the
outward sacrament of the beauty of the soul within; they helped to
deliver men from that idolatry to merely animal strength and loveliness
into which they were in danger of falling in ferocious ages, and among
the relics of Roman luxury.
_Miscellanies_. 1849.
Reveries. February 17.
Beware of giving way to reveries. Have always some employment in your
hands. Look forward to the future with hope. Build castles if you will,
but only bright ones, and _not too many_.
_Letters and Memories_. 1842.
Woman's Mission. February 18.
It is the glory of woman that she was sent into the world to live for
others rather than for herself; and therefore, I should say, let her
smallest rights be respected, her smallest wrongs redressed; but let her
never be persuaded to forget that she is sent into the world to teach
man--what I believe she has been teaching him all along, even in the
savage state, namely, that there is something more necessary than the
claiming of rights, and that is, the performing of duties; to teach him
specially, in these so-called intellectual days, that there is something
more than intellect, and that is--purity and virtue.
_Lecture on Thrift_. 1869.
The Heroic Life. February 19.
Provided we attain at last to the truly heroic and divine life, which is
the life of virtue, it will matter little to us by what wild and weary
ways, or through what painful and humiliating processes, we have arrived
thither. If God has loved us, if God will receive us, then let us submit
loyally and humbly to His law--"whom the Lord loveth He chasteneth, and
scourgeth every son whom He receiveth."
_All Saints' Day Sermons_.
The Wages of Sin. February 20.
It is sometimes said, "The greater the sinner the greater the saint." I
do not believe it. I do not see it. It stands to reason--if a man loses
his way and finds it again, he is so much the less forward on his way,
surely, by all the time he has spent in getting back into the way.
And if any of you fancy you can sin without being punished, remember that
the prodigal son is punished most severely. He does not get off freely
the moment he chooses to repent, as false preachers will tell you. Even
after he does repent and resolves to go back to his father's house he has
a long journey home in poverty and misery, footsore, hungry, and all but
despairing. But when he does get home; when he shows he has learnt the
bitter lesson; when all he dares to ask is, "Make me as one of thy hired
servants,"--he is received as freely as the rest.
_Water of Life Sermons_. 1864.
Silent Depths. February 21.
Our mightiest feelings are always those which remain most unspoken. The
most intense lovers and the greatest poets have generally, I think,
written very little personal love-poetry, while they have shown in
fictitious characters a knowledge of the passion too painfully intimate
to be spoken of in the first person.
_MS._ 1843.
True Justification. February 22.
God grant us to be among those who wish to be really justified by faith,
by being made just persons by faith,--who cannot satisfy either their
conscience or their reason by fancying that God looks on them as right
when they know themselves to be wrong; and who cannot help trusting that
union with Christ must be something real and substantial, and not merely
a metaphor and a flower of rhetoric.
_MS._ 1854.
A Present Hell. February 23.
"Ay," he muttered, "sing awa', . . . wi' pretty fancies and gran' words,
and gang to hell for it."
"To hell, Mr. Mackaye?"
"Ay, to a verra real hell, Alton Locke, laddie--a warse ane than any
fiend's kitchen or subterranean Smithfield that ye'll hear o' in the
pulpits--the hell on earth o' being a flunkey, and a humbug, and a
useless peacock, wasting God's gifts on your ain lusts and pleasures--and
kenning it--and not being able to get oot o' it for the chains of vanity
and self-indulgence."
_Alton Locke_, chap. viii. 1849.
Time and Eternity. February 24.
Eternity does not mean merely some future endless duration, but that ever-
present _moral_ world, governed by ever-living and absolutely necessary
laws, in which we and all spirits are now; and in which we should be
equally, whether time and space, extension and duration, and the whole
material universe to which they belong, became nothing this moment, or
lasted endlessly.
_Theologica Germanica_. 1854.
Christ's Life. February 25.
What was Christ's life? Not one of deep speculations, quiet thoughts,
and bright visions, but a life of fighting against evil; earnest, awful
prayers and struggles within, continued labour of body and mind without;
insult, and danger, and confusion, and violent exertion, and bitter
sorrow. This was Christ's life. This was St. Peter's, and St. James's,
and St. John's life afterwards.
_Village Sermons_. 1849.
The Higher Education. February 26.
In teaching women we must try to make our deepest lessons bear on the
great purpose of unfolding Woman's own calling in all ages--her especial
calling in this one. We must incite them to realise the chivalrous
belief of our old forefathers among their Saxon forests, that something
Divine dwelt in the counsels of woman: but, on the other hand, we must
continually remind them that they will attain that divine instinct, not
by renouncing their sex, but by fulfilling it; by becoming true women,
and not bad imitations of men; by educating their heads for the sake of
their hearts, not their hearts for the sake of their heads; by claiming
woman's divine vocation as the priestess of purity, of beauty, and of
love.
_Introductory Lecture_, _Queen's College_.
1848.
God's Kingdom. February 27.
Philamon had gone forth to see the world, and he had seen it; and he had
learnt that God's kingdom was not a kingdom of fanatics yelling for a
doctrine, but of willing, loving, obedient hearts.
_Hypatia_, chap. xxiii. 1852.
Sowing and Reaping. February 28.
So it is, that by every crime, folly, even neglect of theirs, men drive a
thorn into their own flesh, which will trouble them for years to come, it
may be to their dying day--
Though the mills of God grind slowly, yet they grind exceeding small;
Though with patience He stands waiting, with exactness grinds He all--
as those who neglect their fellow-creatures will discover, by the most
patent, undeniable proofs, in that last great day, when the rich and poor
shall meet together, and then, at last, discover too that the Lord is the
Maker of them all.
_All Saints' Day Sermons_. 1871.
The Church Catechism. February 29.
Did it ever strike you that the simple, noble, old Church Catechism,
without one word about rewards and punishments, heaven or hell, begins to
talk to the child, like a true English Catechism as it is, about that
glorious old English key-word Duty? It calls on the child to confess its
own duty, and teaches it that its duty is something most human, simple,
everyday--commonplace, if you will call it so. And I rejoice in the
thought that the Church Catechism teaches that the child's duty is
commonplace. I rejoice that in what it says about our duty to God and
our neighbour, it says not one word about counsels of perfection, or
those frames and feelings which depend, believe me, principally on the
state of people's bodily health, on the constitution of their nerves, and
the temper of their brain; but that it requires nothing except what a
little child can do as well as a grown person, a labouring man as well as
a divine, a plain farmer as well as the most refined, devout, imaginative
lady.
_Sermons for the Times_. 1855.
SAINTS' DAYS, FASTS, & FESTIVALS.
FEBRUARY 2.
The Presentation of Christ in the Temple,
COMMONLY CALLED
The Purification of the Virgin Mary.
Little children may think of Christ as a child now and always. For to
them He is always the Babe of Bethlehem. Let them not say to themselves,
"Christ is grown up long ago." He is, and yet He is not. His life is
eternal in the heavens, above all change of time and space. . . . Such
is the sacred heart of Jesus--all things to all. To the strong He can be
strongest, to the weak weakest of all. With the aged and dying He goes
down for ever to the grave; and yet with you children Christ lies for
ever on His mother's bosom, and looks up for ever into His mother's face,
full of young life and happiness and innocence, the Everlasting Christ-
child, in whom you must believe, whom you must love, to whom you must
offer up your childish prayers.
_The Christ-child_,
_Sermons_, (_Good News of God_).
FEBRUARY 24.
St. Matthias, Apostle and Martyr.
Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord. They rest from their
labours--all their struggles, failures, past and over for ever. But
their works follow them. The good which they did on earth--_that_ is not
past and over. It cannot die. It lives and grows for ever, following on
in their path long after they are dead, and bearing fruit unto
everlasting life, not only in them, but in men whom they never saw, and
in generations yet unborn.
_Sermons_ (_Good News of God_).
Ash Wednesday.
There is a repentance too deep for words--too deep for all confessionals,
penances, and emotions or acts of contrition; the repentance, not of the
excitable, theatric Southern, unstable as water even in his most violent
remorse, but of the still, deep-hearted Northern, whose pride breaks
slowly and silently, but breaks once for all; who tells to God what he
will never tell to man, and having told it, is a new creature from that
day forth for ever.
_Two Years Ago_, chap. xviii.
The True Fast.
The _rationale_ of Fasting is to give up habitual indulgences for a time,
lest they become our masters--artificial _necessities_.
_MS._
March.
Early in the Springtime, on raw and windy mornings,
Beneath the freezing house-eaves, I heard the starlings sing--
Ah! dreary March month, is this then a time for building wearily?
Sad, sad, to think that the year is but begun!
Late in the Autumn, on still and cloudless evenings,
Among the golden reed-beds I heard the starlings sing--
Ah! that sweet March month, when we and our mates were courting
merrily;
Sad, sad, to think that the year is all but done.
_The Starlings_.
Knowledge and Love. March 1.
Knowledge and Love are reciprocal. He who loves knows. He who knows
loves. Saint John is the example of the first; Saint Paul of the second.
_Letters and Memories_. 1842.
A Charm of Birds. March 2.
Little do most people know how much there is to learn--what variety of
character, as well as variety of motion, may be distinguished by the
practised ear in a "charm of birds"--from the wild cry of the
missel-thrush, ringing from afar in the first bright days of March a
passage of one or two bars repeated three or four times, and then another
and another, clear and sweet and yet defiant--for the great "storm-cock"
loves to sing when rain and wind is coming on, and faces the elements as
boldly as he faces hawk and crow--down to the delicate warble of the
wren, who slips out of his hole in the brown bank where he has huddled
through the frost with wife and children, all folded in each other's arms
like human beings. Yet even he, sitting at his house-door in the low
sunlight, says grace for all mercies in a song so rapid, so shrill, so
loud, and yet so delicately modulated, that you wonder at the amount of
soul within that tiny body; and then stops suddenly, like a child that
has said its lesson or got to the end of a sermon, gives a self-satisfied
flirt of his tail, and goes in again to sleep.
_Prose Idylls_. 1866.
Tact of the Heart. March 3.
Random shots are dangerous and cruel, likely to hit the wrong person and
hurt his feelings unnecessarily. It is very easy to say a hard thing,
but not so easy to say it to the right person at the right time.
_MS._
Special Providences. March 4.
I believe not only in "special providences," but in the whole universe as
one infinite complexity of special providences.
_Letters and Memories_.
The grain of dust is a thought of God; God's power made it; God's wisdom
gave it whatsoever properties or qualities it may possess. God's
providence has put it in the place where it is now, and has ordained that
it should be in that place at that moment, by a train of causes and
effects which reaches back to the very creation of the universe. The
grain of dust can no more go from God's presence or flee from God's
Spirit than you or I can.
_Town Geology_. 1871.
Be Calm. March 5.
Strive daily and hourly to be calm; to stop yourself forcibly and recall
your mind to a sense of what you are, where you are going, and whither
you ought to be tending. This is most painful discipline, but most
wholesome.
_MS. Letter_. 1842.
Self-sacrifice and Personality. March 6.
What a strange mystery is that of mutual self-sacrifice! to exist for one
moment for another! the perfection of human bliss! And does not love
teach us two things? First, that self-sacrifice, the living for others,
is the law of our perfect being, and next, that by and in self-sacrifice
alone can we attain to the perfect apprehension of ourselves, our own
personality, our own duty, our own bliss. So that the mystics are
utterly wrong when they fancy that self-sacrifice can be attained by self-
annihilation. Self-sacrifice, instead of destroying the sense of
personality, perfects it.
_MS. Letter_. 1843.
Follow your Star. March 7.
I believe with Dante, "_se tu segui la tua Stella_," that He who ordained
my star will not lead me _into_ temptation but _through_ it. Without Him
all places and methods of life are equally dangerous, with Him all
equally safe.
_Letters and Memories_. 1848.
Reverence for Books. March 8.
This is the age of _books_. And we should reverence books. Consider!
except a living man there is nothing more wonderful than a book--a
message to us from the dead, from human souls whom we never saw, who
lived perhaps thousands of miles away, and yet in those little sheets of
paper speak to us, amuse us, terrify us, teach us, comfort us, open their
hearts to us as brothers!
We ought to reverence books, to look at them as awful and mighty things.
If they are good and true, whether they are about religion or politics,
trade or medicine, they are the message of Christ, the Maker of all
things, the Teacher of all truth, which He has put into the heart of some
men to speak. And at the last day, be sure of it, we shall have to
render an account--a strict account--of the books which we have read, and
of the way in which we have obeyed what we read, just as if we had had so
many prophets or angels sent to us.
_Village Sermons_. 1849.
The Unknown Future. March 9.
As for the things which God has prepared for those who love Him, the
Bible tells me that no man can conceive them, and therefore I believe
that I cannot conceive them. God has conceived them; God has prepared
them; God is our Father. That is enough.
_Sermons for the Times_. 1855.
Secular and Sacred. March 10.
I grudge the epithet of "_secular_" to any matter whatsoever. But more;
I deny it to anything which God has made, even to the tiniest of insects,
the most insignificant grain of dust. To those who believe in God, and
try to see all things in God, the most minute natural phenomenon cannot
be secular. It must be divine, I say deliberately, divine, and I can use
no less lofty word.
_Town Geology_. 1871.
Content or Happy? March 11.
My friends, whether you will be the happier for any knowledge of physical
science, or for any other knowledge whatsoever, I cannot tell. That lies
in the decision of a higher Power than I; and, indeed, to speak honestly,
I do not think that any branch of physical science is likely, at first at
least, to make you happy. Neither is the study of your fellow-men.
Neither is religion itself. We were not sent into the world to be happy,
but to be right--at least, poor creatures that we are--as right as we can
be, and we must be content with being right, and not happy. . . . And we
shall be made truly wise if we be made content; content, too, not only
with what we can understand, but content with what we do not
understand--the habit of mind which theologians call (and rightly) faith
in God, true and solid faith, which comes often out of sadness and out of
doubt.
_Lecture on Bio-geology_. 1869.
Duty of Man to Man. March 12.
Each man can learn something from his neighbour; at least he can learn
this--to have patience with his neighbour, to live and let live.
Peace! peace! Anything which is not _wrong_ for the sake of heaven-born
Peace!
_Town and Country Sermons_. 1861.
Blessing of a True Friend. March 13.
A blessed thing it is for any man or woman to have a friend, one human
soul whom we can trust utterly, who knows the best and worst of us, and
who loves us in spite of all our faults; who will speak the honest truth
to us, while the world flatters us to our face, and laughs at us behind
our back; who will give us counsel and reproof in the days of prosperity
and self-conceit; but who, again, will comfort and encourage us in the
day of difficulty and sorrow, when the world leaves us alone to fight our
battle as we can.
It is only the great-hearted who can be true friends: the mean and
cowardly can never know what true friendship means.
_Sermons on David_. 1866.
True Heroines. March 14.
What is the commonest, and yet the least remembered form of heroism? The
heroism of an average mother. Ah! when I think of that broad fact I
gather hope again for poor humanity, and this dark world looks bright,
this diseased world looks wholesome to me once more, because, whatever
else it is or is not full of, it is at least full of mothers.
_Lecture on Heroism_. 1873.
Secret Atheism. March 15.
There is little hope that we shall learn the lessons God is for ever
teaching us in the events of life till we get rid of our secret Atheism,
till we give up the notion that God only visits now and then to disorder
and destroy His own handiwork, and take back the old scriptural notion
that God is visiting all day long for ever, to give order and life to His
own work, to set it right where it goes wrong, and re-create it whenever
it decays.
_Water of Life Sermons_. 1866.
Tolerance. March 16.
If we really love God and long to do good and work for God, if we really
love our neighbours and wish to help them, we shall have no heart to
quarrel about _how_ the good is to be done, provided _it is_ done.
"Master," said St. John, "we saw one casting out devils in Thy name, and
he followeth not us; wilt Thou that we forbid him? And Jesus said,
Forbid him not."
_Sermons_.
The Hopes of Old Age. March 17.
Christianity alone deprives old age of its bitterness, making it the gate
of heaven. Our bodies will fade and grow weak and shapeless, just when
we shall not want them, being ready and in close expectation of that
resurrection of the flesh which is the great promise of Christianity (no
miserable fancies about "pure souls" escaped from matter, but)--of
bodies, _our_ bodies, beloved, beautiful, ministers to us in all our
joys, sufferers with us in all our sorrows--yea, our very own selves
raised up again to live and love in a manner inconceivable from its
perfection.
_MS._ 1842.
. . . No! I can wait:
Another body!--Ah, new limbs are ready,
Free, pure, instinct with soul through every nerve,
Kept for us in the treasuries of God!
_Santa Maura_. 1852.
The Highest Study for Man, March 18.
Man is _not_, as the poet said, "the noblest study of mankind." God is
the noblest study of man, and Him we can study in three ways. 1st. From
His image as developed in Christ the Ideal, and in all good men--great
good men. 2dly. From His works. 3dly. From His dealings in history;
this is the real philosophy of history.
_Letters and Memories_. 1842.
Eclecticism. March 19.
An eclectic, if it mean anything, means this--one who in any branch of
art or science refuses to acknowledge Bacon's great law, that "Nature is
only conquered by obeying her;" who will not take a full and reverent
view of the whole mass of facts with which he has to deal, and from them
deducing the fundamental laws of his subject, obey them whithersoever
they may lead; but who picks and chooses out of them just so many as may
be pleasant to his private taste, and then constructs a partial system
which differs from the essential ideas of Nature in proportion to the
number of facts which he has determined to discard.
_Miscellanies_. 1849.
Duty. March 20.
Duty, be it in a small matter or a great, is duty still; the command of
Heaven; the eldest voice of God. And it is only they who are faithful in
a few things who will be faithful over many things; only they who do
their duty in everyday and trivial matters who will fulfil them on great
occasions.
_Sermons for the Times_. 1855.
The Great Unknown. March 21.
"Brother," said the abbot, "make ready for me the divine elements, that I
may consecrate them." And he asking the reason therefor, the saint
replied, "That I may partake thereof with all my brethren before I depart
hence. For know assuredly that within the seventh day I shall migrate to
the celestial mansions. For this night stood by me in a dream those two
women whom I love, and for whom I pray, the one clothed in a white, the
other in a ruby-coloured garment, and holding each other by the hand, who
said to me, '_That life after death is not such a one as you fancy_:
come, therefore, and behold what it is like.'"
_Hypatia_, chap. xxx. 1852.
Loss nor Gain, March 22.
Nothing is more expensive than penuriousness; nothing more anxious than
carelessness; and every duty which is bidden to wait returns with seven
fresh duties at its back.
_Sermons for the Times_. 1855.
Ancient Greek Education, March 23.
We talk of education now. Are we more educated than were the ancient
Greeks? Do we know anything about education, physical, intellectual,
aesthetic (religious education in our sense of the word of course they
had none), of which they have not taught us at least the rudiments? Are
there not some branches of education which they perfected once and for
ever, leaving us northern barbarians to follow or not to follow their
example? To produce health, that is, harmony and sympathy, proportion
and grace, in every faculty of mind and body--that was their notion of
education.
Ah! the waste of health and strength in the young! The waste, too, of
anxiety and misery in those who love and tend them! How much of it might
be saved by a little rational education in those laws of nature which are
the will of God about the welfare of our bodies, and which, therefore, we
are as much bound to know and to obey as we are bound to know and to obey
the spiritual laws whereon depend the welfare of our souls.
_Lecture on Thrift_. 1869.
Body and Soul. March 24.
Exalt me with Thee, O Lord, to know the mystery of life, that I may use
the earthly as the appointed expression and type of the heavenly, and, by
using to Thy glory the natural body, may be fit to be exalted to the use
of the spiritual body. Amen.
_MS._ 1842.
Moderation. March 25.
Let us pray for that great--I had almost said that crowning grace and
virtue of Moderation, what St. Paul calls sobriety and a sound mind. Let
us pray for moderate appetites, moderate passions, moderate honours,
moderate gains, moderate joys; and if sorrows be needed to chasten us,
moderate sorrows. Let us not long violently after, or wish too eagerly
to rise in life.
_Water of Life Sermons_. 1869.
Poetry in the Slums. March 26.
"True poetry, like true charity, my laddie, begins at home. . . . Hech!
is there no the heaven above them there, and the hell beneath them? and
God frowning, and the devil grinning? No poetry there! Is no the verra
idea of the classic tragedy defined to be man conquered by circumstance?
canna ye see it there? And the verra idea of the modern tragedy, man
conquering circumstance? and I'll show ye that too--in many a garret
where no eye but the good God's enters to see the patience, and the
fortitude, and the self-sacrifice, and the love stronger than death,
that's shining in those dark places of the earth."
"Ah, poetry's grand--but fact is grander; God and Satan are grander. All
around ye, in every gin-shop and costermonger's cellar, are God and Satan
at death-grips; every garret is a haill Paradise Lost or Paradise
Regained."
_Alton Locke_, chap. viii. 1849.
Time and Eternity. March 27.
. . . Our life's floor
Is laid upon Eternity; no crack in it
But shows the underlying heaven.
_Saint's Tragedy_, Act iii. Scene ii.
Work. March 28.
Yes. Life is meant for work, and not for ease; to labour in danger and
in dread, to do a little good ere the night comes when no man can work,
instead of trying to realise for oneself a paradise; not even Bunyan's
shepherd-paradise, much less Fourier's casino-paradise, and perhaps,
least of all, because most selfish and isolated of all, our own
art-paradise, the apotheosis of loafing, as Claude calls it.
_Prose Idylls_. 1849.
Teaching of Pictures. March 29.
Pictures raise blessed thoughts in me. Why not in you, my toiling
brother? Those landscapes painted by loving, wise, old Claude two
hundred years ago, are still as fresh as ever. How still the meadows
are! How pure and free that vault of deep blue sky! No wonder that thy
worn heart, as thou lookest, sighs aloud, "Oh, that I had wings as a
dove, then would I flee away and be at rest." Ah! but gayer meadows and
bluer skies await thee _in the world to come_--that fairyland made
real--"the new heavens and the new earth" which God hath prepared for the
pure and the loving, the just, and the brave, who have conquered in this
sore fight of life.
_True Words for Brave Men_. 1849.
Voluntary Heroism. March 30.
Any man or woman, in any age and under any circumstances, who _will_,
_can_ live the heroic life and exercise heroic influences.
It is of the essence of self-sacrifice, and therefore of heroism, that it
should be voluntary; a work of supererogation, at least, towards society
and man; an act to which the hero or heroine is not bound by duty, but
which is above though not against duty.
_Lecture on Heroism_. 1872.
The Ideal Holy One. March 31.
Have you never cried in your hearts with longing, almost with impatience,
"Surely, surely, there is an ideal Holy One somewhere--or else, how could
have arisen in my mind the conception, however faint, of an ideal
holiness? But where? oh, where? Not in the world around strewn with
unholiness. Not in myself, unholy too, without and within. Is there a
Holy One, whom I may contemplate with utter delight? and if so, where is
He? Oh, that I might behold, if but for a moment, His perfect beauty,
even though, as in the fable of Semele of old, 'the lightning of His
glance were death.'" . . .
And then, oh, then--has there not come that for which our spirit was
athirst--the very breath of pure air, the very gleam of pure light, the
very strain of pure music--for it is the very music of the spheres--in
those words, "Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty, which was, and is, and
is to come"?
Yes, whatever else is unholy, there is a Holy One--spotless and
undefiled, serene and self-contained. Whatever else I cannot trust,
there is One whom I can trust utterly. Whatever else I am dissatisfied
with, there is One whom I can contemplate with utter satisfaction, and
bathe my stained soul in that eternal fount of purity. And who is He?
Who, save the Cause and Maker and Ruler of all things past, present, and
to come?
_Sermon on All Saints' Day_. 1874.
Charles Kingsley's Dying Words,
"HOW BEAUTIFUL GOD IS."
SAINTS' DAYS, FASTS, & FESTIVALS.
MARCH 25.
The Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin,
COMMONLY CALLED
Lady Day.
It is one of the glories of our holy religion, and one of the ways by
which the Gospel takes such hold on our hearts, that, mixed up with the
grandest and most mysterious and most divine matters, are the simplest,
the most tender, the most human. What more grand, or deep, or divine
words can we say than, "I believe in Jesus Christ, God's only Son our
Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Ghost,"--and yet what more simple,
human, and tender words can we say than, "Who was born of the Virgin
Mary"? For what more beautiful sight on earth than a young mother with
her babe upon her knee? Beautiful in itself; but doubly beautiful to
those who can say, "I believe in Him who was born of the Virgin Mary."
For since He was born of woman, and thereby took the manhood into God,
birth is holy, and childhood holy, and all a mother's joys and a mother's
cares are holy to the Lord; and every Christian mother with her babe in
her arms is a token and a sign from God, a pledge of His good-will
towards men, a type and pattern of her who was highly-favoured and
blessed above all women. Everything has its time, and Lady-Day is the
time for our remembering the Blessed Virgin. For our hearts and reasons
tell us (and have told all Christians in all ages), that she must have
been holier, nobler, fairer in body and soul, than all women upon earth.
_MS. Sermon_.
April.
Wild, wild wind, wilt thou never cease thy sighing?
Dark, dark night, wilt thou never wear away?
Cold, cold Church, in thy death sleep lying,
Thy Lent is past, thy Passion here, but not thine Easter Day.
Peace, faint heart, though the night be dark and sighing,
Rest fair corpse, where thy Lord Himself hath lain.
Weep, dear Lord, above Thy bride low lying,
Thy tears shall wake her frozen limbs to life and health again.
_The Dead Church_.
The Song of Birds. April 1.
St. Francis called the birds his brothers. Perfectly sure that he
himself was a spiritual being, he thought it at least possible that the
birds might be spiritual beings likewise, incarnate like himself in
mortal flesh, and saw no degradation to the dignity of human nature in
claiming kindred lovingly with creatures so beautiful, so wonderful, who
(as he fancied in his old-fashioned way) praised God in the forest even
as angels did in heaven.
_Prose Idylls_. 1867.
True Reformers. April 2.
It is not the many who reform the world; but the few who rise superior to
that Public Opinion which crucified our Lord many years ago.
_MS. Lecture at Cambridge_. 1866.
High Ideals. April 3.
What if a man's idea of "The Church" be somewhat too narrow for the year
of grace 18--, is it no honour to him that he has such an idea at all?
that there has risen up before him the vision of a perfect polity, a
"divine and wonderful order," linking earth to heaven, and to the very
throne of Him who died for men; witnessing to each of its citizens what
the world tries to make him forget, namely, that he is the child of God
Himself; and guiding and strengthening him from the cradle to the grave
to do his Father's work? Is it no honour to him that he has seen that
such a polity must exist, that he believes that it does exist, or that he
thinks he finds it in its highest, if not in its most perfect form, in
the most ancient and august traditions of his native land? True, he may
have much still to learn. . . .
_Two Years Ago_, chap. iv. 1856.
Divine Knowledge. April 4.
That glorious word _know_--it is God's attribute, and includes in itself
all others. Love, truth--all are parts of that awful power of _knowing_
at a single glance, from and to all eternity, what a thing is in its
essence, its properties, and its relations to the whole universe through
all Time. I feel awestruck whenever I see that word used rightly, and I
never, if I can remember, use it myself of myself.
_Letters and Memories_. 1842.
Woman's Love. April 5.
The story of Ruth is the consecration of woman's love. I do not mean of
the love of wife to husband, divine and blessed as that is. I mean that
depth and strength of devotion, tenderness, and self-sacrifice, which God
has put into the heart of all true women; and which they spend so
strangely, and so nobly often, on persons who have no claim on them, and
from whom they can receive no earthly reward--the affection which made
women minister of their substance to our Lord Jesus Christ, which brought
Mary Magdalene to the foot of the cross and to the door of the tomb--the
affection which made a wise man say that as long as women and sorrow are
left in the world, so long will the gospel of our Lord Jesus live and
conquer therein.
_Water of Life Sermons_.
Feeling and Emotion. April 6.
Live a life of _feeling_, not of _excitement_. Let your religion, your
duties, every thought and word, be ruled by the _affections_, not by the
_emotions_, which are the expressions of them. Do not consider whether
you are glad, sorry, dull, or spiritual at any moment, but be
yourself--what God makes you.
_MS. Letter_. 1842.
The Beasts that perish. April 7.
St. Paul says that he himself saw through a glass darkly. But this he
seems to have seen, that the Lord, when He rose from the dead, brought a
blessing even for the dumb beasts and the earth on which we live. He
says the whole creation is now groaning in the pangs of labour, about to
bring forth something, and that the whole creation will rise again--how
and when and into what new state we cannot tell; but that when the Lord
shall destroy death the whole creation shall be renewed.
_National Sermons_. 1851.
Reverence for Age. April 8.
Reverence for age is a fair test of the vigour of youth; and, conversely,
insolence towards the old and the past, whether in individuals or in
nations, is a sign rather of weakness than of strength.
_Lecture on Westminster Abbey_.
1874.
Prayers for the Dead. April 9.
We do not in the Church of England now pray for the dead. We are not
absolutely forbidden by Scripture to do so. But we believe they are
where they ought to be--that they are gone to a perfectly just world, in
which is none of the confusion, mistakes, wrong, and oppression of this
world; in which they will therefore receive the due reward of their deeds
done in the body; and that they are in the hands of a perfectly just God,
who rewardeth every man according to his work. It seems therefore
unnecessary, and, so to speak, an impertinence towards God, to pray for
them who are in the unseen world of spirits exactly in the state which
they have deserved.
_MS. Sermon_.
Diversities of Gifts. April 10.
Why expect
Wisdom with love in all? Each has his gift--
Our souls are organ pipes of diverse stop
And various pitch: each with its proper notes
Thrilling beneath the self-same breath of God.
Though poor alone, yet joined, they're harmony.
_Saints' Tragedy_, Act ii. Scene v.
1847.
The Atonement. April 11.
_How_ Christ's death takes away thy sins thou wilt never know on
earth--perhaps not in heaven. It is a mystery which thou must believe
and adore. But _why_ He died thou canst see at the first glance, if thou
hast a human heart and will look at what God means thee to look at--Christ
upon His Cross. He died because He was _Love_--love itself, love
boundless, unconquerable, unchangeable--love which inhabits eternity, and
therefore could not be hardened or foiled by any sin or rebellion of man,
but must love men still--must go out to seek and save them, must dare,
suffer any misery, shame, death itself, for their sake--just because it
is absolute and perfect Love which inhabits eternity.
_Good News of God Sermons_.
A Day's Work. April 12.
Make a rule, and pray to God to help you to keep it, never, if possible,
to lie down at night without being able to say, I have made one human
being at least a little wiser, a little happier, or a little better this
day. You will find it easier than you think, and pleasanter.
_Sermons for the Times_. 1855.
Self-control. April 13.
A well-educated moral sense, a well-educated character, saves from
idleness and ennui, alternating with sentimentality and excitement, those
tenderer emotions, those deeper passions, those nobler aspirations of
humanity, which are the heritage of the woman far more than of the man,
and which are potent in her, for evil or for good, in proportion as they
are left to run wild and undisciplined, or are trained and developed into
graceful, harmonious, self-restraining strength, beautiful in themselves,
and a blessing to all who come under their influence.
_Lecture on Thrift_. 1869.
Women and Novels. April 14.
Novels will be read; but that is all the more reason why women should be
trained, by the perusal of a higher, broader, deeper literature, to
distinguish the good novel from the bad, the moral from the immoral, the
noble from the base, the true work of art from the sham which hides its
shallowness and vulgarity under a tangled plot and a melodramatic
situation. They should learn--and that they can only learn by
cultivation--to discern with joy and drink in with reverence, the good,
the beautiful, and the true, and to turn with the fine scorn of a pure
and strong womanhood from the bad, the ugly, and the false.
_Lecture on Thrift_. 1869.
Expect Much. April 15.
Expect great things from God, and also expect the least things, for the
great test of faith is shown about the least matters. People will
believe their soul is sure to be saved who have not the heart to expect
that God will take away some small burden.
_MS. Letter_. 1842.
What is Theology? April 16.
Theology signifies the knowledge of God as He is. And it is dying out
among us in these days. Much of what is called theology now is nothing
but experimental religion, which is most important and useful when it is
founded on the right knowledge of God, but which is not itself theology.
For theology begins with God, but experimental religion, right or wrong,
begins with a man's own soul.
_Discipline and other Sermons_.
Sweetness and Light. April 17.
Ah, that we could believe that God is love, and that he that dwelleth in
love dwelleth in God, and God in him! Then we should have no need to be
told to cultivate sweetness and light, for they would seem to us the only
temper which could make life tolerable in any corner of the universe.
_Essay on the Critical Spirit_. 1871.
The Contemplative Life. April 18.
"Woman is no more capable than man of living on mere contemplation. We
must have an object to whom we may devote the fruits of thought, and
unless we have a real one in active life we shall be sure to coin one for
ourselves, and spend our spirits on a dream."
"True, true," chimed in the counsellor, "spirit is little use without
body, and a body it will find; and therefore, unless you let people's
brains grow healthy plants, they will grow mushrooms."
_MS. unfinished Story_. 1843.
Sudden Death. April 19.
"What better can the Lord do for a man, than take him home when he has
done his work?"
"But, Master Yeo, a sudden death?"
"And why not a sudden death, Sir John? Even fools long for a short life
and a merry one, and shall not the Lord's people pray for a short death
and a merry one? Let it come as it will to old Yeo!"
_Westward Ho_! chap. xxxii. 1855.
Prayer and Praise. April 20.
Pray night and day, very quietly, like a little weary child, to the good
and loving God, for everything you want, in body as well as soul--the
least thing as well as the greatest. Nothing is too much to ask God
for--nothing too great for Him to grant: glory be to Thee, O Lord! And
try to thank Him for everything . . . I sometimes feel that eternity
will be too short to praise God in, if it was only for making us live at
all! And then not making us idiots or cripples, or even only ugly and
stupid! What blessings we have! Let us work in return for them--not
under the enslaving sense of paying off an infinite debt, but with the
delight of gratitude, glorying that we are God's debtors.
_Letters_. 1843.
The Divine Spark. April 21.
Man? I am a man, thou art a woman--not by reason of bones and muscles,
nerves and brain, which I have in common with apes, and dogs, and
horses--I am a man, thou art a man or woman, not because we have a flesh,
God forbid! but because there is a spirit in us, a divine spark and ray
which nature did not give, and which nature cannot take away. And
therefore, while I live on earth, I will live to the spirit, not to the
flesh, that I may be indeed a man.
_Lecture on Ancient Civilisation_.
1873.
The Worst Calamity. April 22.
The very worst calamity, I should say, which could befall any human being
would be this--to have his own way from his cradle to his grave; to have
everything he liked for the asking, or even for the buying; never to be
forced to say, "I should like that, but I cannot afford it. I should
like this, but I must not do it." Never to deny himself, never to exert
himself, never to work, and never to want--that man's soul would be in as
great danger as if he were committing great crimes.
_All Saints' Day Sermons_.
Men and Women. April 23.
"The Lord be with you, dearest lady," said Adrian Gilbert. "Strange how
you women sit at home to love and suffer, while we men rush forth to
break our hearts and yours against rocks of our own seeking! Ah! hech!
were it not for Scripture I should have thought that Adam, rather than
Eve, had been the one who plucked the fruit of the forbidden tree."
_Westward Ho_! chap. xiii. 1855.
Faith in the Unseen. April 24.
He was not one of those "ungodly" men of whom David speaks in his Psalms,
who rob the widow and the fatherless. His morality was as high as that
of the average, his honour higher. But of "godliness" in its true
sense--of belief that any Being above cared for him, and was helping him
in the daily business of life: that it was worth while asking that
Being's advice, or that any advice would be given if asked for--of any
practical notion of a heavenly Father or a Divine educator--he was as
ignorant as thousands of persons who go to church every Sunday, and read
good books, and believe firmly that the Pope is Antichrist.
_Two Years Ago_, chap. i. 1856.
Death--Resurrection. April 25.
As we rose to go, my eye caught a highly-finished drawing of the
Resurrection painted above the place where the desk and faldstool and
lectern, holding an open missal book, stood. I should have rather
expected, I thought to myself, a picture of the Crucifixion. She seemed
to guess my thought, and said, "There is enough in an abode of heavy
hearts, and in daily labours among poverty and suffering, to keep in our
minds the Prince of Sufferers. We need rather to be reminded that pain
is not the law but the disease of our existence, and that it has been
conquered for us in body and soul by Him in whose eternity of bliss a few
years of sadness were but as a mote within the sunbeam's blaze."
_MS. unfinished Story_. l843.
Woman's Work. April 26.
Woman is the teacher, the natural and therefore divine guide, purifier,
inspirer of man.
_MS._
Passion--Easter--Ascension. April 27.
Good Friday, Easter Day, and Ascension, are set as great lights in the
firmament of the spiritual year;--to remind us that we are not animals
born to do what we like, and fulfil the simple lusts of the flesh--but
that we are rational moral beings, members of Christ, children of God,
and inheritors of the kingdom of heaven, and that, therefore, like
Christ, we must die in order to live, stoop in order to conquer. They
remind us that honour must grow out of humility; that freedom must grow
out of discipline; that sure conquest must be born of heavy struggles;
righteous joy out of righteous sorrow; pure laughter out of pure tears;
true strength out of the true knowledge of our own weakness; sound peace
of mind out of sound contrition.
_All Saints' Day Sermons_. 1871.
How to keep Passion-Week. April 28.
Can we go wrong if we keep our Passion-week as Christ kept His? And how
did He keep it? Not by shutting Himself up apart, not by the mere
thinking over the glory of self-sacrifice. He taught daily in the
temple; instead of giving up His work, He worked more earnestly than ever
as the terrible end drew near. Why should not we keep Passion-week, not
by merely hiding in our closets to meditate even about Him, but by going
about our work each in his place, dutifully, bravely, as Christ went?
_Town and Country Sermons_. 1859.
Self-Sacrifice. April 29.
Without self-sacrifice there can be no blessedness either in earth or in
heaven. He that loveth his life will lose it. He that hateth his life
in this paltry, selfish, luxurious world shall keep it to life eternal.
_All Saints' Day Sermons_. 1870.
Help from our Blessed Dead. April 30.
And so with those who are Christ's whom we love. Partakers of His death,
they are partakers of His resurrection. Let us believe the blessed news
in all its fulness, and be at peace. A little while and we see them, and
again a little while and we do not see them. But why? Because they are
gone to the Father, to the Source and Fount of all life and power, all
light and love, that they may gain life from His life, power from His
power, light from His light, love from His love; and surely not for
nought. Surely not for nought. For if they were like Christ on earth,
and did not use their powers for themselves alone; if they are to be like
Christ when they see Him as He is, then, more surely, will they not use
their powers for themselves, but as Christ uses His, for those they love.
_MS. Sermon_. 1866.
SAINTS' DAYS, FASTS, & FESTIVALS.
Passion-tide.
From the earliest times the Cross has been the special sign of
Christians. St. Paul tells us his great hope, his great business, what
God had sent him into the world to do, was this--to make people know the
love of Christ; to look at Christ's Cross, and take in its breadth and
length and depth and height.
And what is the _breadth_ of Christ's Cross? My friends, it is as broad
as the whole world, for He died for the whole world; as it is written,
"He is a propitiation not for our sins only, but for the sins of the
whole world." And that is the _breadth_ of Christ's Cross.
And what is the _length_ of Christ's Cross? Long enough to last through
all time. As long as there is a sinner to be saved; as long as there is
ignorance, sorrow, pain, death, or anything else which is contrary to God
and hurtful to man in the universe of God, so long will Christ's Cross
last. And that is the _length_ of the Cross of Christ.
And how _high_ is Christ's Cross? As high as the highest heaven, and the
throne of God and the bosom of the Father--that bosom out of which for
ever proceed all created things. Ay, as high as the highest heaven; for,
if you will receive it, when Christ hung upon the Cross heaven came down
on earth, and earth ascended into heaven. And that is the _height_ of
the Cross of Christ.
And how _deep_ is the Cross of Christ? This is a great mystery which
people are afraid to look into, and darken it of their own will. But if
the Cross of Christ be as high as heaven, then it must be as deep as
hell, deep enough to reach the deepest sinner in the deepest pit to which
he may fall, for Christ descended into hell, and preached to the spirits
in prison. Let us hope, then, that is the _depth_ of the Cross of
Christ.
"_The Measure of the Cross_,"
_Sermons_ (_Good News of God_).
Good Friday.
Listen! and our God shall whisper, as we hang upon the cross, {97}
"Children! love! and loving, faint not! great your glory, light your
loss!
_Ye_ are bound--ye may be loosed--_I_ was nailed upon the tree,
Of the pangs I suffered for you--bear awhile a few for me!
Fear not, though the waters whelm you; fear not, though ye see no land!
Know ye not your God is with you, guiding with a Father's hand?
Cords may wring, and winds may freeze you, shivering on the sullen sea,
Yet the life that burns within you liveth ever hid with Me!"
_MS._ 1842.
Christ must suffer before He entered into His glory. He must die before
He could rise. He must descend into hell before He could ascend into
heaven. For this is the law of God's kingdom. Without a Good Friday
there can be no Easter Day. Without self-sacrifice there can be no
blessedness.
My Saviour! My King! Infinite, Eternal Love--alone of all beings devoid
of self-love! Glory be to Thee for Thy humiliation, for Thy Cross and
Passion!
_MS._
Easter Even.
Christ went down into hell and preached to the spirits in prison. It is
written that "as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made
alive;" and again, "When the wicked man turns from his wickedness he
shall save his soul alive." And we know that in the same chapter God
tells us that His ways are not unequal. It is possible, therefore, that
He has not one law for this life and another for the life to come. Let
us hope, then, that David's words may be true after all, when, speaking
by the Spirit of God, he says not only "if I ascend up to heaven, thou
art there," but "if I go down to hell, thou art there also."
_MS. Sermon_.
Easter Day.
The Creed says, "I believe in the Resurrection of the flesh." I believe
that we, each of us, as human beings, men and women, shall have a share
in that glorious day; not merely as ghosts and disembodied spirits, but
as real live human beings, with new bodies of our own, on a new earth,
under a new heaven. "Therefore," David says, "my flesh shall rest in
hope;" not merely my soul, my ghost, but my flesh. For the Lord, who not
only died but rose again with His body, shall raise our bodies according
to His mighty working, and then the whole manhood of us--body, soul, and
spirit--shall have our perfect consummation and bliss in His eternal and
everlasting glory.
_National Sermons_.
APRIL 25.
St. Mark, Evangelist and Martyr.
God's apostles, saints, and martyrs are our spiritual ancestors. They
spread the Gospel into all lands, and they spread it, remember always,
not only by preaching what they knew, but by being what they were. Their
characters, their personal histories, are as important to us as their
writings.
_Sermons_.
May.
Is it merely a fancy that we are losing that love for Spring which among
our old forefathers rose almost to worship? That the perpetual miracle
of the budding leaves and the returning song-birds awakes no longer in us
the astonishment which it awoke yearly among the dwellers in the old
world, when the sun was a god who was sick to death each winter, and
returned in spring to life, and health, and glory; when Freya, the
goddess of youth and love, went forth over the earth while the flowers
broke forth under her tread over the brown moors, and the birds welcomed
her with song? To those simpler children of a simpler age winter and
spring were the two great facts of existence; the symbols, the one of
death, the other of life; and the battle between the two--the battle of
the sun with darkness, of winter with spring, of death with life, of
bereavement with love--lay at the root of all their myths and all their
creeds. Surely a change has come over our fancies! The seasons are
little to us now!
_Prose Idylls_.
Past and Present. May 1.
Now see the young spring leaves burst out a-maying,
Fill with their ripening hues orchard and glen;
So though old forms pass by, ne'er shall their spirit die,
Look! England's bare boughs show green leaf again.
_Poems_. 1849.
The Earth is the Lord's. May 2.
The earth is holy! Can there be a more glorious truth to carry out--one
which will lead us more into all love and beauty and purity in heaven and
earth? One which must have God's light of love shining on it at every
step. God gives us souls and bodies exquisitely attuned for this very
purpose--the aesthetic faculty, our sensibilities to the beautiful. All
events of life, all the workings of our hearts, should point to this one
idea. As I walk the fields, the trees and flowers and birds, and the
motes of rack floating in the sky, seem to cry to me: "Thou knowest us!
Thou knowest we have a meaning, and sing a heaven's harmony by night and
day! Do us justice! Spell our enigma, and go forth and tell thy fellows
that we are their brethren, that their spirit is our spirit, their
Saviour our Saviour, their God our God!"
_Letters and Memories_. 1842.
The Great Question. May 3.
Is there a living God in the universe, or is there not? That is the
greatest of all questions. Has our Lord Jesus Christ answered it, or has
He not?
_Water of Life Sermons_. 1866.
Our Father. May 4.
Look at those thousand birds, and without our Father not one of them
shall fall to the ground; and art thou not of more value than many
sparrows--thou for whom God sent His Son to die? . . . Ah! my friend, we
must look out and around to see what God is like. It is when we persist
in turning our eyes inward, and prying curiously over our own
imperfections, that we learn to make a god after our own image, and fancy
that our own hardness and darkness are the patterns of His light and
love.
_Hypatia_, chap. xi.
Want of Sympathy. May 5.
If we do not understand our fellow-creatures we shall never love them.
And it is equally true, that if we do not love them we shall never
understand them. Want of charity, want of sympathy, want of good feeling
and fellow-feeling--what does it, what can it breed but endless mistakes
and ignorances, both of men's characters and men's circumstances?
_Westminster Sermons_. 1873.
A Religion. May 6.
If all that a man wants is "a _religion_," he ought to be able to make a
very pretty one for himself, and a fresh one as often as he is tired of
the old. But the heart and soul of man wants more than that; as it is
written, "My soul is athirst for GOD, even for the living God." I want a
living God, who cares for men, forgives men, saves men from their sins:
and Him I have found in the Bible, and nowhere else, save in the facts of
life which the Bible alone interprets.
_Sermons on the Pentateuch_. 1863.
True Civilisation. May 7.
Do the duty which lies nearest to you; your duty to the man who lives
next door, and to the man who lives in the next street. Do your duty to
your parish, that you may do your duty by your country and to all
mankind, and prove yourselves thereby civilised men.
_Water of Life Sermons_. 1866.
Nature and Grace. May 8.
Why speak of the God of Nature and the God of grace as two antithetical
terms? The Bible never in a single instance makes the distinction, and
surely if God be the eternal and unchangeable One, and if all the
universe bears the impress of His signet, we have no right, in the
present infantile state of science, to put arbitrary limits of our own to
the revelation which He may have thought good to make of Himself in
Nature. Nay, rather, let us believe that if our eyes were opened we
should fulfil the requirement of genius and see the universal in the
particular by seeing God's whole likeness, His whole glory, reflected as
in a mirror in the meanest flower, and that nothing but the dulness of
our simple souls prevents them from seeing day and night in all things
the Lord Jesus Christ fulfilling His own saying, "My Father worketh
hitherto, and I work."
_Glaucus_. 1855.
Wisdom the Child of Goodness. May 9.
Goodness rather than talent had given her a wisdom, and goodness rather
than courage a power of using that wisdom, which to those simple folk
seemed almost an inspiration.
_Two Years Ago_, chap. ii. 1857.
Rule of Life. May 10.
Two great rules for the attainment of heavenly wisdom are simple
enough--"Never forget what and where you are," and "Grieve not the Holy
Spirit."
_MS. Letter_. 1841.
Music the Speech of God. May 11.
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_. 1859.
Facing Realities. May 12.
The only comfort I can see in the tragedies of war is that they bring us
all face to face with the realities of human life, as it has been in all
ages, giving us sterner and yet more loving, more human, and more divine
thoughts about ourselves, and our business here, and the fate of those
who are gone, and awakening us out of the luxurious, frivolous, and
unreal dream (full nevertheless of hard judgments) in which we have been
living so long, to trust in a living Father who is really and practically
governing this world and all worlds, and who willeth that none should
perish.
_Letters and Memories_. 1855.
Street Arabs. May 13.
One has only to go into the streets of any great city in England to see
how we, with all our boast of civilisation, are yet but one step removed
from barbarism. Is that a hard word? Only there _are_ the barbarians
round us at every street corner--grown barbarians, it may be, now all but
past saving, but bringing into the world young barbarians whom we may yet
save, for God wishes us to save them. . . . Do not deceive yourselves
about the little dirty, offensive children in the street. If they be
offensive to you, they are not to Him who made them. "Take heed that ye
despise not one of these little ones: for I say unto you, their angels do
always behold the face of your Father which is in heaven."
_All Saints' Day Sermons_. 1871.
Fellowship of Sorrow. May 14.
How was He,
The blessed One, made perfect? Why, by grief--
The fellowship of voluntary grief--
He read the tear-stained book of poor men's souls,
As we must learn to read it. Lady! lady!
Wear but one robe the less--forego one meal--
And thou shalt taste the core of many tales,
Which now flit past thee, like a minstrel's songs,
The sweeter for their sadness.
_Saint's Tragedy_, Act ii. Scene v.
1847.
Heaven and Hell. May 15.
Heaven and hell--the spiritual world--are they merely invisible places in
space which may become visible hereafter? or are they not rather the
moral world of right and wrong? Love and righteousness--is not that the
heaven itself wherein God dwells? Hatred and sin--is not that hell
itself, wherein dwells all that is opposed to God?
_Water of Life Sermons_.
The Awfulness of Life. May 16.
Our hearts are dull, and hard, and light, God forgive us! and we forget
continually what an earnest, awful world we live in--a whole eternity
waiting for us to be born, and a whole eternity waiting to see what we
shall do now we are born. Yes, our hearts are dull, and hard, and light.
And therefore Christ sends suffering on us, to teach us what we always
gladly forget in comfort and prosperity--what an awful capacity of
suffering we have; and more, what an awful capacity of suffering our
fellow-creatures have likewise. . . .
We sit at ease too often in a fool's paradise, till God awakens us and
tortures us into pity for the torture of others. And so, if we will not
acknowledge our brotherhood by any other teaching, He knits us together
by the brotherhood of suffering.
_All Saints' Day Sermons_. 1871.
Hope and Fear. May 17.
Every gift of God is good, and given for our happiness, and we sin if we
abuse it. To use your fancy to your own misery is to abuse it and to
sin. The realm of the possible was given to man to _hope_ and not to
_fear_ in.
_Letters and Memories_. 1842.
Cry of the Heart and Reason. May 18.
A living God, a true God, a real God, a God worthy of the name, a God who
is working for ever, everywhere, and in all; who hates nothing that He
has made, forgets nothing, neglects nothing; a God who satisfies not only
the head but the heart, not only the logical intellect but the highest
reason--that pure reason which is one with the conscience and moral
sense! For Him we cry out, Him we seek, and if we cannot find Him we
know no rest.
_Water of Life Sermons_. 1867.
Speaking the Truth in Love. May 19.
Whenever we are tempted to say more than is needful, let us remember St.
John's words (in the only sermon we have on record of his), "Little
children, love one another," and ask God for His Holy Spirit, the spirit
of love, which, instead of weakening a man's words, makes them all the
stronger in the cause of truth, because they are spoken in love.
How difficult it is to distinguish between the loving _tact_, which
avoids giving offence to a weaker brother, and the fear of man, which
bringeth a snare!
_MS. Letter_. 1842.
Peasant Souls. May 20.
. . . Dull boors
See deeper than we think, and hide within
Those leathern hulls unfathomable truths,
Which we amid thought's glittering mazes lose.
They grind among the iron facts of life,
And have no time for self-deception.
_Saint's Tragedy_, Act iii. Scene ii.
1847.
Death and Everlasting Life. May 21.
Do not rashly count on some sudden radical change happening to you as
soon as you die to make you fit for heaven. There is not one word in the
Bible which gives us reason to suppose that we shall not be in the next
world the same persons that we have made ourselves in this world. . . .
What we sow here we shall reap there. And it is good for us to know and
face this. Anything is good for us, however unpleasant it may be, which
drives us from the only real misery, which is sin and selfishness, to the
only true happiness, which is the everlasting life of Christ, a pure,
loving, just, generous, useful life of goodness.
_Good News of God Sermons_.
Science and Virtue. May 22.
Science is great; but she is not the greatest. She is an instrument and
not a power--beneficent or deadly, according as she is wielded by the
hand of virtue or vice. But her lawful mistress, the only one which can
use her aright, the only one under whom she can truly grow and prosper
and prove her divine descent, is Virtue, the likeness of Almighty God.
_Roman and Teuton_. 1860.
A Child's Heart. May 23.
"I saw at last! I found out that I had been trying for years which was
stronger, God or I; I found out I had been trying whether I could not do
well enough without Him; and there I found that I could not--could not! I
felt like a child who had marched off from home, fancying it can find its
way, and is lost at once. I did not know that I had a Father in heaven
who had been looking after me, when I fancied I was looking after myself.
I don't half believe it now." . . . And so the old heart passed away
from Thomas Thurnall, and instead of it grew up the heart of a little
child.
_Two Years Ago_, chap. xxviii. 1857.
Self-Security. May 24.
Strange it is how mortal man, "who cometh up and is cut down like the
flower," can harden himself into a stoical security, and count on the
morrow which may never come. Yet so it is, and perhaps if it were not so
no work would get done on earth--at least by the many who know not that
God is guiding them, while they fancy they are guiding themselves.
_Two Years Ago_, chap. i.
There is a Providence which rules this earth, whose name is neither
Political Economy nor Expediency, but the Living God, who makes every
right action reward, and every wrong action punish, _itself_.
_History Lecture_, _Cambridge_. 1866.
Loss and Gain. May 25.
"He has yet to learn what losing his life to save it means, Amyas. Bad
men have taught him (and I fear these Anabaptists and Puritans at home
teach little else) that it is the one great business of every man to save
his own soul after he dies; every one for himself; and that that, and not
divine self-sacrifice, is the one thing needful, and the better part
which Mary chose."
"I think," said Amyas, "men are enough inclined to be selfish without
being taught that."
_Westward Ho_! chap. vii. 1854.
The Law of Righteousness. May 26.
What if I had discovered that one law of the spiritual world, in which
all others were contained, was Righteousness? and that disharmony with
that law, which we call unspirituality, was not being vulgar, or clumsy,
or ill-taught, or unimaginative, or dull; but simply being unrighteous?
that righteousness, and it alone, was the beautiful, righteousness the
sublime, the heavenly, the God-like--ay, God Himself?
_Hypatia_, chap. xxvii. 1852.
Human and Divine Love. May 27.
Believe me that he who has been led by love to a human being to
understand the mystery of that divine love which fills all heaven and
earth, and concentrates itself into an articulate manifestation in the
person of Christ, will soon begin to find that he cannot enter into the
perfect bliss of that truth without going further, and seeing that the
human heart requires some standing-ground for its affection, even for the
love of wife and child, deeper and surer than that love, namely, in utter
loyalty, resignation, adoring affection to Him in whom all loveliness is
concentrated. It is a great mystery. It is a hard lesson.
_Letters and Memories_. 1847.
A High Finish. May 28.
A high artistic finish is important for more reasons than for the mere
pleasure it gives. There is something sacramental in perfect metre and
rhythm. They are outward and visible signs (most seriously we speak as
we say it) of an inward and spiritual grace, namely, of the
self-possessed and victorious temper of one who has so far subdued nature
as to be able to hear that universal sphere-music of hers, speaking of
which Mr. Carlyle says, that "all deepest thoughts instinctively vent
themselves in song."
_Miscellanies_. 1849.
Our Prayers. May 29.
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.
_Letters and Memories_. 1860.
Clearing Showers. May 30.
When a stream is swelled by a flood, a shower of rain _clears_ it. So in
trouble, when the heart is turbid from the world's admixtures, and the
stirring up of the foul particles which will lie at the bottom, nothing
but the pure dew of heaven can restore its purity, when God's spirit
comes down upon it like a gentle rain!
_MS._ 1843.
Vineyards in Spring. May 31.
Look at the rows of vines, or what will be vines when the summer comes,
but are now black, knotted and gnarled clubs, without a sign of life in
the seemingly dead stick. One who sees that sight may find a new beauty
and meaning in the mystic words, "I am the Vine, ye are the branches." It
is not merely the connection between branch and stem common to all trees;
not merely the exhilarating and seemingly inspiring properties of the
grape, which made the very heathen look upon it as the sacred and
miraculous fruit, the special gift of God; not merely the pruning out of
the unfruitful branches, to be burned as firewood--not merely these, but
the seeming death of the Vine, shorn of all its beauty, its fruitfulness,
of every branch and twig which it had borne the year before, and left
unsightly and seemingly ruined, to its winter sleep; and then bursting
forth again by an irresistible inward life into fresh branches, spreading
and trailing far and wide, and tossing their golden tendrils to the sky.
This thought surely--the emblem of the living Church, springing from the
corpse of the dead Christ, who yet should rise to be alive for
evermore--enters into, it may be forms an integral part of, the meaning
of that prophecy of all prophecies.
_Prose Idylls_. 1864.
SAINTS' DAYS, FASTS, & FESTIVALS.
MAY 1.
St. Philip and St. James, Apostles and Martyrs.
Christ's cross says still, and will say to all Eternity, "Wouldst thou be
good? Wouldst thou be like God? Then work and dare, and if need be,
suffer for thy fellow-men." On the Cross Christ consecrated, and as it
were offered to the Father in His own body, all loving actions, unselfish
actions, merciful actions, heroic actions, which man has done or ever
will do. From Him, from His spirit, their strength came; and therefore
He is not ashamed to call them brethren. He is the King of the noble
army of martyrs; of all who suffer for love and truth and justice' sake;
and to all such He says, thou hast put on My likeness; thou hast suffered
for My sake, and I too have suffered for thy sake, and enabled thee to
suffer likewise, and in Me thou too art a Son of God, in whom the Father
is well pleased.
_Sermons_.
Feast of the Ascension.
"Lo, I am with you always," said the Blessed One before He ascended to
the Father. And this is the Lord who we fancy is gone away far above the
stars till the end of time! Oh, my friends, rather bow your heads before
Him at this moment! For here He is among us now, listening to every
thought of our poor simple hearts. He is where God is, in whom we live,
and move, and have our being, and that is everywhere. Do you wish Him to
be any nearer?
_National Sermons_.
. . . Oh, my Saviour!
My God! where art Thou? That's but a tale about Thee,
That crucifix above--it does but show Thee
As Thou wast once, but not as Thou art now. . . .
_Saint's Tragedy_, Act iv. Scene i.
June.
Three o'clock, upon a still, pure, Midsummer morning. . . . The white
glare of dawn, which last night hung high in the north-west, has
travelled now to the north-east, and above the wooded wall of the hills
the sky is flushing with rose and amber. A long line of gulls goes
wailing inland; the rooks come cawing and sporting round the corner at
Landcross, while high above them four or five herons flap solemnly along
to find their breakfast on the shallows. The pheasants and partridges
are clucking merrily in the long wet grass; every copse and hedgerow
rings with the voice of birds; but the lark, who has been singing since
midnight in the "blank height of the dark," suddenly hushes his carol and
drops headlong among the corn, as a broad-winged buzzard swings from some
wooded peak into the abyss of the valley, and hangs high-poised above the
heavenward songster. The air is full of perfume; sweet clover, new-mown
hay, the fragrant breath of kine, the dainty scent of sea-weed, and fresh
wet sand. Glorious day, glorious place, "bridal of earth and sky,"
decked well with bridal garments, bridal perfumes, bridal songs.
_Westward Ho_! chap. xii.
Open Thou mine Eyes. June 1.
I have wandered in the mountains mist-bewildered,
And now a breeze comes, and the veil is lifted;
And priceless flowers, o'er which I trod unheeding,
Gleam ready for my grasp.
_Saint's Tragedy_, Act i. Scene ii.
1847.
The Spirit of Romance. June 2.
Some say that the spirit of romance is dead. The spirit of romance will
never die as long as there is a man left to see that the world might and
can be better, happier, wiser, fairer in all things than it is now. The
spirit of romance will never die as long as a man has faith in God to
believe that the world will actually be better and fairer than it is now,
as long as men have faith, however weak, to believe in the romance of all
romances, in the wonder of all wonders, in that of which all poets'
dreams have been but childish hints and dim forefeelings--even
"That one divine far-off event
Towards which the whole creation moves,
that wonder which our Lord Himself has bade us pray for as for our daily
bread, and say, "Father, Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as
it is done in heaven."
_Water of Life Sermons_. 1865.
The Everlasting Music. June 3.
All melody and all harmony upon earth, whether in the song of birds, the
whisper of the wind, the concourse of voices, or the sounds of those
cunning instruments which man has learnt to create, because he is made in
the image of Christ, the Word of God, who creates all things; all music
upon earth, I say, is beautiful in as far as it is a pattern and type of
the everlasting music which is in heaven, which was before all worlds and
shall be after them.
_Good News of God Sermons_. 1859.
Gifts are Duties. June 4.
Exceeding gifts from God are not blessings, they are duties, and very
solemn and heavy duties. They do not always increase a man's happiness;
they always increase his responsibility, the awful account which he must
render at last of the talents committed to his charge. They increase,
too, his danger.
_Water of Life Sermons_.
Summer Days. June 5.
Now let the young be glad,
Fair girl and gallant lad,
And sun themselves to-day
By lawn and garden gay;
'Tis play befits the noon
Of rosy-girdled June;
. . . . .
The world before them, and above
The light of Universal Love.
_Installation Ode_, _Cambridge_. 1862.
"Sufficient for the Day." June 6.
Let us not meddle with the future, and matters which are too high for us,
but refrain our souls, and keep them low like little children, content
with the day's food, and the day's schooling, and the day's play-hours,
sure that the Divine Master knows that all is right, and how to train us,
and whither to lead us; though we know not and need not know, save this,
that the path by which He is leading each of us, if we will but obey and
follow step by step, leads up to everlasting life.
_All Saints' Day Sermons_. 1871.
Secret of Thrift. June 7.
The secret of thrift is knowledge. The more you know the more you can
save yourself and that which belongs to you, and can do more work with
less effort. Knowledge of domestic economy saves income; knowledge of
sanitary laws saves health and life: knowledge of the laws of the
intellect saves wear and tear of brain, and knowledge of the laws of the
spirit--what does it not save?
_Lecture on Thrift_. 1869.
Out-door Worship. June 8.
In the forest, every branch and leaf, with the thousand living things
which cluster on them, all worship, worship, worship with us! Let us go
up in the evenings and pray there, with nothing but God's cloud temple
between us and His heaven! And His choir of small birds and night
crickets and booming beetles, and all happy things who praise Him all
night long! And in the still summer noon, too, with the lazy-paced
clouds above, and the distant sheep-bell, and the bee humming in the beds
of thyme, and one bird making the hollies ring a moment, and then all
still--hushed--awe-bound, as the great thunder-clouds slide up from the
far south! Then, then, to praise God! Ay, even when the heaven is black
with wind, the thunder crackling over our heads, then to join in the paean
of the storm-spirits to Him whose pageant of power passes over the earth
and harms us not in its mercy!
_Letters and Memories_. 1844.
God's Countenance. June 9.
Study nature as the countenance of God! Try to extract every line of
beauty, every association, every moral reflection, every inexpressible
feeling from it.
_Letters and Memories_. 1842.
Certain and Uncertain. June 10.
"Life is uncertain," folks say. Life is certain, say I, because God is
educating us thereby. But this process of education is so far above our
sight that it looks often uncertain and utterly lawless; wherefore fools
conceive (as does M. Comte) that there is no Living God, because they
cannot condense His formulas into their small smelling-bottles.
O glorious thought! that we are under a Father's education, and that _He_
has promised to develop us, and to make us go on from strength to
strength.
_Letters and Memories_. 1868.
Sensuality. June 11.
What is sensuality? Not the enjoyment of holy glorious matter, but
blindness to its meaning.
_MS._ 1842.
The Journey's End. June 12.
Let us live hard, work hard, go a good pace, get to our journey's end as
soon as possible--then let the post-horse get his shoulder out of the
collar. . . . I have lived long enough to feel, like the old post-horse,
very thankful as the end draws near. . . . Long life is the last thing
that I desire. It may be that, as one grows older, one acquires more and
more the painful consciousness of the difference between what _ought_ to
be done and what _can_ be done, and sits down more quietly when one gets
the wrong side of fifty, to let others start up to do for us things we
cannot do for ourselves. But it is the highest pleasure that a man can
have who has (to his own exceeding comfort) turned down the hill at last,
to believe that younger spirits will rise up after him, and catch the
lamp of Truth, as in the old lamp-bearing race of Greece, out of his hand
before it expires, and carry it on to the goal with swifter and more even
feet.
_Speech at Lotus Club_, _New York_. 1874.
Punishment Inevitable. June 13.
It is a fact that God does punish here, in this life. He does not, as
false preachers say, give over this life to impunity and this world to
the devil, and only resume the reigns of moral government and the right
of retribution when men die and go into the next world. Here in this
life He punishes sin. Slowly but surely God punishes. If any of you
doubt my words you have only to commit sin and then see whether your sin
will find you out.
_Sermons on David_. 1866.
The Problem Solved. June l4.
After all, the problem of life is not a difficult one, for it solves
itself so very soon at best--by death. Do what is right the best way you
can, and wait to the end to _know_.
_MS. Letter_.
But remember that though death may alter our place, it cannot alter our
character--though it may alter our circumstances, it cannot alter
ourselves.
_Discipline and other Sermons_.
The Father's Education. June 15.
Sin, [Greek text], is the missing of a mark, the falling short of an
ideal; . . . and that each miss brings a penalty, or rather is itself the
penalty, is to me the best of news and gives me hope for myself and every
human being past, present, and future, for it makes me look on them all
as children under a paternal education, who are being taught to become
aware of, and use their own powers in God's house, the universe, and for
God's work in it; and, in proportion as they do that, they attain
salvation,
_Letters and Memories_. 1852.
Parent and Child. June 16.
Superstition is the child of fear, and fear is the child of ignorance.
_Lectures on Science and Superstition_.
1866.
A Charm of Birds. June 17.
Listen to the charm of birds in any sequestered woodland on a bright
forenoon in early summer. As you try to disentangle the medley of
sounds, the first, perhaps, which will strike your ear will be the loud,
harsh, monotonous, flippant song of the chaffinch, and the metallic
clinking of two or three sorts of titmice. But above the tree-tops,
rising, hovering, sinking, the woodlark is fluting tender and low. Above
the pastures outside the skylark sings--as he alone can sing; and close
by from the hollies rings out the blackbird's tenor--rollicking,
audacious, humorous, all but articulate. From the tree above him rises
the treble of the thrush, pure as the song of angels; more pure, perhaps,
in tone, though neither so varied nor so rich as the song of the
nightingale. And there, in the next holly, is the nightingale himself;
now croaking like a frog, now talking aside to his wife, and now bursting
out into that song, or cycle of songs, in which if any man find sorrow,
he himself surely finds none. . . . In Nature there is nothing
melancholy.
_Prose Idylls_. 1866.
Notes of Character. June 18.
Without softness, without repose, and therefore without dignity.
_MS._
Our Blessed Dead. June 19.
Why should not those who are gone be actually nearer us, not farther from
us, in the heavenly world, praying for us, and it may be influencing and
guiding us in a hundred ways of which we, in our prison-house of
mortality, cannot dream? Yes! Do not be afraid to believe that he whom
you have lost is near you, and you near him, and both of you near God,
who died on the cross for you.
_Letters and Memories_. 1871.
Silent Influence. June 20.
Violence is not strength, noisiness is not earnestness. Noise is a sign
of want of faith, and violence is a sign of weakness.
By quiet, modest, silent, private influence we shall win. "Neither
strive nor cry nor let your voice be heard in the streets," was good
advice of old, and is still. I have seen many a movement succeed by it.
I have seen many a movement tried by the other method of striving and
crying and making a noise in the streets, but I have never seen one
succeed thereby, and never shall.
_Letters and Memories_. 1870.
Chivalry. June 21.
Some say that the age of chivalry is past. The age of chivalry is never
past as long as there is a wrong left unredressed on earth, and a man or
woman left to say, "I will redress that wrong, or spend my life in the
attempt." The age of chivalry is never past as long as men have faith
enough in God to say, "God will help me to redress that wrong; or if not
me, surely He will help those that come after me. For His eternal will
is to overcome evil with good."
_Water of Life Sermons_. 1865.
Nature and Art. June 22.
When once you have learnt the beauty of little mossy banks, and tiny
leaves, and flecks of cloud, with what a fulness the glories of Claude,
or Ruysdael, or Berghem, will unfold themselves to you! You must know
Nature or you cannot know Art. And when you do know Nature you will only
prize Art for being like Nature.
_MS. Letter_. 1842.
Simple and Sincere. June 23.
There are those, and, thanks to Almighty God, they are to be numbered by
tens of thousands, who will not perplex themselves with questionings;
simple, genial hearts, who try to do what good they can in the world, and
meddle not with matters too high for them; people whose religion is not
abstruse but deep, not noisy but intense, not aggressive but laboriously
useful; people who have the same habit of mind as the early Christians
seem to have worn, ere yet Catholic truth had been defined in formulae,
when the Apostles' Creed was symbol enough for the Church, and men were
orthodox in heart rather than exact in head.
For such it is enough if a fellow-creature loves Him whom they love, and
serves Him whom they serve. Personal affection and loyalty to the same
unseen Being is to them a communion of saints both real and actual, in
the genial warmth of which all minor differences of opinion vanish. . . .
_Preface to Tauler's Sermons_. 1854.
God's Words. June 24.
Do I mean, then, that this or any text has nothing to do with us? God
forbid! I believe that every word of our Lord's has to do with us, and
with every human being, for their meaning is infinite, eternal, and
inexhaustible.
_MS. Letter_.
Taught by Failure. June 25.
So I am content to have failed. I have learned in the experiment
priceless truths concerning myself, my fellow-men, and the city of God,
which is eternal in the heavens, for ever coming down among men, and
actualising itself more and more in every succeeding age. I only know
that I know nothing, but with a hope that Christ, who is the Son of Man,
will tell me piecemeal, if I be patient and watchful, what I am and what
man is.
_Letters and Memories_. 1857.
Presentiments. June 26.
"I cannot deny," said Claude, "that such things as presentiments may be
possible. However miraculous they may seem, are they so very much more
so than the daily fact of memory? I can as little guess why we remember
the past, as why we may not at times be able to foresee the future." . .
.
_Two Years Ago_, chap. xxviii.
A thing need not be unreasonable--that is, contrary to reason--because it
is above and beyond reason, or, at least, our human reason, which at best
(as St. Paul says) sees as in a glass darkly.
_MS. Letter_. 1856.
Common Duties. June 27.
But after all, what is speculation to practice? What does God require of
us, but to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with Him? The
longer I live this seems to me more important, and all other questions
less so--if we can but live the simple right life--
Do the work that's nearest,
Though it's dull at whiles;
Helping, when we meet them,
Lame dogs over stiles.
_Letters and Memories_. 1857.
Lost and Found. June 28.
"My welfare? It is gone!"
"So much the better. I never found mine till I lost it."
_Hypatia_, chap. xxvii. 1852.
How to bear Sorrow. June 29.
I believe that the wisest plan is sometimes not to try to bear sorrow--as
long as one is not crippled for one's everyday duties--but to give way to
it utterly and freely. Perhaps sorrow is sent that we _may_ give way to
it, and in drinking the cup to the dregs, find some medicine in it
itself, which we should not find if we began doctoring ourselves, or
letting others doctor us. If we say simply, "I am wretched--I ought to
be wretched;" then we shall perhaps hear a voice, "Who made thee wretched
but God? Then what can He mean but thy good?" And if the heart answers
impatiently, "My good? I don't want it, I want my love;" perhaps the
voice may answer, "Then thou shalt have both in time."
_Letters and Memories_. 1871.
A certain Hope. June 30.
Let us look forward with quiet certainty of hope, day and night;
believing, though we can see but little day, that all this tangled web
will resolve itself into golden threads of twined, harmonious life,
guiding both us, and those we love, together, through this life to that
resurrection of the flesh, when we shall at last know the reality and the
fulness of life and love. Even so come, Lord Jesus!
_Letters and Memories_. 1844.
SAINTS' DAYS, FASTS, & FESTIVALS.
Whit Sunday.
Think of the Holy Spirit as a Person having a will of His own, who
breatheth whither He listeth, and cannot be confined to any feelings or
rules of yours or of any man's, but may meet you in the Sacraments or out
of the Sacraments, even as He will, and has methods of comforting and
educating you of which you will never dream; One whose will is the same
as the will of the Father and of the Son, even a good will.
_Discipline Sermons_.
Trinity Sunday.
Some things I see clearly and hold with desperate clutch. A Father in
heaven for all, a Son of God incarnate for all, and a Spirit of the
Father _and_ the Son--who works to will and to do of His own good
pleasure in every human being in whom there is one spark of active good,
the least desire to do right or to be of use--the Fountain of all good on
earth.
_Letters and Memories_.
JUNE 11.
St. Barnabas, Apostle and Martyr.
. . . Which is Love?
To do God's will, or merely suffer it?
. . . . .
No! I must headlong into seas of toil,
Leap far from self, and spend my soul on others.
For contemplation falls upon the spirit,
Like the chill silence of an autumn sun:
While action, like the roaring south-west wind,
Sweeps laden with elixirs, with rich draughts
Quickening the wombed earth.
_Saint's Tragedy_.
JUNE 21.
St. John the Baptist.
How shall we picture John the Baptist to ourselves? Great painters have
exercised their fancy upon his face, his figure, his actions. The best
which I can recollect is Guido's--of the magnificent lad sitting on the
rock, half clad in his camel's-hair robe, his stalwart hand lifted up to
denounce he hardly knows what, save that things are going all wrong,
utterly wrong to him--his beautiful mouth open to preach he hardly knows
what, save that he has a message from God, of which he is half conscious
as yet--that he is a forerunner, a prophet, a foreteller of something and
some one who is to come, and which is very near at hand. The wild rocks
are round him, the clear sky over him, and nothing more, . . . and he,
the noble and the priest, has thrown off--not in discontent and
desperation (for he was neither democrat nor vulgar demagogue), but in
hope and awe--all his family privileges, all that seems to make life
worth having; and there aloft and in the mountains, alone with God and
Nature, feeding on locusts and wild honey and clothed in skins, he, like
Elijah of old, preaches to a generation sunk in covetousness, party
spirit, and superstition--preaches what?--The most common--Morality. Ah,
wise politician! ah, clear and rational spirit, who knows and tells
others to do the duty which lies nearest to them! . . . who in the hour
of his country's deepest degradation had divine courage to say, our
deliverance lies, not in rebellion but in _doing right_.
_St. John the Baptist_,
_All Saints' Day Sermons_.
JUNE 29.
St. Peter, Apostle and Martyr.
God is revealed in the Crucified;
The Crucified must be revealed in me:--
I must put on His righteousness; show forth
His sorrow's glory; hunger, weep with Him;
Taste His keen stripes, and let this aching flesh
Sink through His fiery baptism into death.
_Saint's Tragedy_.
St. Peter, as he is drawn in the Gospels and the Acts, is a grand and
colossal human figure, every line and feature of which is full of meaning
and full of beauty to us.
_Sermons_, _Discipline_.
July.
It was a day of God. The earth lay like one great emerald, ringed and
roofed with sapphire: blue sea, blue mountain, blue sky overhead. There
she lay, not sleeping, but basking in her quiet Sabbath joy, as though
her two great sisters of the sea and air had washed her weary limbs with
holy tears, and purged away the stains of last week's sin and toil, and
cooled her hot worn forehead with their pure incense-breath, and folded
her within their azure robes, and brooded over her with smiles of pitying
love, till she smiled back in answer, and took heart and hope for next
week's weary work.
Heart and hope for next week's work.--That was the sermon which it
preached to Tom Thurnall, as he stood there alone, a stranger and a
wanderer like Ulysses of old: but, like him, self-helpful, cheerful, fate
defiant. He was more of a heathen than Ulysses--for he knew not what
Ulysses knew, that a heavenly guide was with him in his wanderings; still
less that what he called the malicious sport of fortune was, in truth,
the earnest education of a Father. . . . "Brave old world she is after
all," he said; "and right well made; and looks right well to-day in her
go-to-meeting clothes, and plenty of room and chance for a brave man to
earn his bread, if he will but go right on about his business, as the
birds and the flowers do, instead of peaking and pining over what people
think of him."
_Two Years Ago_, chap. xiv.
Nature and Grace. July 1.
God is the God of Nature as well as the God of Grace. For ever He looks
down on all things which He has made; and behold they are very good. And
therefore we dare to offer to Him in our churches the most perfect works
of naturalistic art, and shape them into copies of whatever beauty He has
shown us in man or woman, in cave or mountain-peak, in tree or flower,
even in bird or butterfly. But Himself? Who can see Him except the
humble and the contrite heart, to whom He reveals Himself as a Spirit to
be worshipped in spirit and in truth, and not in bread nor wood, nor
stone nor gold, nor quintessential diamond?
_Lecture on Grots and Groves_. 1871.
Love and Book-Learning. July 2.
I see more and more that the knowledge of one human being, such as love
alone can give, and the apprehension of our own private duties and
relations, is worth more than all the book-learning in the world.
_MS._
The Ancient Creeds. July 3.
Blessed and delightful it is when we find that even in these new ages the
Creeds, which so many fancy to be at their last gasp, are still the
finest and highest succour, not merely of the peasant and the outcast,
but of the subtle artist and the daring speculator. Blessed it is to
find the most cunning poet of our day able to combine the rhythm and
melody of modern times with the old truths which gave heart to the
martyrs at the stake, to see in the science and the history of the
nineteenth century new and living fulfilments of the words which we
learnt at our mother's knee!
_Miscellanies_. 1850.
A Master-Truth. July 4.
Every creature of God is good, if it be sanctified with prayer and
thanksgiving! This to me is the master-truth of Christianity, the
forgetfulness of which is at the root of almost all error. It seems to
me that it was to redeem man and the earth that Christ was made man and
used the earth!--that Christianity has never yet been pure, because it
never yet, since St. Paul's time, has stood on _this_ as the fundamental
truth, and that it has been pure or impure, just in proportion as it has
_practically_ and _really_ acknowledged this truth.
_Letters and Memories_. 1842.
English Women. July 5.
Let those who will sneer at the women of England. We who have to do the
work and fight the battle of life know the inspiration which we derive
from their virtue, their counsel, their tenderness--and, but too often,
from their compassion and their forgiveness. There is, I doubt not,
still left in England many a man with chivalry and patriotism enough to
challenge the world to show so perfect a specimen of humanity as a
cultivated British woman.
_Lecture on Thrift_. 1869.
Life retouched again. July 6.
Even in the saddest woman's soul there linger snatches of old music,
odours of flowers long dead and turned to dust,--pleasant ghosts, which
still keep her mind attuned to that which may be in others, though in her
never more; till she can hear her own wedding-hymn re-echoed in the tones
of every girl who loves, and see her own wedding-torch re-lighted in the
eyes of every bride.
_Westward Ho_! chap. xxix.
Mystery of Life. July 7.
"All things begin in some wonder, and in some wonder end," said St.
Augustine, wisest in his day of mortal men. It is a strange thing, and a
mystery, how we ever got into this world; a stranger thing still to me
how we shall ever get out of this world again. Yet they are common
things enough--birth and death.
_Good News of God Sermons_.
Beauty of Life. July 8.
The Greeks were, as far as we know, the most beautiful race which the
world ever saw. Every educated man knows that they were the cleverest of
all nations, and, next to his Bible, thanks God for Greek literature. Now
the Greeks had made physical, as well as intellectual education a science
as well as a study. Their women practised graceful, and in some cases
even athletic exercises. They developed, by a free and healthy life,
those figures which remain everlasting and unapproachable models of human
beauty.
_Lecture on Thrift_. 1869.
Study the human figure, both as intrinsically beautiful and as expressing
mind. It only expresses the broad natural childish emotions, which are
just what we want to return to from our over subtlety. Study "natural
language"--I mean the language of attitude. It is an inexhaustible
source of knowledge and delight, and enables one human being to
understand another so perfectly. Therefore learn to draw and paint
figures.
_Letters and Memories_. 1842.
True Civilisation. July 9.
Civilisation with me shall mean--not more wealth, more finery, more self-
indulgence, even more aesthetic and artistic luxury--but more virtue,
more knowledge, more self-control, even though I earn scanty bread by
heavy toil.
_Lecture on Ancient Civilisation_. 1874.
The Church. July 10.
"The Church is a very good thing, and I keep to mine," said Captain
Willis, "having served under her Majesty and her Majesty's forefathers,
and learned to obey orders, I hope; but don't you think, sir, you're
taking it as the Pharisees took the Sabbath Day?"
"How then?"
"Why, as if man was made for the Church, and not the Church for man."
_Two Years Ago_, chap. ii. 1856.
What does God ask? July 11.
What is this strange thing, without which even the true knowledge of
doctrine is of no use? without which either a man or a nation is poor,
and blind, and wretched, and naked in soul, notwithstanding all his
religion? Isaiah will tell, "Wash you, make you clean, saith the Lord.
Do justice to the fatherless, relieve the widow." Church-building and
church-going are well, but they are not repentance. Churches are not
souls. I ask for your hearts, and you give me fine stones and fine
words. I want souls, I want _your_ souls.
_National Sermons_. 1851.
Work or Want. July 12.
Remember that we are in a world where it is not safe to sit under the
tree and let the ripe fruit drop into your mouth; where the "competition
of species" works with ruthless energy among all ranks of being, from
kings upon their thrones to the weed upon the waste; where "he that is
not hammer is sure to be anvil;" and "he who will not work neither shall
he eat."
_Ancien Regime_. 1867.
True Insight. July 13.
It is easy to see the spiritual beauty of Raffaelle's Madonnas, but it
requires a deeper and more practised, all-embracing, loving, simple
spirituality, to see the same beauty in the face of a worn-out, painful,
peasant woman haggling about the price of cottons.
Form and colour are but the vehicle for the spirit-meaning. In the
"spiritual body" I fancy they will both be united _with_ the meaning--all
and every part and property of man and woman instinct with spirit!
_MS._ 1843.
Retribution inevitable. July 14.
Know this--that as surely as God sometimes punishes wholesale, so surely
is He always punishing in detail. By that infinite concatenation of
moral causes and effects, which makes the whole world one mass of special
Providences, every sin of ours will punish itself, and probably punish
itself in kind. Are we selfish? We shall call out selfishness in
others. Do we neglect our duty? Then others will neglect their duty to
us. Do we indulge our passions? Then others who depend on us will
indulge theirs, to our detriment and misery.
_All Saints' Day Sermons_.
Antinomies. July 15.
Spiritual truths present themselves to us in "antinomies," apparently
contradictory pairs, pairs of poles, which, however, do not really
contradict, or even limit, each other, but are only correlatives, the
existence of the one making the existence of the other necessary,
explaining each other, and giving each other a real standing ground and
equilibrium. Such an antinomic pair are, "He that loveth not knoweth not
God," and "If a man hateth not his father and mother he cannot be My
disciple."
_Letters and Memories_. 1848.
False Refinement. July 16.
God's Word, while it _alone_ sanctifies rank and birth, says to all
_equally_, "Ye are brethren, _work_ for each other." Let us then be
above rank, and look at men as men, and women as women, and all as God's
children. There is a "refinement" which is the invention of that sensual
mind, which looks only at the outward and visible sign.
_MS. Letter_. 1843.
Music's Meaning. July 17.
Some quick music is inexpressibly mournful. It seems just like one's own
feelings--exultation and action, with the remembrance of past sorrow
wailing up, yet without bitterness, tender in its shrillness, through the
mingled tide of present joy; and the notes seem thoughts--thoughts pure
of words; and a spirit seems to call to me in them and cry, "Hast thou
not felt all this?" And I start when I find myself answering
unconsciously, "Yes, yes, I know it all! Surely we are a part of all we
see and hear!" And then, the harmony thickens, and all distinct sound is
pressed together and absorbed in a confused paroxysm of delight, where
still the female treble and the male bass are distinct for a moment, and
then one again--absorbed into each other's being--sweetened and
strengthened by each other's melody. . . .
_Letters and Memories_. 1842.
Vagueness of Mind. July 18.
By allowing vague inconsistent habits of mind, almost persuaded by every
one you love, when you are capable by one decided act of _leading_ them,
you may be treading blindfold a terrible path to your own misery.
_MS. Letter_. 1842.
A Faith for Daily Life. July 19.
That is not faith, to see God only in what is strange and rare; but this
is faith, to see God in what is most common and simple, to know God's
greatness not so much from disorder as from order, not so much from those
strange sights in which God seems (but only seems) to break His laws, as
from those common ones in which He fulfils His laws.
_Town and Country Sermons_.
Charms of Monotony. July 20.
I delight in that same monotony. It saves curiosity, anxiety,
excitement, disappointment, and a host of bad passions. It gives a man
the blessed, invigorating feeling that he is at home; that he has roots
deep and wide struck down into all he sees, and that only the Being who
can do nothing cruel or useless can tear them up. It is pleasant to look
down on the same parish day after day, and say I know all that is
beneath, and all beneath know me. It is pleasant to see the same trees
year after year, the same birds coming back in spring to the same shrubs,
the same banks covered by the same flowers.
_Prose Idylls_. 1857.
How to attain. July 21.
If our plans are not for time but for eternity, our knowledge, and
therefore our love to God, to each other, to everything, will progress
for ever. And the attainment of this heavenly wisdom requires neither
ecstacy nor revelation, but prayer and watchfulness, and observation, and
deep and solemn thought.
Two great rules for its attainment are simple enough--Never forget what
and where you are, and grieve not the Holy Spirit, for "If a man will do
God's will he shall know of the doctrine."
_Letters and Memories_. 1842.
The Divine Discontent. July 22.
I should like to make every one I meet discontented with themselves; I
should like to awaken in them, about their physical, their intellectual,
their moral condition, that divine discontent which is the parent first
of upward aspiration and then of self-control, thought, effort to fulfil
that aspiration even in part. For to be discontented with the divine
discontent, and to be ashamed with the noble shame, is the very germ and
first upgrowth of all virtue.
_Lecture on Science of Health_. 1872.
Dra et labora. July 23.
"Working is praying," said one of the holiest of men. And he spoke
truth; if a man will but do his work from a sense of duty, which is for
the sake of God.
_Sermons_.
Distrust and Anarchy. July 24.
Over the greater part of the so-called civilised world is spreading a
deep distrust, a deep irreverence of every man towards his neighbour, and
a practical unbelief in every man whom you do see, atones for itself by a
theoretic belief in an ideal human nature which you do not see. Such a
temper of mind, unless it be checked by that which alone can check it,
namely, the grace of God, must tend towards sheer anarchy. There is a
deeper and uglier anarchy than any mere political anarchy,--which the
abuse of the critical spirit leads to,--the anarchy of society and of the
family, the anarchy of the head and of the heart, which leaves poor human
beings as orphans in the wilderness to cry in vain, "What can I know?
Whom can I love?"
_The Critical Spirit_. 1871.
A Future Life of Action. July 25.
Why need we suppose that heaven is to be one vast lazy retrospect? Why
is not eternity to have action and change, yet both like God, compatible
with rest and immutability? This earth is but one minor planet of a
minor system. Are there no more worlds? Will there not be incident and
action springing from these when the fate of this world is decided? Has
the evil one touched this alone? Is it not self-conceit which makes us
think the redemption of this earth the one event of eternity?
_Letters_. 1842.
An Ideal Aristocracy. July 26.
We may conceive an Utopia governed by an aristocracy that should be
really democratic, which should use, under developed forms, that method
which made the mediaeval priesthood the one great democratic institution
of old Christendom; bringing to the surface and utilising the talents and
virtues of all classes, even the lowest.
_Lectures on Ancien Regime_. 1867.
Our Weapons. July 27.
God, who has been very good to us, will be more good, if _we allow Him_!
Worldly-minded people think they can manage so much better than God. We
must _trust_. Our weapons must be prayer and faith, and our only
standard the Bible. As soon as we leave these weapons and take to
"knowledge of the world," and other people's clumsy prejudices as our
guides, we must inevitably be beaten by the World, which knows how to use
its own arms better than we do. What else is meant by becoming as a
little child?
_MS. Letter_. 1843.
Uneducated Women. July 28.
Take warning by what you see abroad. In every country where the women
are uneducated, unoccupied; where their only literature is French novels
or translations of them--in every one of those countries the women, even
to the highest, are the slaves of superstition, and the puppets of
priests. In proportion as women are highly educated, family life and
family secrets are sacred, and the woman owns allegiance and devotion to
no confessor or director, but to her own husband or her own family.
_Lecture on Thrift_. 1860.
Pardon and Cure. July 29.
After the forgiveness of sin must come the cure of sin. And that cure,
like most cures, is a long and a painful process.
But there is our comfort, there is our hope--Christ the great Healer, the
great Physician, can deliver us, and will deliver us, from the remains of
our old sins, the consequences of our own follies. Not, indeed, at once,
or by miracle, but by slow education in new and nobler motives, in purer
and more unselfish habits.
_All Saints' Day Sermons_. 1861.
Eternal Law. July 30.
The eternal laws of God's providence are still at work, though we may
choose to forget them, and the Judge who administers them is the same
yesterday, to-day, and for ever, even Jesus Christ the Lord, the
Everlasting Rock, on which all morality and all society is founded.
Whosoever shall fall on that Rock, in repentance and humility, shall
indeed be broken, but of him it is written, "A broken and a contrite
heart, O God, Thou wilt not despise."
_Discipline and other Sermons_. 1866.
God's Mercy or Man's? July 31.
"He fought till he could fight no more, and then died like a hero, with
all his wounds in front; and may God have mercy on his soul."
"That last was a Popish prayer, Master Frank," said old Mr. Carey.
"Most worshipful sir, you surely would not wish God _not_ to have mercy
on his soul?"
"No--Eh? Of course not, for that's all settled by now, for he is dead,
poor fellow!"
"And you can't help being a little fond of him still?"
"Eh? Why, I should be a brute if I were not. Fond of him? why, I would
sooner have given my forefinger than that he should have gone to the
dogs."
"Then, my dear sir, if _you_ feel for him still, in spite of all his
faults, how do you know that God may not feel for him in spite of all his
faults? For my part," said Frank, in his fanciful way, "without
believing in that Popish purgatory, I cannot help holding with Plato that
such heroical souls, who have wanted but little of true greatness here,
are hereafter, by strait discipline, brought to a better mind."
_Westward Ho_! chap. v. 1854.
The Chrysalis State.
You ask, "What is the Good?" I suppose God Himself is the Good; and it
is this, in addition to a thousand things, which makes me feel the
absolute certainty of a resurrection, and a hope that this, our present
life, instead of being an ultimate one, which is to decide our fate for
ever, is merely some sort of chrysalis state in which man's faculties are
so narrow and cramped, his chances (I speak of the millions, not of
units) of knowing the Good so few, that he may have chances hereafter,
perhaps continually fresh ones, to all eternity.
_Letters and Memories_. 1852.
SAINTS' DAYS, FASTS, & FESTIVALS.
JULY 25.
St. James, Apostle and Martyr.
And they will know his worth
Years hence . . .
And crown him martyr; and his name will ring
Through all the shores of earth, and all the stars
Whose eyes are sparkling through their tears to see
His triumph, Preacher and Martyr. . .
. . . . .
. . . It is over; and the woe that's dead,
Rises next hour a glorious angel.
_Santa Maura_.
August.
"I cannot tell what you say, green leaves,
I cannot tell what you say;
But I know that there is a spirit in you,
And a word in you this day.
"I cannot tell what ye say, rosy rocks,
I cannot tell what ye say;
But I know that there is a spirit in you,
And a word in you this day.
"I cannot tell what ye say, brown streams,
I cannot tell what ye say;
But I know, in you too, a spirit doth live,
And a word in you this day."
"Oh! rose is the colour of love and youth,
And green is the colour of faith and truth,
And brown of the fruitful clay.
The earth is fruitful and faithful and young,
And her bridal morn shall rise erelong,
And you shall know what the rocks and streams
And the laughing green woods say."
_Dartside_, _August_ 1849.
Sight and Insight. August 1.
Do the work that's nearest,
Though it's dull at whiles,
Helping, when you meet them,
Lame dogs over stiles;
See in every hedgerow
Marks of angels' feet,
Epics in each pebble
Underneath our feet.
_The Invitation_. 1857.
Genius and Character. August 2.
I have no respect for genius (I do not even acknowledge its existence)
where there is no strength and steadiness of character. If any one
pretends to be more than a man he must begin by proving himself a man at
all.
_Two Years Ago_, chap. xv.
Nature's Student. August 3.
The perfect naturalist must be of a reverent turn of mind--giving Nature
credit for an inexhaustible fertility and variety, which will keep him
his life long, always reverent, yet never superstitious; wondering at the
commonest, but not surprised by the most strange; free from the idols of
sense and sensuous loveliness; able to see grandeur in the minutest
objects, beauty in the most ungainly: estimating each thing not carnally,
as the vulgar do, by its size, . . . but spiritually, by the amount of
Divine thought revealed to him therein. . . .
_Glaucus_. 1855.
The Masses. August 4.
Though permitted evils should not avenge themselves by any political
retribution, yet avenge themselves, if unredressed, they surely will.
They affect masses too large, interests too serious, not to make
themselves bitterly felt some day. . . . We may choose to look on the
masses in the gross as objects for statistics--and of course, where
possible, for profits. There is One above who knows every thirst, and
ache, and sorrow, and temptation of each slattern, and gin-drinker, and
street-boy. The day will come when He will require an account of these
neglects of ours--not in the gross.
_Miscellanies_. 1851.
We sit in a cloud, and sing like pictured angels,
And say the world runs smooth--while right below
Welters the black, fermenting heap of life
On which our State is built.
_Saint's Tragedy_, Act ii. Scene v.
Love and Knowledge. August 5.
He who has never loved, what does he know?
_MS._
Siccum Lumen. August 6.
How shall I get true knowledge? Knowledge which will be really useful,
really worth knowing. Knowledge which I shall know accurately and
practically too, so that I can use it in daily life, for myself and
others? Knowledge too, which shall be clear knowledge, not warped or
coloured by my own fancies, passions, prejudices, but pure and calm and
sound; Siccum Lumen, "Dry Light," as the greatest of philosophers called
it of old.
To all such who long for light, that by the light they may live, God
answers through His only begotten Son: "Ask and ye shall receive, seek
and ye shall find."
_Westminster Sermons_. 1873.
This World. August 7.
What should the external world be to those who truly love, but the garden
in which they are placed, not so much for sustenance or enjoyment of
themselves and each other, as to dress it and to keep it--_it_ to be
their subject-matter, not they its tools! In this spirit let us pray
"Thy kingdom come."
_MS._ 1842.
The Life of the Spirit. August 8.
The old fairy superstition, the old legends and ballads, the old
chronicles of feudal war and chivalry, the earlier moralities and
mysteries--these fed Shakespeare's youth. Why should they not feed our
children's? That inborn delight of the young in all that is marvellous
and fantastic--has that a merely evil root? No, surely! it is a most
pure part of their spiritual nature; a part of "the heaven which lies
about us in our infancy;" angel-wings with which the free child leaps the
prison-walls of sense and custom, and the drudgery of earthly life. It
is a God-appointed means for keeping alive what noble Wordsworth calls
those
". . . . obstinate questionings,
. . . . . .
Blank misgivings of a creature
Moving about in worlds not realised."
_Introductory Lecture_, _Queen's College_.
1848.
A Quiet Depth. August 9.
The deepest affections are those of which we are least conscious--that
is, which produce least _startling_ emotion, and most easy and
involuntary practice.
_MS._ 1843.
Acceptable Sacrifices. August 10.
Every time we perform an act of kindness to any human being, ay, even to
a dumb animal; every time we conquer our worldliness, love of pleasure,
ease, praise, ambition, money, for the sake of doing what our conscience
tells us to be our duty,--we are indeed worshipping God the Father in
spirit and in truth, and offering Him a sacrifice which He will surely
accept for the sake of His beloved Son, by whose Spirit all good deeds
and thoughts are inspired.
_All Saints' Day Sermons_. 1871.
Chivalry. August 11.
Chivalry; an idea which, perfect or imperfect, God forbid that mankind
should ever forget till it has become the possession--as it is the God-
given right--of the poorest slave that ever trudged on foot; and every
collier lad shall have become
"A very gentle, perfect knight."
_Lectures on Ancien Regime_. 1867.
God waits for Man. August 12.
Patiently, nobly, magnanimously, God waits; waits for the man who is a
fool, to find out his own folly; waits for the heart that has tried to
find pleasure in everything else, to find out that everything else
disappoints, and to come back to Him, the fountain of all wholesome
pleasure, the well-spring of all life, fit for a man to live.
God condescends to wait for His creature; because what He wants is not
His creature's fear, but His creature's love; not only his obedience, but
his heart; because He wants him not to come back as a trembling slave to
his master, but as a son who has found out at last what a father he has
still left him, when all beside has played him false. Let him come back
thus.
_Discipline and other Sermons_.
Thrift. August 13.
The secret of thriving is thrift; saving of force; to get as much work as
possible done with the least expenditure of power, the least jar and
obstruction, the least wear and tear. And the secret of thrift is
knowledge. In proportion as you know the laws and nature of a subject,
you will be able to work at it easily, surely, rapidly, successfully,
instead of wasting your money or your energies in mistaken schemes,
irregular efforts, which end in disappointment and exhaustion.
_Lecture on Thrift_. 1869.
Revelations. August 14.
Only second-rate hearts and minds are melancholy. When we become like
little children, our very playfulness tells that we are _seeing deep_,
when we see that God is love in His _works_ as well as in Himself, and we
look at Nature as a baby does, as a beautiful mystery which we scarcely
wish to solve. And therefore deep things, which the intellect in vain
struggles after, will reveal themselves to us.
_MS._ 1842.
Christ comes in many ways. August 15.
Often Christ comes to us in ways in which the world would never recognise
Him--in which perhaps neither you nor I shall recognise _Him_; but it
will be enough, I hope, if we but hear His message, and obey His gracious
inspiration, let Him speak through whatever means He will. He may come
to us by some crisis in our life, either for sorrow or for bliss. He may
come to us by a great failure; by a great disappointment--to teach the
wilful and ambitious soul that not in _that_ direction lies the path of
peace; or He may come in some unexpected happiness to teach that same
soul that He is able and willing to give abundantly beyond all that we
can ask or think.
_MS. Sermon_. 1874.
Lesson of the Cross. August 16.
On the Cross God has sanctified suffering, pain, and sorrow, and made
them holy; as holy as health and strength and happiness are.
_National Sermons_. 1851.
The Ideal Unity. August 17.
"Oh, make us one." All the world-generations have but one voice! "How
can we become One? at harmony with God and God's universe! Tell us this,
and the dreary, dark mystery of life, the bright, sparkling mystery of
life, the cloud-chequered, sun-and-shower mystery of life, is solved! for
we shall have found one home and one brotherhood, and happy faces will
greet us wherever we move, and we shall see God! see Him everywhere, and
be ready to wait for the Renewal, for the Kingdom of Christ perfected! We
came from Eden, all of us: show us how we may return, hand in hand,
husband and wife, parent and child, gathered together from the past and
the future, from one creed and another, and take our journey into a far
country, which is yet this earth--a world-migration to the heavenly
Canaan, through the Red Sea of Death, back again to the land which was
given to our forefathers, and is ours even now, could we but find it!"
_Letters and Memories_. 1843.
Body and Soul. August 18.
The mystics considered the soul, _i.e._ the intellect, as the "_moi_" and
the body as the "_non moi_;" and this idea that the body is not _self_,
is the fundamental principle of mysticism and asceticism, and
diametrically opposed to the whole doctrines and practice of Scripture.
Else why is there a resurrection of the body? and why does the Eucharist
"preserve our body and soul to everlasting life?"
_MS._ 1843.
Childlikeness. August 19.
If you wish to be "a little child," study what a little child could
understand--Nature; and do what a little child could do--love. Feed on
Nature. It will digest itself. It did so when you were a little child
the first time.
Keep a common-place book, and put into it not only facts and thoughts,
but observations on form, and colour, and nature, and little sketches,
even to the form of beautiful _leaves_. They will all have their charm .
. . all do their work in consolidating your ideas. Put everything into
it. . . .
_Letters and Memories_. 1842.
Inspiration. August 20.
Every good deed comes from God. His is the idea, His the inspiration,
and His its fulfilment in time; and therefore no good deed but lives and
grows with the everlasting life of God Himself.
_MS._
Lifting of the Veil. August 21.
I seldom pass those hapless loungers who haunt every watering-place
without thinking sadly how much more earnest, happier, and better men and
women they might be if the veil were but lifted from their eyes, and they
could learn to behold that glory of God which is all around them like an
atmosphere, while they, unconscious of what and where they are, wrapt up
each in his little selfish world of vanity and interest, gaze lazily
around them at earth, sea, and sky--
And have no speculation in those eyes
Which they do glare withal
_Glaucus_. 1855.
The Cross--its meaning. August 22.
To take up the cross means, in the minds of most persons, to suffer
patiently under affliction. It is a true and sound meaning, but it means
more. Why did Christ take up the cross? Not for affliction's sake, or
for the cross's sake, as if suffering were a good thing in itself. No.
But that He might thereby _do good_. That the world through Him might be
saved. That He might do good at whatever cost or pain to Himself.
_Sermons_.
The Crucifix. August 23.
If I had an image in my room it should be one of Christ _glorified_,
sitting at the right hand of God. The crucifix has been THE image,
because the idea of torture and misery has been THE idea in the
melancholy and the ferocious (for the two ultimately go together),. . .
and thus ascetics became inquisitors. . . .
_MS._ 1843.
Love to God proved. August 24.
Our love to God does not depend upon the emotions of the moment. If you
fancy you do not love Him enough, above all when Satan tempts you to look
inward, go immediately and minister to others; visit the sick, perform
some act of self-sacrifice or thanksgiving. Never mind how _dull_ you
may feel while doing it; the fact of your feeling excited proves nothing;
the fact of your _doing_ it proves that your will, your spiritual part,
is on God's side, however tired or careless the poor flesh may be. The
"flesh" must be brought into harmony with the spirit, not only by
physical but by intellectual mortification.
_MS. Letter_. 1843.
Training of Beauty. August 25.
There is many a road into our hearts besides our ears and brains; many a
sight and sound and scent even, of which we have never _thought_ at all,
sinks into our memory and helps to shape our characters; and thus
children brought up among beautiful sights and sweet sounds will most
likely show the fruits of their nursing by thoughtfulness and affection
and nobleness of mind, even by the expression of the countenance.
_True Words to Brave Men_. 1848.
Ignorance of the Cynic. August 26.
Be sure that no one knows so little of his fellow-men as the cynical,
misanthropic man, who walks in darkness because he hates his brother. Be
sure that the truly wise and understanding man is he who by sympathy puts
himself in his neighbours' place; feels with them and for them; sees with
their eyes, hears with their ears; and therefore understands them, makes
allowances for them, and is merciful to them, even as his Father in
heaven is merciful.
_Westminster Sermons_. 1872.
Penitential Prayer. August 27.
Faith in God it is which has made the fifty-first Psalm the model of all
true penitence for evermore. Penitential prayers in all ages have too
often wanted faith in God, and therefore have been too often prayers to
avert punishment. This, this--the model of all true penitent prayers--is
that of a man who is to be punished, and is content to take his
punishment, knowing that he deserves it, and far more besides.
_Sermons on David_. 1866.
A Real Presence. August 28.
Believe the Holy Communion is the sign of Christ's perpetual presence;
that when you kneel to receive the bread and wine, Christ is as near
you--spiritually, indeed, and invisibly, but really and truly as near you
as those who are kneeling by your side.
And if it be so with Christ, then is it so with those who are Christ's,
with those whom we love. . . . Surely, like Christ, they may come and go
even now, though unseen. Like Christ they may breathe upon our restless
hearts and say, "Peace be unto you," and not in vain. For what they did
for us when they were on earth they can more fully do now that they are
in heaven.
_All Saints' Day Sermons_. 1862.
A Living God. August 29.
Man would never have even dreamed of a Living God had not that Living God
been a reality, who did not leave the creature to find his Creator, but
stooped from heaven, at the very beginning of our race, to find His
creature.
_Sermons on David_. 1866.
Thine, not mine. August 30.
Whensoever you do a thing which you know to be right and good, instead of
priding yourself upon it as if the good in it came from you, offer it up
to your Heavenly Father, from whom all good things come, and say, "Oh,
Lord! the good in this is Thine and not mine; the bad in it is mine and
not Thine. I thank Thee for having made me do right, for without Thy
help I should have done nothing but wrong. For mine is the laziness, and
the weakness, and the selfishness, and the self-conceit; and Thine is the
kingdom, for Thou rulest all things; and the power, for Thou doest all
things; and the glory, for Thou doest all things well, for ever and ever.
Amen."
_Sermons_.
The Unquenchable Fire. August 31.
A fire which cannot be quenched, a worm which cannot die, I see existing,
and consider them among the most blessed revelations of the gospel. I
fancy I see them burning and devouring everywhere in the spiritual world,
as their analogues do in the physical. I know that they have done so on
me, and that their operation, though exquisitely painful, is most
healthful. I see the world trying to quench and kill them; I know too
well that I often do the same ineffectually. But, in the comfort that
the worm cannot die and the fire cannot be quenched, I look calmly
forward through endless ages to my own future, and the future of that
world whereof it is written, "He shall reign until He hath put all
enemies under His feet, and death and hell shall be cast into the lake of
fire."
* * * * *
The Day of the Lord will be revealed in flaming fire, not merely to give
new light and a day-spring from on high to those who sit in darkness and
the shadow of death, but to burn up out of sight, and off the universe,
the chaff, hay, and stubble which men have built on the One Living
Foundation, Christ, in that unquenchable fire, of which it is written
that _Death_ and _Hell_ shall one day be cast into it also, to share the
fate of all other unnatural and abominable things, and God's universe
be--what it must be some day--_very good_.
* * * * *
Because I believe in a God of absolute and unbounded love, therefore I
believe in a loving anger of His, which will and must devour and destroy
all which is decayed, monstrous, abortive, in His universe, till all
enemies shall be put under His feet, to be pardoned surely, if they
confess themselves in the wrong and open their eyes to the truth. And
God shall be All in All. Those last are wide words.
_Letters and Sermons_. 1856.
SAINTS' DAYS, FASTS, & FESTIVALS.
AUGUST 24.
St. Bartholomew, Apostle and Martyr.
Blessed are they who once were persecuted for righteousness' sake, for
theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Great indeed is their reward, for it is
no less than the very beatific vision to contemplate and adore that
supreme moral beauty, of which all earthly beauty, all nature, all art,
all poetry, all music, are but phantoms and parables, hints and hopes,
dim reflected rays of the clear light of everlasting day.
_All Saints' Day Sermons_.
September.
That poet knew but little of either streams or hearts who wrote--
"Nor ever had the breeze of passion
Stirred her heart's clear depths."
The lonely fisher, the lover of streams and living fountains, knows that
when the stream stops it is turbid. The deep pools and still flats are
always brown--always dark--the mud lies in them, the trout _sleep_ in
them. When they are clearest they are still tinged brown or gray with
some foreign matter held in solution--the brown of selfish sensuality or
the gray of morbid melancholy. But when they are free again! when they
hurry over rock and weed and sparkling pebble-shallow, then they are
clear! Then all the foreign matter, the defilement which earth pours
into them, falls to the ground, and into them the trout work up for life
and health and food; and through their swift yet yielding
eddies--_moulding themselves to every accident_, _yet separate and
undefiled_--shine up the delicate beauties of the subaqueous world, the
Spirit-glories which we can only see in this life through the medium of
another human soul, but which we can never see unless that soul is
stirred by circumstance into passion and motion and action strong and
swift. Only the streams which have undergone long and _severe struggles_
from their very fountain-head have clear pools.
_MS._ 1843.
Goodness. September 1.
Always say to yourself this one thing, "Good I will become, whatever it
cost me; and in God's goodness I trust to make me good, for I am sure He
wishes to see me good more than I do myself." And you will find that,
because you have confessed in that best and most honest of ways that God
is good, and have so given Him real glory, and real honour, and real
praise, He will save you from the sins which torment you, and you shall
never come, either in this world or the world to come, to that worst
misery, the being ashamed of yourself.
_Sermons for the Times_. 1855.
Be good to do Good. September 2.
What we wish to do for our fellow-creatures we must do first for
ourselves. We can give them nothing save what God has already given us.
We must become good before we can make them good, and wise before we can
make them wise.
_All Saints' Day Sermons_. 1867.
The Undying I. September 3.
The youngest child, by faith in God his Father, may look upon all heaven
and earth and say, "Great and wonderful and awful as this earth and those
skies may be, I am more precious in the sight of God than sun and moon
and stars; for they are things, but I am a person, a spirit, an immortal
soul, made in the likeness of God, redeemed into the likeness of God.
This great earth was here thousands and thousands of years before I was
born, and it will be here perhaps millions of years after I am dead. But
it cannot harm _Me_, it cannot kill _Me_. When earth, and sun, and stars
have passed away I shall live for ever, for I am the immortal child of an
immortal Father, the child of the everlasting God."
_Sermons for the Times_. 1855.
Love and Time. September 4.
Love proves its spiritual origin by rising above time and space and
circumstance, wealth and age, and even temporary beauty, at the same time
that it alone can perfectly _use_ all those material adjuncts. Being
spiritual, it is Lord of matter, and can give and receive from it glory
and beauty when it will, and yet live without it.
_MS._ 1843.
Common Duties. September 5.
The only way to regenerate the world is to do the duty which lies nearest
us, and not to hunt after grand, far-fetched ones for ourselves. If each
drop of rain _chose_ where it should fall, God's showers would not fall
as they do now, on the evil and the good alike. I know from the
experience of my own heart how galling this doctrine is--how, like
Naaman, one goes away in a rage, because the prophet has not bid us do
some great thing, but only to go wash in the nearest brook and be clean.
_Letters and Memories_. 1854.
Despair--Hope. September 6.
Does the age seem to you dark? Do you feel, as I do at times, the awful
sadness of that text, "The time shall come when you shall desire to see
one of the days of the Lord, and shall not see it"? Then remember that
The night is never so long
But at last it ringeth for matin song.
. . . Even now the dawn is gilding the highest souls, and _we_ are in the
night only because we crawl below.
_Prose Idylls_. 1850.
The Critical Spirit. September 7.
"Judge nothing before the time." This is a hard saying. Who can hear
it? There never was a time in which the critical spirit was more
thoroughly in the ascendant. Every man now is an independent critic. To
accept fully, or as it is now called, to follow blindly; to admire
heartily, or as it is now called, fanatically--these are considered signs
of weakness or credulity. To believe intensely; to act unhesitatingly;
to admire passionately; all this, as the latest slang phrases it, is "bad
form"; a proof that a man is not likely to win in the race of this world
the prize whereof is, the greatest possible enjoyment with the least
possible work.
_The Critical Spirit_. 1871.
Toil and Rest. September 8.
Remember always, toil is the condition of our being. Our sentence is to
labour from the cradle to the grave. But there are Sabbaths allowed for
the mind as well as the body, when the intellect is stilled, and the
emotions alone perform their gentle and involuntary functions.
_Letters and Memories_. 1842.
Storm and Calm. September 9.
Then Amyas told the last scene; how, when they were off the Azores, the
storms came on heavier than ever, with terrible seas breaking short and
pyramid-wise, till, on the 9th of September, the tiny _Squirrel_ nearly
foundered, and yet recovered, and the General (Sir Humphrey Gilbert),
sitting abaft with a book in his hand, cried out to us in the _Hind_, "We
are as near heaven by sea as by land," reiterating the same speech well
be-seeming a soldier resolute in Jesus Christ, as I can testify he was.
_Westward Ho_! chap. xiii.
On the Heights. September 10.
It is good for a man to have holy and quiet thoughts, and at moments to
see into the very deepest meaning of God's word and God's earth, and to
have, as it were, heaven opened before his eyes; and it is good for a man
sometimes actually to _feel_ his heart overpowered with the glorious
majesty of God--to _feel_ it gushing out with love to his blessed
Saviour; but it is not good for him to stop there any more than for the
Apostles in the Mount of Transfiguration.
_Village Sermons_. 1849.
In the Valley. September 11.
The disciples had to come down from the Mount and do Christ's work, and
so have we. Believe me, one word of warning spoken to keep a little
child out of sin,--one crust of bread given to a beggar-man because he is
your brother, for whom Christ died,--one angry word checked on your lips
for the sake of Him who was meek and lowly of heart; any the smallest
endeavour to lessen the amount of evil which is in yourselves and those
around you,--is worth all the speculations, and raptures, and visions,
and frames, and feelings in the world; for these are the good fruits of
faith, whereby alone the tree shall be known whether it be good or evil.
_Village Sermons_. 1849.
Self-Conceit. September 12.
Self-conceit is the very daughter of self-will, and of that loud crying
out about _I_, and me, and mine, which is the very bird-call for all
devils, and the broad road which leads to death.
_Westward Ho_! chap. i.
Facing Fact. September 13.
It is good for a man to be brought once, at least, in his life, face to
face with _fact_, ultimate fact, however horrible it may be, and to have
to confess to himself shuddering, what things are possible on God's
earth, when man has forgotten that his only welfare is in living after
the likeness of God.
_Miscellanies_. 1858.
The Heroical Rest. September 14.
Right, lad; the best reward for having wrought well already is to have
more to do; and he that has been faithful over a few things must find his
account in being made ruler over many things. That is the true and
heroical rest which only is worthy of gentlemen and sons of God. As for
those who either in this world or in the world to come look for idleness,
and hope that God will feed them with pleasant things, as it were with a
spoon, Amyas, I count them cowards and base, even though they call
themselves saints and elect.
_Westward Ho_! chap. vii. 1855.
Body and Soul. September 15.
Remember that St. Paul always couples with the resurrection and ascension
of our bodies in the next life the resurrection and ascension of our
souls in this life, for without that, the resurrection of our bodies
would be but a resurrection to fresh sin, and therefore to fresh misery
and ruin.
_All Saints' Day Sermons_. 1870.
Love in Absence. September 16.
Absence quickens love into consciousness.
_MS._
The baby sings not on its mother's breast;
Nor nightingales who nestle side by side;
Nor I by thine: but let us only part,
Then lips which should but kiss, and so be still,
As having uttered all, must speak again.
_Sonnet_. 1851.
Special Providence. September 17.
If I did not believe in a special Providence, in a perpetual education of
men by evil as well as good, by small things as well as great, I could
believe nothing.
_Letters and Memories_.
Love of Work. September 18.
"Can you tell me, my pastor, what part of God's likeness clings to a man
longest and closest and best? No? Then I will tell you. It is the love
of employment. God in heaven must create Himself a universe to work on
and love. And now we sons of Adam, the sons of God, cannot rest without
our _mundus peculiaris_ of some sort--our world subjective, as Doctor
Musophilus has it. But we can create too, and make our little sphere
look as large as a universe."
_MS. Novel_. 1844.
Fret not. September 19.
Fret not, neither be anxious. What God intends to do He will do. And
what we ask believing we shall receive. 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.
_MS._ 1843.
Peace! Why these fears?
Life is too short for mean anxieties:
Soul! thou must work, though blindfold.
_Saint's Tragedy_, Act ii. Scene x.
Battle before Victory. September 20.
Whenever you think of our Lord's resurrection and ascension, remember
always that the background of His triumph is a tomb. Remember that it is
the triumph over suffering; a triumph of One who still bears the prints
of the nails in His sacred hands and feet, and the wound of the spear in
His side; like many a poor soul who has followed Him, triumphant at last,
and yet scarred, and only not maimed in the hard battle of life.
_All Saints' Day Sermons_. 1870.
Night and Growth. September 21.
As in the world of Nature, so it is in the world of men. The night is
peopled not merely with phantoms and superstitions and spirits of evil,
but under its shadow all sciences, methods, social energies, are taking
rest, and growing, and feeding, unknown to themselves.
_Prose Idylls_. 1850.
Passion. September 22.
Self-sacrifice! What is love worth that does not show itself in action?
and more, which does not show itself in _passion_ in the true sense of
that word: namely, in suffering? in daring, in struggling, in grieving,
in agonising, and, if need be, in dying for the object of its love? Every
mother will give but one answer to that question.
_Westminster Sermons_. 1870.
Worth of Beauty. September 23.
It is a righteous instinct which bids us welcome and honour beauty,
whether in man or woman, as something of real worth--divine, heavenly,
ay, though we know not how, in a most deep sense Eternal; which makes our
reason give the lie to all merely logical and sentimental maunderings of
moralists about "the fleeting hues of this our painted clay;" and tell
men, as the old Hebrew Scriptures told them, that physical beauty is the
deepest of all spiritual symbols; and that though beauty without
discretion be the jewel of gold in the swine's snout, yet the jewel of
gold it is still, the sacrament of an inward beauty, which ought to be,
perhaps hereafter may be, fulfilled in spirit and in truth.
_Hypatia_, chap. xxvi. 1852.
Empty Profession. September 24.
What is the sin which most destroys all men and nations? High religious
profession, with an ungodly, selfish life. It is the worst and most
dangerous of all sins; for it is like a disease which eats out the heart
and life without giving pain, so that the sick man never suspects that
anything is the matter with him till he finds himself, to his
astonishment, at the point of death.
_National Sermons_. 1851.
True Poetry. September 25.
Let us make life one poem--not of dreams or sentiments--but of actions,
not done Byronically as proofs of genius, but for our own self-education,
alone, in secret, awaiting the crisis which shall call us forth to the
battle to do just what other people do, only, perhaps, by an utterly
different self-education. That is the life of great spirits, after,
perhaps, many many years of seclusion, of silent training in the lower
paths of God's vineyard, till their hearts have settled into a still,
deep, yet swift current, and those who have been faithful over a few
things are made rulers over many things.
_MS. Letter_. 1842.
Office of the Clergy. September 26.
There is a Christian as well as political liberty quite consistent with
High Church principles, which makes the clergy our teachers--not the
keepers of our _consciences_ but of our _creeds_.
_Letters and Memories_. 1842.
Opinions are not Knowledge. September 27.
. . . As to self-improvement, the true Catholic mode of learning is to
"prove all things," as far as we can, without sin or the danger of it, to
"hold fast that which is good." Let us never be afraid of trying
anything new, learnt from people of different opinions to our own. And
let us never be afraid of changing our opinions. The unwillingness to go
back from once declared opinion is a form of pride which haunts some
powerful minds: but it is not found in great childlike geniuses. Fools
may hold fast to their scanty stock through life, and we must be very
cautious in drawing them from it--for where can they supply its place?
_Letters and Memories_. 1843.
The Worst Punishment. September 28.
God reserves many a sinner for that most awful of all punishments
(here)--impunity.
_Sermons_.
The Divine Order. September 29.
Ah, that God's will were but done on earth as it is in the material
heaven overhead, in perfect order and obedience, as the stars roll in
their courses, without rest, yet without haste--as all created things,
even the most awful, fire and hail, snow and vapour, wind and storm,
fulfil God's word, who hath made them sure for ever and ever, and given
them a law which shall not be broken. But above them; above the divine
and wonderful order of the material universe, and the winds which are
God's angels, and the flames of fire which are His messengers; above all,
the prophets and apostles have caught sight of another divine and
wonderful order of _rational_ beings, of races loftier and purer than
man--angels and archangels, thrones and dominions, principalities and
powers, fulfilling God's will in heaven as it is not, alas! fulfilled on
earth.
_All Saints' Day Sermons_. 1867.
True Resignation. September 30.
. . . Christianity heightens as well as deepens the human as well as the
divine affections. I am happy, for the less hope, the more faith. . . .
God knows what is best for us; we do not. Continual resignation, at last
I begin to find, is the secret of continual strength. "Daily _dying_,"
as Boehmen interprets it, is the path of daily _living_. . . .
_Letters and Memories_. 1843.
SAINTS' DAYS, FASTS, & FESTIVALS.
SEPTEMBER 21.
St. Matthew, Apostle, Evangelist, and Martyr.
There is something higher than happiness. There is blessedness; the
blessedness of being good and doing good, of being right and doing right.
That blessedness we may have at all times; we may be blest even in
anxiety and in sadness; we may be blest, even as the martyrs of old were
blest, in agony and death.
_Water of Life Sermons_.
SEPTEMBER 29.
Feast of St. Michael and All Angels.
The eternal moral law which held good for the sinless Christ, who, though
He were a Son, yet learned obedience by the things which He suffered,
must hold good of you and me, and all moral and rational beings--yea, for
the very angels in heaven. They have not sinned. That we know; and we
do not know that they have ever suffered. But this at least we know,
that they have submitted. They have obeyed, and have given up their own
wills to be ministers of God's will. In them is neither self-will nor
selfishness; and, therefore, by faith, that is, by trust and loyalty,
they stand. And so, by consenting to lose their individual life of
selfishness, they have saved their eternal life in God, the life of
blessedness and holiness, just as all evil spirits have lost their
eternal life by trying to save their selfish life and be something in
themselves and of themselves without respect to God.
_All Saints' Day Sermons_.
October.
A beautiful October morning it was; one of those in which Dame Nature,
healthily tired with the revelry of summer, is composing herself, with a
quiet satisfied smile, for her winter's sleep. Sheets of dappled cloud
were sliding slowly from the west; long bars of hazy blue hung over the
southern chalk downs, which gleamed pearly gray beneath the low south-
eastern sun. In the vale below, soft white flakes of mist still hung
over the water meadows, and barred the dark trunks of the huge elms and
poplars, whose fast-yellowing leaves came showering down at every rustle
of the western breeze, spotting the grass below. The river swirled
along, glassy no more, but dingy gray with autumn rains and rotting
leaves. All beyond the garden told of autumn, bright and peaceful even
in decay; but up the sunny slope of the garden itself, and to the very
window-sill, summer still lingered. The beds of red verbena and geranium
were still brilliant, though choked with fallen leaves of acacia and
plane; the canary plant, still untouched by frost, twined its delicate
green leaves, and more delicate yellow blossoms, through the crimson lace-
work of the Virginia creeper; and the great yellow noisette swung its
long canes across the window, filling all the air with fruity fragrance.
_Two Years Ago_, chap. i.
Blessing of Daily Work. October 1.
Thank God every morning when you get up that you have something to do
that day which must be done whether you like it or not. Being forced to
work, and forced to do your best, will breed in you temperance and self-
control, diligence and strength of will, cheerfulness and content, and a
hundred virtues which the idle will never know.
_Town and Country Sermons_. 1861.
The Forming Form. October 2.
As the acorn, because God has given it "a forming form," and life after
its kind, bears within it not only the builder oak but shade for many a
herd, food for countless animals, and at last the gallant ship itself,
and the materials of every use to which Nature or Art can put it, and its
descendants after it, throughout all time, so does every good deed
contain within itself endless and unexpected possibilities of other good,
which may and will grow and multiply for ever, in the genial light of Him
whose eternal mind conceived it, and whose eternal spirit will for ever
quicken it, with that life of which He is the Giver and the Lord.
_Preface to Tauler's Sermons_. 1854.
Special Providences. October 3.
And as for special Providences. I believe that every step I take, every
person I meet, every thought which comes into my mind--which is not
sinful--comes and happens by the perpetual Providence of God watching for
ever with Fatherly care over me, and each separate thing that He has
made.
_MS. Letter_.
Virtue. October 4.
Nothing, nothing can be a substitute for purity and virtue. Man will
always try to find substitutes for it. He will try to find a substitute
in superstition, in forms and ceremonies, in voluntary humility and
worship of angels, in using vain repetitions, and fancying he will be
heard for his much speaking; he will try to find a substitute in
intellect, and the worship of intellect and art and poetry, . . . but let
no man lay that flattering unction to his soul.
_Sermons on David_. 1866.
God-likeness. October 5.
"We can become like God--only in proportion as we are of use," said ---.
"I did not see this once. I tried to be good, not knowing what good
meant. I tried to be good, because I thought it would pay me in the
world to come. But at last I saw that all life, all devotion, all piety,
were only worth anything, only Divine, and God-like and God-beloved, as
they were means to that one end--to be of use."
_Two Years Ago_, chap. xix. 1856.
The Refiner's Fire. October 6.
"Not quite that," said Amyas. "He was a meeker man latterly than he used
to be. As he said himself once, a better refiner than any whom he had on
board had followed him close all the seas over, and purified him in the
fire. And gold seven times tried he was when God, having done His work
in him, took him home at last."
_Westward Ho_! chap. xiii.
The Prayer of Faith. October 7.
With the prayer of faith we can do anything. Look at Mark xi. 24--a text
that has saved more than one soul from madness in the hour of sorrow; and
it is so _simple_ and _wide_--wide as eternity, simple as light, true as
God Himself. If we are to do great things it must be in the spirit of
that text. Verily, when the Son of God cometh shall He find faith in the
earth?
_Letters and Memories_. 1843.
Mountain-Ranges. October 8.
We fancy there are many independent sciences, because we stand half-way
up on different mountain-peaks, calling to each other from isolated
stations. The mists hide from us the foot of the range beneath us, the
depths of primary analysis to which none can reach, or we should see that
all the peaks were but offsets of one vast mountain-base, and in their
inmost root but One! And the clouds which float between us and the
heaven shroud from us the sun-lighted caps themselves--the perfect issues
of synthetic science, on which the Sun of Righteousness shines with
undimmed lustre--and keep us from perceiving that the complete practical
details of our applied knowledge is all holy and radiant with God's
smile. And so, half-way up, on the hillside, beneath a cloudy sky, we
build up little earthy hill-cairns of our own petty synthesis, and fancy
them Babel-towers whose top shall reach to heaven!
_MS. Note-book_. 1843.
The Temper for Success in Life. October 9.
The men whom I have seen succeed best in life have always been cheerful
and hopeful men, who went about their business with a smile on their
faces, and took the changes and chances of this mortal life like men,
facing rough and smooth alike as it came, and so found the truth of the
old proverb that "good times and bad times and all times pass over."
_MS._
Want of Simplicity. October 10.
Faith and prayer are simple things, . . . but when we begin to want
faith, and to assist prayer by our own inventions and to explain away
God's providence, then faith and prayer become intricate and uncertain.
We cannot serve God and mammon. We must either utterly depend on God
(and therefore on our own reason enlightened by His spirit after prayer),
or we must utterly depend on the empirical maxims of the world. Choose!
_MS. Letter_.
True Rest. October 11.
What is true rest? To rest from sin, from sorrow, from doubt, from care;
this is true rest. Above all, to rest from the worst weariness of
all--knowing one's duty and not being able to do it. That is true rest;
the rest of God who works for ever, and yet is at rest for ever; as the
stars over our heads move for ever, thousands of miles a day, and yet are
at perfect rest, because they move orderly, harmoniously, fulfilling the
law which God has given them. Perfect rest in perfect work; that surely
is the rest of blessed spirits till the final consummation of all things.
_Water of Life Sermons_. 1867.
God's Image. October 12.
. . . "Honour all men." Every man should be honoured as God's image, in
the sense in which Novalis says--that we touch Heaven when we lay our
hand on a human body! . . . The old Homeric Greeks, I think, felt that,
and acted up to it, more than any nation. The Patriarchs too seem to
have had the same feeling. . . .
_Letters and Memories_. 1843.
Woman's Work. October 13.
Let woman never be persuaded to forget that her calling is not the lower
and more earthly one of self-assertion, but the higher and diviner one of
self-sacrifice; and let her never desert that higher life which lives in
and for others, like her Redeemer and her Lord.
_Lecture on Thrift_. 1869.
Self-Enjoyment. October 14.
"How do ye expect," said Sandy, "ever to be happy, or strong, or a man at
a', as long as ye go on only looking to enjoy yersel--_yersel_? Mony was
the year I looked for nought but my ain pleasure, and got it too, when it
was a'
"'Sandy Mackaye, bonny Sandy Mackaye,
There he sits singing the lang simmer day;
Lassies gae to him,
And kiss him, and woo him--
Na bird is so merry as Sandy Mackaye.'
An' muckle good cam' o't. Ye may fancy I'm talking like a sour,
disappointed auld carle. But I tell ye nay. I've got that's worth
living for, though I am downhearted at times, and fancy a's wrong, and
there's na hope for us on earth, we be a' sic liars--a' liars, I
think--I'm a great liar often mysel, especially when I'm praying."
_Alton Locke_, chap. vii.
Temptations of Temperament. October 15.
A man of intense sensibilities, and therefore capable, as is but too
notorious, of great crimes as well as of great virtues.
_Sermons on David_.
The more delicate and graceful the organisation, the more noble and
earnest the nature, the more certain it is, I fear, if neglected, to go
astray.
_Lecture on Thrift_. 1869.
Egotism of Melancholy. October 16.
Morbid melancholy results from subjectivity of mind. The
self-contemplating mind, if it be a conscientious and feeling one, must
be dissatisfied with what it sees within. Then it begins unconsciously
to flatter itself with the idea that it is not the "_moi_" but the "_non
moi_," the world around, which is evil. Hence comes Manichaeism,
Asceticism, and that morbid tone of mind which is so accustomed to look
for sorrow that it finds it even in joy--because it will not confess to
itself that sorrow belongs to _sin_, and that sin belongs to _self_; and
therefore it vents its dissatisfaction on God's earth, and not on itself
in repentance and humiliation.
The world looks dark. Shall we therefore be dark too? Is it not our
business to bring it back to light and joy?
_MS. Letter_. 1843.
Poetry of Doubt. October 17.
The "poetry of doubt" of these days, however pretty, would stand us in
little stead if we were threatened by a second Armada.
_Miscellanies_. 1859.
Work of the Physician. October 18.
The question which is forcing itself more and more on the minds of
scientific men is not how many diseases _are_, but how few are _not_, the
consequences of men's ignorance, barbarism, folly, self-indulgence. The
medical man is felt more and more to be necessary in health as he is in
sickness, to be the fellow-workman not merely of the clergyman, but of
the social reformer, the political economist, and the statesman; and the
first object of his science to be prevention, and not cure.
_National Sermons_. 1851.
Love Many-sided. October 19.
There are many sides to love--admiration, reverence, gratitude, pity,
affection; they are all different shapes of that one great spirit of
love--the only feeling which will bind a man to do good, not once in a
way but habitually.
_National Sermons_. 1851.
The only Path to Light. October 20.
The path by which some come to see the Light, to find the Rock of Ages,
is the simple path of honest self-knowledge, self-renunciation,
self-restraint, in which every upward step towards right exposes some
fresh depth of inward sinfulness, till the once proud man, crushed down
by the sense of his own infinite meanness, becomes a little child once
more, and casts himself simply on the generosity of Him who made him. And
then there may come to him the vision, dim, perhaps, and fitting ill into
clumsy words, but clearer, surer, nearer to him than the ground on which
he treads, or than the foot which treads it--the vision of an Everlasting
Spiritual Substance, most Human and yet most Divine, who can endure; and
who, standing beneath all things, can make their spiritual substance
endure likewise, though all worlds and eons, birth and growth and death,
matter and space and time, should melt indeed--
And like the baseless fabric of a vision,
Leave not a rack behind.
_Preface to Tauler's Sermons_. 1854.
Proverbs False and True. October 21.
There is no falser proverb than that devil's beatitude, "Blessed is he
who expecteth nothing, for he shall never be disappointed." Say rather,
"Blessed is he who expecteth everything, for he enjoys everything once at
least, and if it falls out true, twice also."
_Prose Idylls_. 1857.
True Sisters of Mercy. October 22.
Ah! true Sisters of Mercy! whom the world sneers at as "old maids," if
you pour out on cats and dogs and parrots a little of the love that is
yearning to spend itself on children of your own. As long as such as you
walk this lower world one needs no Butler's _Analogy_ to prove to us that
there is another world, where such as you will have a fuller and a fairer
(I dare not say a juster) portion.
_Two Years Ago_, chap. xxv. 1856.
The Divine Fire. October 23.
Well spoke the old monks, peaceful, watching life's turmoil,
"Eyes which look heavenward, weeping still we see:
God's love with keen flame purges, like the lightning flash,
Gold which is purest, purer still must be."
_Saint's Tragedy_, Act iii. Scene i.
1847.
The Cross a Token. October 24.
Have patience, have faith, have hope, as thou standest at the foot of
Christ's Cross, and holdest fast to it, the anchor of the _soul_ and
_reason_, as well as of the _heart_. For, however ill the world may go,
or seem to go, the Cross is the everlasting token that God so loved the
world that He spared not His only-begotten Son, but freely gave Him for
it. Whatsoever else is doubtful, that at least is sure--that good must
conquer, because God is good, that evil must perish, because God hates
evil, even to the death.
_Westminster Sermons_. 1870.
The True Self-Sacrifice. October 25.
What can a man do more than _die_ for his countrymen?
_Live_ for them. It is a longer work, and therefore a more difficult and
a nobler one.
_Two Years Ago_, chap. xix. 1856.
Now as Then. October 26.
Men can be as original now as ever, if they had but the courage, even the
insight. Heroic souls in old times had no more opportunities than we
have; but they used them. There were daring deeds to be done then--are
there none now? Sacrifices to be made--are there none now? Wrongs to be
redrest--are there none now? Let any one set his heart in these days to
do what is right, and nothing else; and it will not be long ere his brow
is stamped with all that goes to make up the heroical expression--with
noble indignation, noble self-restraint, great hopes, great sorrows;
perhaps even with the print of the martyr's crown of thorns.
_Two Years Ago_, chap. vii. 1856.
One Anchor. October 27.
In such a world as this, with such ugly possibilities hanging over us
all, there is but one anchor which will hold, and that is utter trust in
God; let us keep that, and we may yet get to our graves without _misery_
though not without _sorrow_.
_Letters and Memories_. 1871.
Self-Control. October 28.
Settle it in your minds, young people, that the first and the last of all
virtues and graces which God can give is Self-Control, as necessary for
the saint and the sage lest they become fanatics and pedants, as for the
young in the hey-day of youth and health.
_Sermons on David_. 1866.
Nature's Permanence. October 29.
We abolish many things, good and evil, wisely and foolishly, in these
fast-going times; but, happily for us, we cannot abolish the blue sky,
and the green sea, and the white foam, and the everlasting hills, and the
rivers which flow out of their bosoms. They will abolish themselves when
their work is done, but not before. And we, who, with all our boasted
scientific mastery over Nature, are, from a merely mechanical and carnal
point of view, no more than a race of minute parasitic animals burrowing
in the fair Earth's skin, had better, instead of boasting of our empire
over Nature, take care lest we become too troublesome to Nature, by
creating, in our haste and greed, too many great black countries, and too
many great dirty warrens of houses, miscalled cities, peopled with
savages and imps of our own mis-creation; in which case Nature, so far
from allowing us to abolish her, will by her inexorable laws abolish us.
_MS. Presidential Address_. 1871.
The Only Refuge. October 30.
Prayer is the only refuge against the Walpurgis-dance of the witches and
the fiends, which at hapless moments whirl unbidden through a mortal
brain.
_Two Years Ago_, chap. xix. 1856.
England's Forgotten Worthies. October 31.
Among the higher-hearted of the early voyagers, the grandeur and glory
around them had attuned their spirits to itself and kept them in a lofty,
heroical, reverent frame of mind; while they knew as little about what
they saw in an "artistic" or "critical" point of view as in a scientific
one. . . . They gave God thanks and were not astonished. God was great:
but that they had discovered long before they came into the tropics.
Noble old child-hearted heroes, with just romance and superstition enough
about them to keep from that prurient hysterical wonder and enthusiasm
which is simply, one often fears, a product of our scepticism! We do not
trust enough in God, we do not really believe His power enough, to be
ready, as they were, as every one ought to be on a God-made earth, for
anything and everything being possible; and then when a wonder is
discovered we go into ecstasies and shrieks over it, and take to
ourselves credit for being susceptible of so lofty a feeling--true index,
forsooth, of a refined and cultivated mind!!
Smile if you will: but those were days (and there never were less
superstitious ones) in which Englishmen believed in the living God, and
were not ashamed to acknowledge, as a matter of course, His help, and
providence, and calling, in the matters of daily life, which we now, in
our covert atheism, term "secular and carnal."
_Westward Ho_! chap. xxiii.
SAINTS' DAYS, FASTS, & FESTIVALS.
OCTOBER 18.
St. Luke, Physician and Evangelist.
It is good to follow Christ in one thing and to follow Him utterly in
that. And the physician has set his mind to do one thing--to hate
calmly, but with an internecine hatred, disease and death, and to fight
against them to the end. In his exclusive care for the body the
physician witnesses unconsciously yet mightily for the soul, for God, for
the Bible, for immortality. Is he not witnessing for God when he shows
by his acts that he believes God to be a God of life, not of death; of
health, not of disease; of order, not of disorder; of joy and strength,
not of misery and weakness? Is he not witnessing for Christ when, like
Christ, he heals all manner of sickness and disease among the people, and
attacks physical evil as the natural foe of man and of the Creator of
man?
"_Water of Life_," _and other Sermons_.
OCTOBER 28.
St. Simon and St. Jude, Apostles and Martyrs.
He that loseth his life shall save it. The end and aim of our life is
not happiness but goodness. If goodness comes first, then happiness may
come after; but if not, something better than happiness may come, even
blessedness.
Oh! sad hearts and suffering! look to the Cross. There hung your King!
The King of sorrowing souls; and more, the King of Sorrows. Ay, pain and
grief, tyranny and desertion, death and hell,--He has faced them one and
all, and tried their strength and taught them His, and conquered them
right royally. And since He hung upon that torturing Cross sorrow is
divine,--godlike, as joy itself. All that man's fallen nature dreads and
despises God honoured on the Cross, and took unto Himself, and blest and
consecrated for ever. . . . And now--Blessed are tears and shame,
blessed are agony and pain; blessed is death, and blest the unknown
realms where souls await the Resurrection-day.
_National Sermons_.
November.
"The giant trees are black and still, the tearful sky is dreary gray. All
Nature is like the grief of manhood in its soft and thoughtful sternness.
Shall I lend myself to its influence, and as the heaven settles down into
one misty shroud of 'shrill yet silent tears,' as if veiling her shame in
a cloudy mantle, shall I, too, lie down and weep? Why not? for am I not
'a part of all I see'? And even now, in fasting and mortification, am I
not sorrowing for my sin and for its dreary chastisement? But shall I
then despond and die?
"No! Mother Earth, for then I were unworthy of thee and thy God! We may
weep, Mother Earth, but we have Faith--faith which tells us that above
the cloudy sky the bright clear sun is shining, and will shine. And we
have Hope, Mother Earth--hope, that as bright days have been, so bright
days soon shall be once more! And we have Charity, Mother Earth, and by
it we can love all tender things--ay, and all rugged rocks and dreary
moors, for the sake of the glow which _has_ gilded them, and the
fertility which will spring even from their sorrow. We will smile
through our tears, Mother Earth, for we are not forsaken! We have still
light and heat, and till we can bear the sunshine we will glory in the
shade!"
_MS._ 1842.
Sympathy of the Dead. November 1.
Believe that those who are gone are nearer us than ever; and that if (as
I surely believe) they do sorrow over the mishaps and misdeeds of those
whom they leave behind, they do not sorrow in vain. Their sympathy is a
further education for them, and a pledge, too, of help--I believe of
final deliverance--for those on whom they look down in love.
_Letters and Memories_. 1852.
Nature's Parable. November 2.
There is a devil's meaning to everything in nature, and a God's meaning
too. As I read nature's parable to-night I find nothing in it but hope.
What if there be darkness, the sun will rise to-morrow; what if there
seem chaos, the great organic world is still living and growing and
feeding, unseen by us all the night through; and every phosphoric atom
there below is a sign that in the darkest night there is still the power
of light, ready to flash out wherever and however it is stirred.
_Prose Idylls_. 1849.
Passing Onward. November 3.
Liturgies are but temporary expressions of the Church's heart. The Bible
is the immutable story of her husband's love. _She_ must go on from
grace to grace, and her song must vary from age to age, and her ancient
melodies become unfitted to express her feelings; but He is the same for
ever.
_MS._ 1842.
See how the autumn leaves float by decaying,
Down the wild swirls of the dark-brimming stream;
So fleet the works of men back to their earth again--
Ancient and holy things pass like a dream.
_A Parable_. 1848.
The Divine Intention. November 4.
I am superstitious enough, thank God, to believe that not a stone or a
handful of mud gravitates into its place without the will of God; that it
was ordained, ages since, into what particular spot each grain of gold
should be washed down from an Australian quartz reef, that a certain man
might find it at a certain moment and crisis of his life.
_Science Lectures_.
Christ Weeping over Jerusalem. November 5.
That which is true of nations is true of individuals, of each separate
human brother of the Son of man. Is there one young life ruined by its
own folly--one young heart broken by its own wilfulness--or one older
life fast losing the finer instincts, the nobler aims of youth, in the
restlessness of covetousness, of fashion, of ambition? Is there one such
poor soul over whom Christ does not grieve? One to whom, at some supreme
crisis of their lives, He does not whisper--"Ah, beautiful organism--thou
too art a thought of God--thou too, if thou wert but in harmony with
thyself and God, a microcosmic _City of God_! Ah! that thou hadst
known--even thou--at least in this thy day--the things which belong to
thy peace"?
_MS. Sermon_. 1874.
Love Expansive. November 6.
The mystics think it wrong to love any created thing, because our whole
love should be given to God. But as flame increases by being applied to
many objects, so does love. He who loves God most loves God's creatures
most, and them for God's sake, and God for their sake.
_MS. Note-book_. 1843.
Still the same. November 7.
Those who die in the fear of God and in the faith of Christ do not really
taste death; to them there is no death, but only a change of place, a
change of state; they pass at once into some new life, with all their
powers, all their feelings, unchanged; still the same living, thinking,
active beings which they were here on earth. I say active. Rest they
may, rest they will, if they need rest. But what is true rest? Not
idleness, but peace of mind.
_Water of Life Sermons_. 1862.
An absolutely Good God. November 8.
Fix in your minds--or rather ask God to fix in your minds--this one idea
of an absolutely good God; good with all forms of goodness which you
respect and love in man; good, as you, and I, and every honest man,
understand the plain word good. Slowly you will acquire that grand and
all-illuminating idea; slowly and most imperfectly at best: for who is
mortal man that he should conceive and comprehend the goodness of the
infinitely good God! But see, then, whether, in the light of that one
idea, all the old-fashioned Christian ideas about the relation of God to
man--whether Providence, Prayer, Inspiration, Revelation, the
Incarnation, the Passion, and the final triumph of the Son of God--do not
seem to you, not merely beautiful, not merely probable, but rational, and
logical, and necessary, moral consequences from the one idea of an
Absolute and Eternal Goodness, the Living Parent of the universe?
_Westminster Sermons_. 1873.
Nature's Lesson. November 9.
Learn what feelings every object in Nature expresses, but do not let them
mould the tone of your mind; else, by allowing a melancholy day to make
you melancholy, you worship the creature more than the Creator.
_MS. Letter_. 1842.
Morals and Mind. November 10.
Not upon mind, not upon mind, but upon morals, is human welfare founded.
The true subjective history of man is not the history of his thought, but
of his conscience: the true objective history of man is not that of his
inventions, but of his vices and his virtues. So far from morals
depending upon thought, thought, I believe, depends on morals. In
proportion as a nation is righteous--in proportion as common justice is
done between man and man, will thought grow rapidly, securely,
triumphantly; will its discoveries be cheerfully accepted and faithfully
obeyed, to the welfare of the whole common weal.
_Inaugural Lecture_, _Cambridge_. 1860.
Fastidiousness. November 11.
Do not let us provoke God (though that is _really_ impossible) by
complaining of His gifts because they do not come just in the form _we_
should have wished. . . .
_MS. Letter_. 1844.
Unconscious Faith. November 12.
For the rest, Amyas never thought about thinking or felt about feeling;
and had no ambition whatsoever beyond pleasing his father and mother,
getting by honest means the maximum of "red quarrenders" and mazard
cherries, and going to sea when he was big enough. Neither was he what
would be nowadays called by many a pious child, for though he said his
Creed and Lord's Prayer night and morning, and went to service at the
church every forenoon, and read the day's Psalms with his mother every
evening, and had learnt from her and his father that it was infinitely
noble to do right and infinitely base to do wrong, yet he knew nothing
more of theology or of his own soul than is contained in the Church
Catechism.
_Westward Ho_! chap. i. 1855.
Silence. November 13.
There are silences more pathetic than all words.
_MS._
The Nineteenth Century. November 14.
. . . What so maddening as the new motion of our age--the rush of the
express train, when the live iron pants and leaps and roars through the
long chalk cutting, and white mounds gleam cold a moment against the sky
and vanish; and rocks and grass and bushes fleet by in dim blended lines;
and the long hedges revolve like the spokes of a gigantic wheel; and far
below meadows and streams and homesteads, with all their lazy old-world
life, open for an instant, and then flee away; while awestruck, silent,
choked with the mingled sense of pride and helplessness, we are swept on
by that great pulse of England's life-blood rushing down her iron veins;
and dimly out of the future looms the fulfilment of our primeval mission
to conquer and subdue the earth, and space too, and time, and all
things--even hardest of all tasks, yourselves, my cunning brothers; ever
learning some fresh lesson, except the hardest one of all, that it is the
Spirit of God which giveth you understanding?
Yes, great railroads, and great railroad age, who would exchange you,
with all your sins, for any other time? For swiftly as rushes matter,
more swiftly rushes mind; more swiftly still rushes the heavenly dawn up
the eastern sky. "The night is far spent, the day is at hand." "Blessed
is the servant whom his Lord, when He cometh, shall find watching."
_Prose Idylls_.
Unreality. November 15.
Those who have had no real sorrows can afford to play with imaginary
ones.
_MS._
The indwelling Light. November 16.
The doctrine of Christ in every man, as the indwelling Word of God, the
Light who lights every one who comes into the world, is no peculiar tenet
of the Quakers, but one which runs through the whole of the Old and New
Testaments, and without which they would both be unintelligible, just as
the same doctrine runs through the whole history of the Early Church for
the first two centuries, and is the only explanation of them.
_Theologica Germanica_. 1854.
Woman's Calling. November 17.
What surely is a woman's calling but to teach man? and to teach him what?
To temper his fiercer, coarser, more self-assertive nature by the contact
of her gentleness, purity, self-sacrifice. To make him see that not by
blare of trumpets, not by noise, wrath, greed, ambition, intrigue,
puffery, is good and lasting work to be done on earth; but by wise self-
distrust, by silent labour, by lofty self-control, by that charity which
hopeth all things, believeth all things, endureth all things; by such an
example, in short, as women now in tens of thousands set to those around
them; such as they will show more and more, the more their whole
womanhood is educated to employ its powers without waste and without
haste in harmonious unity.
_Lecture on Thrift_. 1869.
Waste. November 18.
Thrift of the heart, thrift of the emotions--how are they wasted in these
days in reading sensation novels! while British literature--all that the
best hearts and intellects among our forefathers have bequeathed to us--is
neglected for light fiction, the reading of which is the worst form of
intemperance--dram-drinking and opium-eating, intellectual and moral.
_Lecture on Thrift_.
True Penance. November 19.
"Senor," said Brimblecombe, "the best way to punish oneself for doing ill
seems to me to go and do good; and the best way to find out whether God
means you well is to find out whether He will help you to do well."
_Westward Ho_! chap. xxv.
Political Economy of the Future. November 20.
I can conceive a time when, by improved chemical science, every foul
vapour which now escapes from the chimney of a manufactory, polluting the
air, destroying the vegetation, shall be seized, utilised, converted into
some profitable substance, till the black country shall be black no
longer, the streams once more crystal clear, the trees once more
luxuriant, and the desert, which man has created in his haste and greed,
shall in literal fact once more blossom as the rose. And just so can I
conceive a time when by a higher civilisation, formed on a political
economy more truly scientific, because more truly according to the will
of God, our human refuse shall be utilised like our material refuse; when
man as man, down to the weakest and most ignorant, shall be found (as he
really is) so valuable that it will be worth while to preserve his
health, to develop his capabilities, to save him alive, body, intellect,
and character, at any cost; because men will see that a man is, after
all, the most precious and useful thing on the earth, and that no cost
spent on the development of human beings can possibly be thrown away.
_All Saints' Day Sermons_. 1870.
God's Pleasure. November 21.
The world was not made for man: but man, like all the world, was made for
God. Not for man's pleasure merely, not for man's use, but for God's
pleasure all things are, and for God's pleasure they were, created.
_All Saints' Day Sermons_. 1869.
The Hospital Nurse. November 22.
Fearless, uncomplaining, she "trusted in God and made no haste." She did
her work and read her Bible; and read, too, again and again at stolen
moments of rest, a book which was to her as the finding of an unknown
sister--Longfellow's "Evangeline."
_Two Years Ago_, chap. xxviii.
Let us learn to look on hospitals not as acts of charity, supererogatory
benevolences of ours towards those to whom we owe nothing, but as
confessions of sin, and worthy fruits of penitence; as poor and late and
partial compensation for misery which _we_ might have prevented.
_National Sermons_. 1851.
No Work Lost. November 23.
If you lose heart about your work, remember that none of it is
_lost_--that the good of every good deed remains and breeds and works on
for ever, and that all that fails and is lost is the outside shell of the
thing, which, perhaps, might have been better done; but better or worse
has nothing to do with the real spiritual good which you have done to
men's hearts.
_Letters and Memories_. 1862.
True Temperance. November 24.
What we all want is inward rest; rest of heart and brain; the calm,
strong, self-contained, self-denying character, which needs no
stimulants, for it has no fits of depression; which needs no narcotics,
for it has no fits of excitement; which needs no ascetic restraints, for
it is strong enough to use God's gifts without abusing them; the
character, in a word, which is truly temperate, not in drink and food
merely, but in all desires, thoughts, and actions.
_Essays_. 1873.
A Present Veil. November 25.
What is there in this world worth having without religion? Do you not
feel that true religion, even in its most imperfect stage, is not merely
an escape from hell after death but the only _real state_ for a man--the
only position to live in in this world--the only frame of mind which will
give anything like happiness here. I cannot help feeling at moments--if
there were _no Christ_, everything, even the very flowers and insects,
and every beautiful object, would be hell _now_--dark, blank, hopeless.
_MS. Letter_. 1843.
Cowardice. November 26.
There is but one thing which you have to fear in earth or heaven--being
untrue to your better selves, and therefore untrue to God. If you will
not do the thing you know to be right, and say the thing you know to be
true, then indeed you are weak. You are a coward; you desert God.
_True Words for Brave Men_.
Blind Faith. November 27.
In Him--"The Father"--I can trust, in spite of the horrible things I see
happen, in spite of the fact that my own prayers are not answered. I
believe that He makes all things work together for the good of the human
race, and of me among the rest, as long as I obey His will. I believe He
will answer my prayer, not according to the letter, but according to the
spirit of it; that if I desire good, I shall find good, though not _the_
good I longed for.
_MS. Letter_. 1862.
Small and Great. November 28.
Begin with small things--you cannot enter into the presence of another
human being without finding there more to do than you or I or any soul
will ever learn to do perfectly before we die. Let us be content to do
little if God sets us little tasks. It is but pride and self-will which
says, "Give me something huge to fight and I shall enjoy that--but why
make me sweep the dust?"
_Letters and Memories_. 1854.
True and False. November 29.
We must remember that dissatisfaction at existing evil (the feeling of
all young and ardent minds), the struggle to escape from the
"circumstance" of the evil world, has a carnal counterfeit--the love of
novelty, and self-will, and self-conceit, which may thrust us down into
the abysses of misrule and uncertainty; as it has done such men as
Shelley and Byron; trying vainly every loophole, beating against the
prison bars of an imperfect system; neither degraded enough to make
themselves a fool's paradise within it, nor wise enough to escape from it
through Christ, "the door into the sheepfold," to return when they will,
and bring others with them into the serene empyrean of spiritual
truth--truth which explains, and arranges, and hallows, and subdues
everything.
_Letters and Memories_. 1842.
The Mind of Christ. November 30.
How can we attain to the blessed and noble state of mind--the mind of
Christ, who must needs be about His Father's business, which is doing
good? Only by prayer and practice. There is no more use in praying
without practising than there is in practising without praying. You
cannot learn to walk without walking; no more can you learn to do good
without trying to do good.
_Sermons for the Times_. 1855.
SAINTS' DAYS, FASTS, & FESTIVALS.
NOVEMBER 1.
All Saints' Day.
Commemoration of the Blessed Dead.
"If any man serve Me, him will My Father honour," said the Blessed One.
And if God honours His servants, shall not we honour them likewise? We
may not, as our forefathers did blindly, though lovingly, worship them as
mediators and lesser gods, and pray to them instead of to their Father in
heaven to whose throne of grace we may all come boldly through Christ
Jesus, or believe that their relics will work miracles in our behalf,
thus honouring the creature instead of the Creator. This we may not do,
but we may honour the Creator in His creature, and honour God in those
who have lived godly and God-like lives; and when they have passed away
from among us--souls endued by God with manifold virtues and precious
gifts of grace--we may give thanks and say, These, O God, are the fruits
of Thy Spirit. Thou honourest them in heaven with Thy approving smile.
We will honour them on earth, not merely with our lips, but in our lives.
What they were we too might be, if we were as true as they to the
inspiration of Thy Spirit. Help us to honour their memories, as Thou and
they would have us do, by following their example; by setting them before
us, and not only them, but every holy and noble personage of whom we have
ever heard, as dim likenesses of Christ--even as Christ is the likeness
of Thee. Amen.
_MS. Sermon_.
NOVEMBER 30.
St. Andrew, Apostle and Martyr.
Form your own notions about angels and saints in heaven--as you will, . .
. but bear this in mind: that if the saints in heaven live the
everlasting life, they must be living a life of usefulness, of love, and
of good works. The everlasting life cannot be a selfish, idle life,
spent only in individual happiness.
_Good News of God Sermons_.
December.
It chanced upon the merry, merry Christmas eve,
I went sighing past the Church across the moorland dreary:
"Oh! never sin and want and woe this earth will leave,
And the bells but mock the wailing sound, they sing so cheery.
How long, O Lord! how long before Thou come again?
Still in cellar and in garret, and on moorland dreary,
The orphans moan, and widows weep, and poor men toil in vain:
Till earth is sick of hope deferred, though Christmas bells be
cheery."
Then arose a joyous clamour from the wild-fowl on the mere,
Beneath the stars across the snow, like clear bells ringing,
And a voice within cried, "Listen! Christmas carols even here!
Though thou be dumb, yet o'er their work the stars and snows are
singing.
Blind! I live, I love, I reign, and all the nations through
With the thunder of my judgments even now are ringing;
Do thou fulfil thy work but as yon wild-fowl do,
Thou wilt heed no less the wailing, yet hear through it the angels'
singing."
_A Christmas Carol_.
The Final Victory. December 1.
I believe that the ancient creed, the eternal gospel, will stand and
conquer, and prove its might in this age, as it has in every other for
eighteen hundred years, by claiming and subduing and organising those
young anarchic forces which now, unconscious of their parentage, rebel
against Him to whom they owe their being.
_Yeast_, Preface. 1851.
Drifting away. December 2.
They drift away--Ah, God! they drift for ever.
. . . . . .
I watch them drift--the old familiar faces,
Till ghosts, not men, fill old beloved places.
. . . . . .
Shores, landmarks, beacons drift alike.
Yet overhead the boundless arch of heaven
Still fades to night, still blazes into day.
Ah, God! My God! _Thou_ wilt not drift away!
_A Fragment_. 1867.
Our Father. December 3.
Take your sorrows not to man, but to your Father in heaven. If that
name, Father, mean anything, it must mean that He will not turn away from
His wandering child in a way in which you would be ashamed to turn away
from yours. If there be pity, lasting affection, patience in _man_, they
must have come from Him. They, above all things, must be His likeness.
Believe that God possesses them a million times more fully than any human
being.
_Letters and Memories_.
Circumstance. December 4.
Our wanton accidents take root, and grow
To vaunt themselves God's laws, until our clothes,
Our gems, and gaudy books, and cushioned litters
Become ourselves, and we would fain forget
There live who need them not.
_Saint's Tragedy_, Act ii. Scene v.
1847.
Duty. December 5.
When a man has once said _honestly_ to himself, "It is my duty;" when
that glorious heavenly thought has risen upon his soul, like the sun upon
the earth, warming his heart and enlightening it, and making it bring
forth all good and noble fruits, then that man will feel a strength come
to him and a courage come from God which will conquer all his fears, his
selfish love of ease and pleasure, and enable him to bear pain and
poverty and death itself, provided he can do what is right, and be found
by God working His will where He has put him.
_Sermons_.
Humanity and the Bible. December 6.
He who has an intense perception of humanity must know that Christianity
is divine, because it is the only religion which has a perfect perception
of human relations, wants, and feelings. None but He who made the heart
could have written the Bible.
_MS. Note-book_. 1843.
Music. December 7.
There is music in heaven, because in music there is no self-will. Music
goes on certain laws and rules. Man did not make those laws of music, he
has only found them out, and if he be self-willed and break them, there
is an end of his music instantly; all he brings out is discord and ugly
sounds.
Music is fit for heaven. Music is a pattern and type of heaven, and of
the everlasting life of God which perfect spirits live in heaven; a life
of melody and order in themselves; a life of harmony with each other and
with God.
_Good News of God Sermons_. 1859.
Waiting. December 8.
Ay--stay awhile in peace. The storms are still.
Beneath her eider robe the patient earth
Watches in silence for the sun: we'll sit
And gaze up with her at the changeless heaven,
Until this tyranny be overpast.
_Saint's Tragedy_, Act iii. Scene iii.
1847.
True or False Toleration? December 9.
"One thing at least I have learnt," he said, "in all my experiments on
poor humanity--never to see a man do a wrong thing without feeling I
could do the same in his place. I used to pride myself on that once,
fool that I was, and call it comprehensiveness. I used to make it an
excuse for sitting by and seeing the devil have it all his own way, and
call that toleration. I will see now whether I cannot turn the said
knowledge to a better account, as common sense, patience, and charity,
and yet do work of which neither I nor my country need be ashamed."
_Two Years Ago_, chap. xxiii. 1856.
Success and Defeat. December 10.
In many things success at first is dangerous, and _defeat_ an excellent
medicine for testing people's honesty--for setting them honestly to work
to see what they want, and what are the best modes of attaining it. Our
sound thrashing, as a nation, in the first French war was the making of
our armies; and it is good for an idea, as well as for a man, to bear the
yoke in his youth.
_Lectures on Ancien Regime_. 1867.
Passing Emotions. December 11.
Beware of depending on your own _emotions_, which are often but the
fallings and risings of the frail flesh, and mistaking them for spiritual
feelings and affections!
* * * * *
Think less of what you _feel_--even of trying _to be_ anything. Look out
of yourself at God. Pray and praise, and God will give you His Spirit
often when you feel most dull.
_MS. Letter_. 1842.
Christ's Church. December 12.
. . . What a thought it is that there is a God! a Father, a King! a
Husband not of individuals, that is a Popish fancy, which the Puritans
have adopted--but of the Church--of collective humanity. Let us be
content to be members; let us be, if we may, the feet, lowest, hardest
worked, trodden on, bleeding, brought into harshest contact with the evil
world! Still we are members of Christ's Church! . . .
_Letters and Memories_. 1843.
Confound me not. December 13.
Have charity, have patience, have mercy. Never bring a human being,
however silly, ignorant, or weak, above all, any little child, to shame
and confusion of face. Never by petulance, by suspicion, by ridicule,
even by selfish and silly haste, never, above all, by indulging in the
devilish pleasure of a sneer, crush what is finest, and rouse up what is
coarsest in the heart of any fellow-creature.
_Westminster Sermons_. 1872.
The Divine Hunger and Thirst. December 14.
God grant us to be among "those who really hunger and thirst after
righteousness," and who therefore long to know what righteousness is,
that they may copy it--those who long to be freed not merely from the
punishment of sin after they die, but from sin itself while they live on
earth, and who therefore wish to know what sin is that they may avoid it.
_Preface to Tauler's Sermons_. 1854.
Religion or Godliness? December 15.
This is the especial curse of our day, that religion does not mean, as it
used, the service of God--the being like God and showing forth God's
glory. No, religion means nowadays the art of getting to heaven when we
die, and saving our own miserable souls, and getting God's wages without
doing God's work--as if that was godliness, as if that was anything but
selfishness, as if selfishness was any the better for being everlasting
selfishness!
_Village Sermons_. 1849.
Christ's Coming. December 16.
Christ may come to us when we are fierce and prejudiced, with that still
small voice--so sweet and yet so keen, "Understand those who
misunderstand thee. Be fair to those who are unfair to thee. Be just
and merciful to those whom thou wouldst like to hate. Forgive and thou
shalt be forgiven." He comes to us surely, when we are selfish and
luxurious, in every sufferer who needs our help, and says, "If you do
good to one of these, my brethren, you do it unto Me."
_Last Sermon_. _MS._ 1874.
God's Nature. December 17.
When will men open their eyes to the plain axiom that nothing is
impossible with God, save that He should transgress His own nature by
being unjust and unloving?
_Preface to Tauler_. 1854.
Educators of Men. December 18.
There are those who consider--and I agree with them--that the education
of boys under the age of twelve years ought to be entrusted, as much as
possible, to women. Let me ask--of what period of youth and manhood does
it not hold true? I pity the ignorance and conceit of the man who
fancies that he has nothing left to learn from cultivated women. I
should have thought that the very mission of woman was to be, in the
highest sense, the educator of man, from infancy to old age; that that
was the work towards which all the God-given capacities of women pointed.
_Lecture on Thrift_. 1869.
The Earthly Body. December 19.
Let us remember that if the body does feel a burden now (as it must at
moments), what a happiness it is to have a body at all: how lonely, cold,
barren, would it be to be a "disembodied spirit." As St. Paul says, "Not
that we desire to be unclothed, but to be clothed upon"--to have a
spiritual, deathless, griefless life instilled into the body.
_MS. Letter_. 1842.
Home at Last. December 20.
When all the world is old, lad,
And all the trees are brown,
And all the sport is stale, lad,
And all the wheels run down;
Creep home and take your place there,
The spent and maimed among:
God grant you find one face there
You loved when all was young.
_The Water Babies_. 1862.
The Bible. December 21.
The hearts and minds of the sick, the poor, the sorrowing, the truly
human, all demand a living God who has revealed Himself in living acts; a
God who has taught mankind by facts, not left them to discover Him by
theories and sentiments; a Judge, a Father, a Saviour, an Inspirer; in a
word, their hearts demand the historic truth of the Bible--of the Old
Testament no less than the New.
_Sermons on Pentateuch_. 1863.
Shaking of Heaven and Earth. December 22.
"Yet once more I shake not the earth only, but heaven" (Hebrews xii. 26-
29). This is one of the royal texts of Scripture. It declares one of
those great laws of the kingdom of God which may fulfil itself once and
again at many eras and by many methods; which fulfilled itself most
gloriously in the first century after Christ; again in the fifth century;
again at the time of the Crusades; and again at the great Reformation in
the sixteenth century,--and is fulfilling itself again at this very day.
_Westminster Sermons_. 1872.
Self-Respect the Voice of God. December 23.
Never hurt any one's self-respect. Never trample on any soul, though it
may be lying in the veriest mire; for that last spark of self-respect is
as its only hope, its only chance; the last seed of a new and better
life; the voice of God which still whispers to it, "You are not what you
ought to be, and you are not what you can be. You are still God's child,
still an immortal soul. You may rise yet, and fight a good fight yet,
and conquer yet, and be a man yet, after the likeness of God who made
you, and Christ who died for you." Oh! why crush that voice in any
heart? If you do the poor creature is lost, and lies where he or she
falls, and never tries to rise again.
_Good News of God Sermons_. 1859.
Christmas Eve. December 24.
We will have no sad forebodings on the eve of the blessed Christmas-tide.
He lives, He loves, He reigns; and all is well; for we are His and He is
ours.
_Two Years Ago_, Introduction. 1856.
The Miracle of Christmas Night. December 25.
After the crowning miracle of this most blessed night all miracles are
possible. The miracle of Christmas night was possible because God's love
was absolute, infinite, unconquerable, able to condescend to anything
that good might be done. . . . This Christmas night is the one of all
the year which sets a physicist on facing the fact of miracle, and which
delivers him from the bonds of sense and custom by reminding him of God
made Man.
_Letters and Memories_. 1858.
Redemption. December 26.
All things are blessed now, but sin; for all things, excepting sin, are
redeemed by the life and death of the Son of God. Blessed are wisdom and
courage, joy and health and beauty, love and marriage, childhood and
manhood, corn and wine, fruit and flowers, for Christ redeemed them by
His life. . . . Blessed is death, and blest the unknown realms where
souls await the Resurrection Day, for Christ redeemed them by His death.
Blessed are all days, dark as well as bright, for all are His, and He is
ours; and all are ours, and we are His for ever.
_National Sermons_. 1848.
Fellow-workers with Christ. December 27.
To abolish the superstition, the misrule, the vice, the misery of this
world. That is what Christ will do in the day when He has put all
enemies under His feet. That is what Christ has been doing, step by
step, ever since that day when first He came to do His Father's will on
earth in great humility. Therefore, that is what we must do, each in our
place and station, if we be indeed His subjects, fellow-workers with Him
in the improvement of the human race, fellow-soldiers with Him in the
battle against evil.
_All Saints' Day Sermons_. 1867.
The bright Pathway. December 28.
There is a healthy ferment of mind in which one struggles through chaos
and darkness, by means of a few clues and threads of light--and--of one
great bright pathway, which I find more and more to be _the_ only escape
from infinite confusion and aberration, _the_ only explanation of a
thousand human mysteries--I mean the Incarnation of our Lord--the fact
that there really is--a God-Man!
_MS. Letter_. 1844.
New Worship. December 29.
Blessed, thrice blessed, is it to find that hero-worship is not yet
passed away! that the heart of man still beats young and fresh; that the
old tales of David and Jonathan, Damon and Pythias, Socrates and
Alcibiades, Shakespeare and his nameless friend, of love "passing the
love of woman," ennobled by its own humility, deeper than death and
mightier than the grave, can still blossom out, if it be but in one heart
here and there, to show man still how, sooner or later, "he that loveth
knoweth God, for God is love."
_Miscellanies_. 1850.
Links in the Chain. December 30.
The heart will cry out at times, Oh! blissful future! Oh, dreary
present! But let us not repine. What is dreary need not be barren.
Nothing need be barren to those who view all things in their real light,
as links in the great chain of progression both for themselves and for
the Universe. To us all Time should seem so full of life: every moment
the grave and the father of unnumbered events and designs in heaven and
earth, and the mind of our God Himself--all things moving smoothly and
surely in spite of apparent checks and disappointments towards the
appointed end.
_Letters and Memories_. 1844.
Past, Present, Future. December 31.
Surely as the years pass on they ought to have made us better, more
useful, more worthy. We may have been disappointed in our lofty ideas of
what ought to be done, but we may have gained more clear and practical
notions of what can be done. We may have lost in enthusiasm, and yet
gained in earnestness. We may have lost in sensibility, yet gained in
charity, activity, and power. We may be able to do far less, and yet
what we do may be far better done. And our very griefs and
disappointments--have they been useless to us? Surely not. We shall
have gained instead of lost by them if the Spirit of God has been working
in us. Our sorrows will have wrought in us patience, our patience
experience, and that experience hope--hope that He who has led us thus
far will lead us farther still, that He who has taught us in former days
precious lessons--not only by sore temptations but most sacred joys--will
teach us in the days to come fresh lessons by temptations, which we shall
be more able to endure; and by joys which, though unlike those of old
times, are no less sacred, but sent as lessons to our souls by Him from
whom all good gifts come.
_Water of Life Sermons_.
Out of God's boundless bosom, the fount of life, we came; through
selfish, stormy youth, and contrite tears--just not too late; through
manhood, not altogether useless; through slow and chill old age, we
return whence we came, to the bosom of God once more--to go forth again,
it may be, with fresh knowledge and fresh powers, to nobler work. Amen.
_The Air Mothers_. 1869.
SAINTS' DAYS, FASTS, & FESTIVALS.
DECEMBER 21.
St. Thomas, Apostle and Martyr.
The spirits of just men made perfect, freed from the fetters of the gross
animal body, and now somewhere in that boundless universe in which this
earth is but a tiny speck, doing God's will as they longed to do it on
earth, with clearer light, fuller faith, deeper love, mightier powers of
usefulness! Ah, that we were like unto them!
_All Saints' Day and other Sermons_.
DECEMBER 25.
Christmas Day.
Thank God, that One was born, at this same time,
Who did our work for us: we'll talk of Him:
We shall go mad with thinking of ourselves--
We'll talk of Him, and of that new-made star,
Which, as He stooped into the Virgin's side,
From off His finger, like a signet-gem,
He dropped in the empyrean for a sign.
But the first tear He shed at this His birth-hour,
When He crept weeping forth to see our woe,
Fled up to Heaven in mist, and hid for ever
Our sins, our works, and that same new-made star.
_Saint's Tragedy_, Act iv. Scene iv.
DECEMBER 26.
St. Stephen, the Martyr.
These are the holy ones--the heroes of mankind, the elect, the
aristocracy of grace. They are those who carry the palm branch of
triumph, who have come out of great tribulation, who have dared and
fought and suffered for God and truth and right; who have resisted unto
blood, striving against sin. What should easy-going folk like you and me
do but place ourselves with all humility, if but for an hour, where we
can look afar off upon our betters, and see what they are like and what
they do.
_All Saints' Day and other Sermons_.
DECEMBER 27.
St. John, Apostle and Evangelist.
And what do they do, these blessed beings? They longed for, toiled for,
it may be died for, the true, the beautiful, and the good; they entered
while on earth into the mystery and glory of self-sacrifice, and now they
find their bliss in gazing on the one perfect and eternal sacrifice, and
rejoicing in the thought that it is the cause and ground of the whole
universe, even the Lamb slain before the foundation of the world.
_All Saints' Day and other Sermons_.
DECEMBER 28
Holy Innocents' Day.
Christ comes to us in many ways. But most surely does Christ come to us,
and often most happily, and most clearly does He speak to us--in the face
of a little child, fresh out of heaven. Ah, let us take heed that we
despise not one of these little ones, lest we despise our Lord Himself.
For as often as we enter into communion with little children, so often
does Christ come to us. So often, as in Judaea of old, does He take a
little child and set him in the midst of us, that from its simplicity,
docility, and trust--the restless, the mutinous, and the ambitious may
learn the things which belong to their peace--so often does He say to us,
"Except ye be changed and become as this little child, ye shall in no
wise enter into the kingdom of heaven. Take my yoke upon you and learn
of me. For I am meek and lowly of heart, and ye shall find rest unto
your souls."
_MS. Last Sermon_,
_Westminster Abbey_, _Nov._ 30, 1874.
INDEX.
ABSENCE, 209
Acorn, 223
Action, 146, 167
Affections, 79, 179, 217, 279
Age, old, 63, 285
--reverence for, 81
Anarchy, 165
Angels, 175, 217, 218, 219, 269
Anger, God's loving, 195
Animals, dumb, 81, 181
Antinomies, 159
Anxiety, 211
Aristocracy, ideal, 167
Art, 31, 71, 119, 141, 151
Ascension, 93, 123, 211
Asceticism, 185, 189, 233, 263
Ascetic painters, 39
Atonement, the, 83
Attitude, language of, 155
Augustine, St., 155
Autumn, 51, 221
BARBARISM, 109
Beatific Vision, 73, 196, 295
Beauty, 15, 39, 73, 101, 175, 196, 213
--moral, 196, 213
--spiritual, 159
Bible, the, 103, 141, 167, 249, 259, 275, 285
Birds, 53, 77, 99, 101, 103, 125, 127, 137, 271
Blessedness, 218, 245
Body, sacredness of, 63, 67, 185, 229, 244, 285
--the spiritual, 159
Books, 57, 85, 169, 259
Book-learning, 151
Butler's Analogy, 237
CALMNESS, 55, 263
Character, 98, 175, 191
Charity, 37, 281
Cheerfulness, 149, 223, 227
Childhood and wonder, 179
Childlikeness, 31, 183, 187, 235
Children, 48, 109, 295
Chivalry, 139, 153, 179, 181
Christ-child, the, 48
Christ's life, 45, 97, 267
--Church, 121
--compassion, 251
--descent into hell, 98
--resurrection, 95, 98, 211
--the Word, 37, 127
Christianity, Divine, 273
Christmas, 271, 287, 289, 294
Chrysalis state, 171
Church, the, 75, 77, 121, 157
--Catechism, 47, 255
Civilisation, 105, 155, 261
Clergy, the, 215
Coming of Christ, 21, 23, 183, 283, 295
Communion of saints, 141, 193
--Holy, 193
Contemplation, 87, 146
Content, 59
Courage, 275
Cowardice, 207, 265
Creeds, the, 141, 151, 215, 273
Critical spirit, 165, 203
Cross, the, 83, 96, 97, 122, 185, 189, 237, 245
Crucifix, the, 123, 189
Custom, 31
Cynicism, 191
DARK days, 19, 201, 211, 233, 249, 289
Day of the Lord, 3, 195
Dead, the blessed, 21, 49, 95, 139, 193, 249, 253, 289
--prayers for, 24, 81
--work of, 95, 139, 249
Death, 17, 113, 135, 253
--sudden, 89
--and hell, 7, 195
Defeat, 279
Dignity, 137
Discontent, Divine, 165
Disease, 233, 244
Distrust, 165
Doctrines, 157
Doubt, poetry of, 233
Drifting away, 273
Duty, 5, 13, 65, 105, 129, 147, 165, 181, 201, 275
Dying, to live, 13, 55, 93, 97, 117, 217, 295
EARNESTNESS, 35, 139, 293
Earth, God's, 101, 149, 153, 247
Earthly and heavenly, 179
Easter, 93, 98
Eclecticism, 65
Education, 67
--of character, 85
--Divine, 91, 133, 135, 149, 209
--self, 215
--of boys, 283
--after death, 171, 249
Emotions, 5, 49, 79, 85, 179, 189, 203, 259, 279
Enthusiasm, 35
Epiphany, 24
Eternal life, 11, 43
Eternity, 43, 69, 167
Eucharist, the, 21, 65, 185
Excitement, 79, 163
FACTS of life, 103, 113, 207, 285
Failure, 143
Faith, 11, 59, 85, 127, 163, 191, 199, 227, 229
Fasting, 49
Fatherhood of God, 103, 107, 115, 133, 135, 149, 181, 223, 265, 273
Fear, 137, 265, 275
Fellowship of sorrow, 109, 111, 279
Fire of God, 195
--cleansing, 195, 225, 237
Flesh and spirit, 189
Flowers, 15, 99, 101, 105, 127, 151, 221
Fool's paradise, 111, 267
Forgiveness, 169
Forward, 3
Francis, St., 103
Friendship, 19, 61, 291
Future, the, 129, 195
--identity, 19, 253
--life, 57, 65, 71, 81, 113, 171, 237, 253, 293
GENIUS, 105, 175, 215
Gifts, 83, 111, 129
Gilbert, Sir Humphrey, 203
God, the Living, 7, 101, 103, 111, 133, 193, 243, 285
--the Ideal, 73
--an indulgent, 15
--of Nature, 103, 131, 151, 183
God's character, 33, 87, 111, 181, 195, 253, 273, 283
--countenance, 131
Godliness, 91, 281
Good, the eternal, 35, 171, 253
Good in all, 9, 287
Good deeds, 187, 263
Good Friday, 93, 97
Goodness, 5, 105, 113, 199, 245
Gratitude, 89
Greeks, the old, 67, 107, 133, 155, 229
HAPPINESS, 29, 59, 245, 265
Harmony, 5, 67, 83, 127, 161, 277
Hearts and streams, 119, 197
Heaven, 109, 167
Hell, 96, 98, 109, 195, 265
--keys of, 7
--a present, 43
Hero worship, 291
Heroism, 41, 61, 71, 207, 239, 294
History, philosophy of, 63
Hope, 39, 111, 145, 149, 237, 247
Hospitals, 263
Humanity, 275
Humility, 13, 41, 169, 193
I AM I, 55, 89, 185, 199
Ideal, the, 63, 73, 117
Ideals, high, 77
Idleness, 91, 157, 207
Impunity, 217
Incarnation, the, 146, 253, 291
Influence, silent, 139, 259
Intermediate state, 98, 245, 289
JOHN the Baptist, 147
John, St., 45, 53, 63, 113
Justification, 43
KINDNESS, 181, 205
Kingdom, coming, 21, 179; of God, 45, 185
Knowledge, 53, 79, 131, 135, 163, 177, 183
LAMP race, 133
Laws of God, 98, 117, 163, 169, 229, 277, 287
Lesson of life, 61, 293
Liberty, 215
Life everlasting, 11, 113, 219, 277
--long, 133
--value of, 61
Light, 33, 177, 249, 291
Liturgies, 249
Love, 9, 37, 41, 53, 55, 79, 117, 201, 209, 235, 251, 289, 219
--Divine, 117
--and beauty, 201
MAN in God's image, 89, 127, 199, 229
March, 51, 53
Martyrs, 17, 98, 172, 218, 294, 295
Masses, the, 177
May, 99
Melancholy, 137, 183, 233, 253
Melody, 5, 127, 277
Men and women, 39, 91, 93, 153, 259, 283
Metre, 119
Midsummer, 125
Miracles, 31, 99, 289
Moderation, 69
Monotony, 163
Morality, 29, 147, 255
Morbid mind, 233
Morning, 19, 125, 201, 249
Mother earth, 247
Mothers, 61, 74, 213
Music, 23, 107, 127, 161, 277
Mystery of life, 117, 155, 185, 291
Mystics, 55, 185, 251
NATURALIST, 175
Nature, 141, 183, 187, 221, 241, 247, 253
--study of, 7, 105, 131, 141, 175, 183, 187
Nature's worship, 131
Night, 201, 211
Nineteenth century, 3, 151, 257
Noble life, 5, 9
Noble studies, 63
North-east wind, 1
Novel reading, 85, 169, 259
OCTOBER, 221
Old truths, 151
Opinions, 215
Originality, 239
Orthodox, 141
PAINTERS, 39, 71, 141, 159
Parables, Nature's, 5, 99, 101, 127, 173, 175, 196, 197, 249
Passion, 35, 197, 213
--Week, 95
Patience, 59, 143, 237, 277, 281
Paul, St., 25, 53, 207
Peace, 23, 59, 193
Penitence, 191
Penuriousness, 67
Peter, St., 45, 148
Philamon, 9, 45
Physician, 233, 244
Pictures, 39, 71, 141
Plato, 171
Poetry, 23, 41, 69, 215
Political economy, 115, 261
Practice, 143, 267
Prayer, 89, 119, 163, 167, 227, 229, 241, 267
--the Lord's, 31
--unselfish, 31
Prayers for dead, 81
Present time, 3, 5
Presentiments, 143
Pride and humility, 193, 215, 235, 267
Problem of life, 135, 291
Profession, empty, 157, 213
Progress, 101, 163, 257, 291
Proverbs, 235
Providence, 115, 169, 243
--special, 55, 159, 209, 251
Psalms, 17, 191
Public opinion, 77
Punishment, 41, 135, 159, 191, 261, 281
Purgatory, 171
RAILROADS, 257
Rank, 15, 161
Reason, 35, 111, 143, 237
Redemption of earth and man, 153
Refinement, false, 161
Reformers, 77
Religion, 103, 265, 281
Renewal, the, 71, 81, 127, 185
Repentance, 41, 49, 157
Resignation, 117, 211, 217
Rest, 21, 49, 229, 253, 263
Resurrection, 63, 81, 93, 95, 98, 141, 145, 171, 185, 207
Retribution, 47, 81, 113, 135, 177
Reverence, 81, 175, 243
Reveries, 39
Righteousness, 117, 255, 281
Rights and duties, 39
Rock of Ages, 169, 235
Romance, 127
Rules of life, 83, 107, 163
Ruth, 79
SACRAMENTALISM, 15, 39, 101, 119, 213
Sacraments, 21, 146
Safety, 17, 57
Saints' Days, 24
Saints, the, 24, 98, 122, 141, 193, 268, 269, 294, 295
Salvation, 135
Sanitary science, 29, 261
Science, 33, 59, 115, 151, 227, 233, 261
Secular, 59
Self, 31, 233
Selfishness, 159, 219, 231, 281
Self-conceit, 205
Self-control, 165, 223, 241, 259, 263
Self-improvement, 215
Self-indulgence, 91, 275
Self-respect, 287
Self-sacrifice, 13, 21, 55, 71, 79, 95, 117, 146, 148, 189, 213, 231, 295
Security, false, 115
Sensuality, 133
Sentiment, 5
Shakespeare, 179
Shame, 199
Shelley, 267
Silence, 41, 139, 257, 259
Sin, 41, 135, 159, 169, 213, 233, 281
Sisters of Mercy, 237
Sneering, 281
Sorrow, 145, 183, 185, 227, 273
Spirit, the Holy, 146
Spiritual world, 179
Spring, 27, 51, 99, 101
Starlings, 51
Stream and shower, 119, 197
Strength, 263
Substitutes, 225
Success, 139, 227, 279
Summer days, 125, 129, 131, 137, 149
Superstition, 3, 137, 169, 175
Suspicion, 281
Symbols, 99, 101, 105, 127, 131, 151, 173, 196
Sympathy, 103, 151, 153
TACT, 35, 53, 113
Temperament, 231
Temperance, true, 223, 263
Temptation, 57
Theology, 87
Thrift, 131, 183, 259
Toleration, 63, 141, 277
Training, God's, 115, 129, 215
Transfiguration, the, 205
Trinity, the, 146
Trust, 239, 265
UNITY, 185
Usefulness, 225
Utopia, 167
VAGUENESS, 11, 161
Vineyards, 121
Violence, 139
Virgin, Blessed, 74
Virtue, 29, 41, 225
Visitation of God, 61
Voyagers, early, 243
WAITING, 135, 277
--of God, 181
War tragedies, 107
Water, 29, 119, 197
Welfare, 145, 255
Winter, 1, 27, 99
Wisdom, 37, 83, 105, 107, 163
Woman, 45, 153, 87
Woman's work, 39, 45, 79, 93, 231, 259
Women, educated, 85, 169
Word Christ, the, 7, 37
--the indwelling, 259
Words, 37, 113
--hard, 53
--of God, 141
Work, 71, 83, 133, 143, 157, 165, 175, 203, 209, 223, 263
World, the, 167
Worm, the undying, 195
Worship, 131
YOUTH, 13, 129
Footnotes:
{3} The paper edition of this book has blank pages where the owner can
write diary notes, etc. This is why the page numbers in the eText often
miss out numbers.--DP.
{97} Lines written under a pen and ink drawing of a stormy shoreless
sea, with two human beings lashed to a cross floating on the crest of the
waves.
*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "Daily Thoughts - selected from the writings of Charles Kingsley by his wife" ***
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