Studies in the Christian Character, Bishop Paget.
MAY 5
"Any man—with the heart of a man and not of a mouse—is more likely than not to behave well at a pinch; but no man who is habitually selfish can be sure that he will, when the choice comes sharp between his own life and the lives of others. The impulse of a supreme moment only focusses the habits and customs of a man's soul. The supreme moment may never come, but habits and customs mould us from the cradle to the grave.... Vice and cowardice become alike impossible to a man who has never—cradled in selfishness, and made callous by custom—learned to pamper himself at the expense of others!"
A Happy Family, Mrs. Ewing.
"Sympathy is the safeguard of the human soul against selfishness."
Carlyle.
MAY 6
"Where Love is, God is. He that dwelleth in Love dwelleth in God. God is Love. Therefore love. Without distinction, without calculation, without procrastination, love. Lavish it upon the poor, where it is very easy; especially upon the rich, who often need it most; most of all upon our equals, where it is very difficult, and for whom perhaps we each do least of all. There is a difference between trying to please and giving pleasure. Give pleasure. Lose no chance of giving pleasure. For that is the ceaseless and anonymous triumph of a truly loving spirit. 'I shall pass through this world but once. Any good thing therefore that I can do, or any kindness that I can show to any human being, let me do it now. Let me not defer it or neglect it, for I shall not pass this way again.'"
The Greatest Thing in the World, Henry Drummond.
"Let the weakest, let the humblest remember, that in his daily course he can, if he will, shed around him almost a heaven. Kindly words, sympathising attentions, watchfulness against wounding men's sensitiveness—these cost very little, but they are priceless in their value. Are they not almost the staple of our daily happiness? From hour to hour, from moment to moment, we are supported, blest, by small kindnesses."
F. W. Robertson.
MAY 7
"Whatever impatience we may feel towards our neighbour, and whatever indignation our race may rouse in us, we are chained one to another, and, companions in labour and misfortune, have everything to lose by mutual recrimination and reproach. Let us be silent as to each other's weakness, helpful, tolerant, nay, tender towards each other! Or, if we cannot feel tenderness, may we at least feel pity! May we put away from us the satire which scourges and the anger which brands; the oil and wine of the good Samaritan are of more avail. We may make the ideal a reason for contempt; but it is more beautiful to make it a reason for tenderness."
Amiel's Journal.
"It is always a mistake to paint people blacker than the facts warrant, both because such exaggeration is pretty sure to cause a reaction to the opposite extreme, and also because we are likely to miss the lesson which the errors or misconduct of others should teach us, if we think them so exceptionally wicked that we are ourselves in no danger of following their example."
Life Here and Hereafter, Canon MacColl.
Family Life—"Without Jar or Jostle"
MAY 8
"Let us give everybody a right to live his own life, as far as possible, and avoid imposing our own peculiarities on another.
"If we were to picture a perfect family, it should be a union of people of individual and marked character, who, through love, have come to a perfect appreciation of each other, and who so wisely understand themselves and one another, that each may move freely along his or her own track without jar or jostle,—a family where affection is always sympathetic and receptive, but never inquisitive,—where all personal delicacies are respected,—and where there is a sense of privacy and seclusion in following one's own course, unchallenged by the watchfulness of others, yet withal a sense of society and support in a knowledge of the kind dispositions and interpretations of all around.
"In treating of family discourtesies, I have avoided speaking of those which come from ill-temper and brute selfishness, because these are sins more than mistakes. An angry person is generally impolite; and where contention and ill-will are, there can be no courteousness. What I have mentioned are rather the lackings of good and often admirable people, who merely need to consider in their family-life a little more of whatsoever things are lovely. With such the mere admission of anything to be pursued as a duty secures the purpose; only in their somewhat earnest pursuit of the substantials of life, they drop and pass by the little things that give it sweetness and perfume."
Little Foxes, Harriet Beecher Stowe.
MAY 9
"We can recall occasions in which we have been impatient, inconsiderate, self-willed, self-asserting. We have sharply resented some want of good taste: we have made light of a scruple or of a difficulty which weighed heavily on another: we have yielded ungraciously a service which may have been claimed inopportunely: we have been exact in requiring conventional deference to our judgment: we have not checked the keen word, or the smile which might be interpreted to assert a proud superiority.
"In all this we may have been justifiable according to common rules of conduct; but we have given offence. We have not, that is, shewn, when we might have shewn, that Christian sympathy, devotion, fellowship, come down to little things; that the generosity of love looks tenderly, if by any means it may find the soul which has not revealed itself."
Bishop Westcott.
"Seek the graces of God with all your strength; but above all seek the graces that specially belong to heaven. Try hard to be humble, to be free from all conceit, to question your own opinions, to give up your own way, to put simplicity first among all excellences of character, to be ready to think yourself in the wrong, to prefer others to yourself; for this character is nearest to God's heart, and to babes who are of this sort does God reveal His most secret mysteries."
Bishop Temple.
May 10
"The spectrum of Love has nine ingredients:—
Patience—'Love suffereth long.'
Kindness—'And is kind.'
Generosity—'Love envieth not.'
Humility—'Love vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up.'
Courtesy—'Doth not behave itself unseemly.'
Unselfishness—'Seeketh not her own.'
Good Temper—'Is not easily provoked.'
Guilelessness—'Thinketh no evil.'
Sincerity—'Rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in
the truth.'
Patience; kindness; generosity; humility; courtesy; unselfishness; good temper; guilelessness; sincerity—these make up the supreme gift, the stature of the perfect man. You will observe that all are in relation to men, in relation to life, in relation to the known to-day and the near to-morrow, and not to the unknown eternity. We hear much of love to God; Christ spoke much of love to man. We make a great deal of peace with heaven; Christ made much of peace on earth. Religion is not a strange or added thing, but the inspiration of the secular life, the breathing of an eternal spirit through this temporal world. The supreme thing, in short, is not a thing at all, but the giving of a further finish to the multitudinous words and acts which make up the sum of every common day."
The Greatest Thing in the World, Henry Drummond.
MAY 11
"There is an idea abroad among moral people that they should make their neighbours good. One person I have to make good: myself. But my duty to my neighbour is much more nearly expressed by saying that I have to make him happy—if I may."
Across the Plains, R. L. Stevenson.
"Of all the weapons we wield against wrong, there is none more effective than pure and burning joy."
The Gospel of Joy, Stopford Brooke.
"There is no beautifier of complexion, or form, or behaviour, like the wish to scatter joy and not pain around us."
Emerson.
MAY 12
"It is astonishing how large a part of Christ's precepts is devoted solely to the inculcation of happiness. How much of His life, too, was spent simply in making people happy! There was no word more often on His lips than 'blessed,' and it is recognised by Him as a distinct end in life, the end for this life, to secure the happiness of others. This simple grace, too, needs little equipment. Christ had little. One need scarcely even be happy one's self. Holiness, of course, is a greater word, but we cannot produce that in others. That is reserved for God Himself, but what is put in our power is happiness, and for that each man is his brother's keeper. Now society is an arrangement for producing and sustaining human happiness, and temper is an agent for thwarting and destroying it. Look at the parable of the Prodigal Son for a moment, and see how the elder brother's wretched pettiness, explosion of temper, churlishness, spoiled the happiness of a whole circle. First, it certainly spoiled his own. How ashamed of himself he must have been when the fit was over, one can well guess. Yet these things are never so quickly over as they seem. Self-disgust and humiliation may come at once, but a good deal else within has to wait till the spirit is tuned again. For instance, prayer must wait. A man cannot pray till the sourness is out of his soul. He must first forgive his brother who trespassed against him before he can go to God to have his own trespasses forgiven."
The Ideal Life, Henry Drummond.
MAY 13
"The function of culture is not merely to train the powers of enjoyment, but first and supremely for helpful service."
Bishop Potter.
"It was often in George Eliot's mind and on her lips that the only worthy end of all learning, of all science, of all life, in fact, is that human beings should love one another better. Culture merely for culture's sake can never be anything but a sapless root, capable of producing at best a shrivelled branch.... She was cheered by the hope and by the belief in gradual improvement of the mass; for in her view each individual must find the better part of happiness in helping another. She often thought it wisest not to raise too ambitious an ideal, especially in young people, but to impress on ordinary natures the immense possibilities of making a small circle brighter and better. Few are born to do the great work of the world, but all are born to this. And to the natures capable of the larger effort the field of usefulness will constantly widen."
The Life of George Eliot, J. W. Cross.
"Blessed are the Happiness Makers"
MAY 14
"Have you ever noticed how much of Christ's life was spent in doing kind things—in merely doing kind things? Run over it with that in view, and you will find that He spent a great proportion of His time simply in making people happy, in doing good turns to people."
The Greatest Thing in the World, Henry Drummond.
"Take life all through, its adversity as well as its prosperity, its sickness as well as its health, its loss of its rights as well as its enjoyment of them, and we shall find that no natural sweetness of temper, much less any acquired philosophical equanimity, is equal to the support of a uniform habit of kindness. Nevertheless, with the help of grace, the habit of saying kind words is very quickly formed, and when once formed it is not speedily lost. Sharpness, bitterness, sarcasm, acute observation, divination of motives—all these things disappear when a man is earnestly conforming himself to the image of Christ Jesus. The very attempt to be like our dearest Lord is already a wellspring of sweetness within us, flowing with an easy grace over all who come within our reach."
F. W. Faber.
"Blessed are the Happiness Makers. Blessed are they who know how to shine on one's gloom with their cheer."
Henry Ward Beecher.
Character—The Right Atmosphere
MAY 15
"Character cannot be formed without action. Through it strength comes. But every action must have its reaction upon the nature of the one who puts it forth. If it does not, it fails of that which is its highest result; for the finest expression of a man's nature is not to be found in action, but in that very intangible thing which we call his atmosphere. There are a great many people who are alert, energetic, and decisive, but who give forth very little of this rare effluence—this quality which seems to issue out of the very recesses of one's nature. It is, however, through this quality that the most constant influence is exercised; that influence which is not only put forth most steadily, but which penetrates and affects others in the most searching way. The air we breathe has much to do with health; in a relaxing atmosphere it is difficult to work; in an atmosphere of vitality it is easy to work. We never meet some people without going away from them with our ideals a little blurred, or our faith in them a little disturbed. We can never part from others without a sense of increased hope. There are those who invigorate us by simple contact; something escapes from them of which they are not aware and which we cannot analyse, which makes us believe more deeply in ourselves and our kind.
"So far as charm is concerned, there is no quality which contributes so much to it as the subtle thing we call atmosphere. There are some people who do not need to speak in order not only to awaken our respect, but to give us a sense of something rare and fine. In such an influence, all that is most individual and characteristic flows together, and the woman reveals herself without being conscious that she is making herself known. Such an atmosphere in a home creates a sentiment and organises a life which would not be possible if one should attempt to fashion these things by intention. The finest things, like happiness, must be sought by indirection and are the results of character, rather than objects of immediate pursuit."
"It is always good to know, if only in passing, charming human beings. It refreshes one like flowers, and woods, and clear brooks."
George Eliot.
MAY 16
"Jesus afterwards focussed the new type of character in a lovely illustration which is not always appreciated at its full value, because we deny it perspective. Every reader of the Gospels has marked the sympathy of Jesus with children. How He watched their games! How angry He was with His disciples for belittling them! How He used to warn men, whatever they did, never to hurt a little child! How grateful were children's praises when all others had turned against Him! One is apt to admire the beautiful sentiment, and to forget that children were more to Jesus than helpless gentle creatures to be loved and protected. They were His chief parable of the Kingdom of Heaven. As a type of character the Kingdom was like unto a little child, and the greatest in the Kingdom would be the most child-like. According to Jesus, a well-conditioned child illustrates better than anything else on earth the distinctive features of Christian character. Because he does not assert nor aggrandise himself. Because he has no memory for injuries, and no room in his heart for a grudge. Because he has no previous opinions, and is not ashamed to confess his ignorance. Because he can imagine, and has the key of another world, entering in through the ivory gate and living amid the things unseen and eternal. The new society of Jesus was a magnificent imagination, and he who entered it must lay aside the world standards and ideals of character, and become as a little child."
The Mind of the Master, Dr. John Watson.
MAY 17
"Some people seem to be here in the world just on their guard all the while, always so afraid of doing wrong that they never do anything really right. They do not add to the world's moral force; as the man, who, by constant watchfulness over his own health, just keeps himself from dying, contributes nothing to the world's vitality. All merely negative purity has something of the taint of the impurity that it resists. The effort not to be frivolous is frivolous itself. The effort not to be selfish is very apt to be only another form of selfishness."
Phillips Brooks.
"Beware of making your moral staple consist of the negative virtues. It is good to abstain and teach others to abstain, from all that is sinful and hurtful. But making a business of it leads to emaciation of character, unless one feeds largely also on the more nutritious diet of active sympathetic benevolence."
O. W. Holmes.
"The seductions of life are strong in every age and station; we make idols of our affections, idols of our customary virtues; we are content to avoid the inconvenient wrong, and to forego the inconvenient right with almost equal self-approval, until at last we make a home for our conscience among the negative virtues and the cowardly vices."
The Life of R. L. Stevenson, Graham Balfour.
MAY 18
"The moments of our most important decisions are often precisely those in which nothing seems to have been decided; and only long afterwards, when we perceive with astonishment that the Rubicon has been crossed, do we realise that in that half-forgotten instant of hesitation as to some apparently unimportant side issue, in that unconscious movement which betrayed a feeling of which we were not aware, our choice was made. The crises of life come, like the Kingdom of Heaven, without observation. Our characters, and not our deliberate actions, decide for us; and even when the moment of crisis is apprehended at the time by the troubling of the water, action is generally a little late. Character, as a rule, steps down first."
Diana Tempest, Mary Cholmondeley.
"Great occasions do not make heroes or cowards—they simply unveil them to the eyes of men. Silently and imperceptibly, as we wake or sleep, we grow and wax strong, or we grow and wax weak, and at last some crisis shows us what we have become."
Bishop Westcott.
Character—"Our Echoes roll from Soul to Soul"
MAY 19
"One of the main seats of our weakness lies in this very notion, that what we do at the moment cannot matter much; for that we shall be able to alter and mend and patch it just as we like by-and-by."
Hare.
"We sleep, but the loom of life never stops; and the pattern which was weaving when the sun went down is weaving when it comes up to-morrow."
Beecher.
"Let every soul
Heed what it doth to-day, because to-morrow
The same thing it shall find gone forward there
To meet and make and judge it."
The Light of Asia, E. Arnold.
"Our echoes roll from soul to soul,
And grow for ever and for ever."
Tennyson.
MAY 20
"Like flakes of snow that fall unperceived upon the earth, the seemingly unimportant events of life succeed one another. As the snow gathers together, so are our habits formed: no single flake that is added to the pile produces a sensible change; no single flake creates, however it may exhibit, a man's character; but as the tempest hurls the avalanche down the mountain, and overwhelms the inhabitant and his habitation, so passion, acting upon the elements of mischief, which pernicious habits have brought together by imperceptible accumulation, may overwhelm the edifice of truth and virtue."
Jeremy Bentham.
"In the conduct of life, habits count for more than maxims, because habit is a living maxim, become flesh and instinct. To reform one's maxims is nothing: it is but to change the title of the book. To learn new habits is everything, for it is to reach the substance of life. Life is but a tissue of habits."
Amiel's Journal.
MAY 21
"The Hell to be endured hereafter which theology tells, is no worse than the hell we make for ourselves in this world by habitually fashioning our characters the wrong way. Could the young realise how soon they will become mere walking bundles of habits, they would give more heed to their conduct while in the plastic state. We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone. Every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never-so-little scar."
Psychology, Professor William James.
"Routine is a terrible master, but she is a servant whom we can hardly do without. Routine as a law is deadly. Routine as a resource in the temporary exhaustion of impulse and suggestion is often our salvation."
Phillips Brooks.
"It is just as easy to form a good habit as it is a bad one. And it is just as hard to break a good habit as a bad one. So get the good ones and keep them."
McKinley.
MAY 22
"One false note will spoil the finest piece of music, and one little sin, as we deem it, may ruin the most promising character, involving it in a network of unforeseen consequences out of which there may be no escape."
Life Here and Hereafter, Canon MacColl.
"There is a physical demonstration of sin as well as a religious; and no sin can come in among the delicate faculties of the mind, or among the coarser fibres of the body, without leaving a stain, either as a positive injury to the life, or, what is equally fatal, as a predisposition to commit the same sin again. This predisposition is always one of the most real and appalling accompaniments of the stain of sin. There is scarcely such a thing as an isolated sin in a man's life. Most sins can be accounted for by what has gone before. Every sin, so to speak, has its own pedigree, and is the result of the accumulated force, which means the accumulated stain of many a preparatory sin."
The Ideal Life, Henry Drummond.
MAY 23
"Two things a genuine Christian never does. He never makes light of any known sin, and he never admits it to be invincible."
Canon Liddon.
"We always meet the temptation which is to expose us when we least expect it."
The Ideal Life, Henry Drummond.
"It is of the essence of temptation that it should come on us unawares."
Pastor Pastorum, Henry Latham.
"If we cannot at once rise to the sanctities of obedience and faith, let us at least resist our temptations."
Emerson.
MAY 24
"We judge of sins, as we judge of most things, by their outward form. We arrange the vices of our neighbours according to a scale which society has tacitly adopted, placing the more gross and public at the foot, the slightly less gross higher up, and then by some strange process the scale becomes obliterated. Finally it vanishes into space, leaving lengths of itself unexplored, its sins unnamed, unheeded, and unshunned. But we have no balance to weigh sins. Coarser and finer are but words of our own. The chances are, if anything, that the finer are the lower. The very fact that the world sees the coarser sins so well is against the belief that they are the worst. The subtle and unseen sin, that sin in the part of the nature most near to the spiritual, ought to be more degrading than any other. Yet for many of the finer forms of sin society has yet no brand."
The Ideal Life, Henry Drummond.
"Tried by final tests, and reduced to its essential elements, sin is the preference of self to God, and the assertion of the human will against the Will of God. With Jesus, from first to last, sin is selfishness."
The Mind of the Master, Dr. John Watson.
MAY 25-26
"We deceive ourselves in another way, namely, by seeking for all manner of excuses and palliations. The strength of the temptation, or the suddenness of it, or the length of it; our own weakness, our natural tendency to that particular sort of sin; our wishes to be better, the excellence of our feelings, the excellence of our desires; the peculiarity of our circumstances, the special disadvantages which make us worse off than others; all these we put before our minds as excuses for having done wrong, and persuade ourselves too often that wrong is not really wrong, and that though the deed was sinful the doer of it was not. I do not mean that these palliations are never worth anything, nor do I mean that in every case the same deed is the same sin. There are no doubt infinite varieties of guilt in what appears outwardly the same deed, and God will distinguish between them and will judge justly. But the habit of mind which leads us to palliate our sins and find good excuses for them, has this dangerous tendency, that it blinds us to the evil of evil. We slip into the delusion that we are better than we seem, that our faults look worse than they are, that inside we have good dispositions, and good desires, and warm feelings, and religious emotions, and that it is only the outside that is marked by those evil stains. This is a delusion and a grievous delusion. You cannot be good and do wrong. You cannot be righteous and do unrighteousness. Granted that you may slip once into a sin which notwithstanding is not really a part of your nature. Still, this cannot happen several times over. Make no mistake. If you do wrong the deed is a real part of your life, and cannot be removed out of it by any fancy of yours that it is on your circumstances, your temptations, your peculiar disadvantages that the blame can be cast, still less by any wishes or emotions or feelings even of the most religious kind."
Bishop Temple.
"The strength of a man's virtue is not to be measured by the efforts he makes under pressure, but by his ordinary conduct."
Pascal.
MAY 27
"We must remember that it is by the mercy of Christ that we are saved from being what we might have been. 'There goes John Bradford, but for the grace of God,' said a good man when he saw a criminal being led to execution. We are too apt to take the credit to ourselves for our circumstances. Imagine that you were born of poor parents out of work in Whitechapel, and had to pick up your living in the docks, or that you were a working girl in Bethnal Green, trying to keep your poor parents or nurse a sick brother out of making match-boxes at 2¼d. a gross, and then thank God you were spared the temptation to a bad life, which they have to undergo. So, again, we must remember that sins of the spirit are quite as bad in the eyes of Christ as sins of the flesh; He never spoke a hard word of the publican and sinner, but He lashed with His scorn the 'Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites.' The sins that we respectable people commit lightly every day, of pride and indolence and indifference to the sufferings of the poor, may be worse in His sight than the most flagrant sins of those who know no better."
Friends of the Master, Bishop Winnington Ingram.
MAY 28
"I have often observed in the course of my experience of human life, that every man, even the worst, has something good about him; though often nothing else than a happy temperament of constitution, inclining him to this or that virtue. For this reason, no man can say in what degree any other person besides himself can be, with strict justice, called wicked. Let any one with the strictest character for regularity of conduct among us, examine impartially how many vices he has never been guilty of, not from any care or vigilance, but for want of opportunity, or some accidental circumstances intervening; how many of the weaknesses of mankind he has escaped because he was out of the line of such temptation; and—what often, if not always, weighs more than all the rest—how much he is indebted to the world's good opinion because the world does not know all: I say, any man who can thus think will scan the failings, nay, the faults and crimes of mankind with a brother's eye."
Burns.
"Very late in life, and only after many experiences, does a man learn, at the sight of a fellow-creature's real failing or weakness, to sympathise with him, and help him without a secret self-congratulation at his own virtue and strength, but on the contrary, with every humility and comprehension of the naturalness, almost the inevitableness of sin."
An Unhappy Girl, Ivan Turgenev.
MAY 29
"Remove from us the protection, the encompassing safeguards and shelters we enjoy; withdraw the influences for good that are daily and weekly dropped on us like gentle dew from heaven, and have dropped ever since we had any being; deprive us of the comforts and interests, the innocent substitutes for forbidden pleasures; expose us to the loneliness, the vacancy, the dreary monotony, the hopeless struggle, the despair in which the majority of the men and women who fall find themselves immersed; and bring before us, thus exposed and bereft, what temptation you will—uncleanness, intemperance, theft, lying, blasphemy—and not one in ten of ordinary Christian people, I believe, would stand before it."
R. W. Barbour.
"Looking within myself, I note how thin
A plank of station, chance, or prosperous fate,
Doth fence me from the clutching waves of sin;—
In my own heart I find the worst man's mate,
And see not dimly the smooth-hingëd gate
That opes to those abysses
Where ye grope darkly,—ye who never knew
On your young hearts love's consecrating dew
Or felt a mother's kisses,
Or home's restraining tendrils round you curled;
Ah, side by side with heart's-ease in this world,
The fatal night-shade grows and bitter rue!"
James Russell Lowell.
MAY 30
"Conscience is harder than our enemies,
Knows more, accuses with more nicety,
Nor needs to question Rumour if we fall
Below the perfect model of our thought."
George Eliot.
"If a man has nothing to reproach himself with, he can bear anything."
Phillips Brooks.
"Character is the ground of trust and the guarantee for good living, and that character only is sound which rests upon a good conscience and a clean heart and a strong will."
Dr. John Watson.
MAY 31
"What is true contrition? Sorrow for sin in itself, not for sin's consequences."
The Guided Life, Canon Body.
"Remorse and repentance are two very different things. Repentance leads back to life; but remorse ends often in the painless apathy and fatal mortification of despair."
Dean Farrar.
"Penitence is like the dawn.... It is the breaking of the light in the soul,—dark enough sometimes no doubt, but a darkness giving place steadily to the growing light."
Bishop Walsham How.
JUNE 1
"The father says of his profligate son whom he has never done one wise or vigorous thing to make a noble and pure-minded man: 'I cannot tell how it has come. It has not been my fault. I put him into the world and this came out.' The father whose faith has been mean and selfish says the same of his boy who is a sceptic. Everywhere there is this cowardly casting off of responsibilities upon the dead circumstances around us. It is a very hard treatment of the poor, dumb, helpless world which cannot answer to defend itself. It takes us as we give ourselves to it. It is our minister fulfilling our commissions for us upon our own souls. If we say to it, 'Make us noble,' it does make us noble. If we say to it, 'Make us mean,' it does make us mean. And then we take the nobility and say, 'Behold, how noble I have made myself.' And we take the meanness and say, 'See how mean the world has made me.'"
Phillips Brooks.
"Speaking of ancestors—'What right have I to question them, or judge them, or bring them forward in my life as being responsible for my nature? If I roll back the responsibility to them, had they not fathers? and had not their fathers fathers? and if a man rolls back his deeds upon those who are his past, then where will responsibility be found at all, and of what poor cowardly stuff is each of us?"
The Mettle of the Pasture, James Lane Allen.
JUNE 2
"This tracing of the sin to its root now suggests this further topic—its cure. Christianity professes to cure anything. The process may be slow, the discipline may be severe, but it can be done. But is not temper a constitutional thing? Is it not hereditary, a family failing, a matter of temperament, and can that be cured? Yes, if there is anything in Christianity. If there is no provision for that, then Christianity stands convicted of being unequal to human need. What course then did the father take, in the case before us, to pacify the angry passions of his ill-natured son? Mark that he made no attempt in the first instance to reason with him! To do so is a common mistake, and utterly useless both with ourselves and others. We are perfectly convinced of the puerility of it all, but that does not help us in the least to mend it. The malady has its seat in the affections, and therefore the father went there at once. Reason came in its place, and the son was supplied with valid arguments—stated in the last verse of the chapter—against his conduct, but he was first plied with love."
The Ideal Life, Henry Drummond.
JUNE 3
"Any insistence on heredity would have depreciated responsibility, and Jesus held every man to his own sin. Science and theology have joined hands in magnifying heredity and lowering individuality, till a man comes to be little more than the resultant of certain forces, a projectile shot forth from the past, and describing a calculated course. Jesus made a brave stand for each man as the possessor of will-power, and master of his life. He sadly admitted that a human will might be weakened by evil habits of thought, He declared gladly that the Divine Grace reinforced the halting will: but, with every qualification, decision still rested in the last issue with the man. 'If Thou wilt, Thou canst make me clean,' as if his cure hinged on the Divine Will. Of course, I am willing, said Jesus, and referred the man back to his inalienable human rights. Jesus never diverged into metaphysics, even to reconcile the freedom of the human will with the sovereignty of the Divine. His function was not academic debate, it was the solution of an actual situation. Logically, men might be puppets; consciously, they were self-determinating, and Jesus said with emphasis, 'Wilt thou?'"
The Mind of the Master, Dr. John Watson.
"Even natural disposition, of which we make so much when we speak of heredity, is only a tendency till habit takes it and sets it and hardens it and drives it to a settled goal."
Hugh Black.
JUNE 4
"When people detect in us what are actually imperfections and faults, it is clear that they do us no wrong, since it is not they who cause them; and it is clear, too, that they do us a service, inasmuch as they help us to free ourselves from an evil, namely, the ignorance of these defects. We should not be angry because they know them and despise us, for it is right that they should know us for what we are, and that they should despise us if we are despicable.
"Such are the feelings which would rise in a heart filled with equity and justice. What then should we say of our own heart when we see in it a quite contrary frame of mind? For is it not a fact that we hate the truth and those who tell it us, that we love those who deceive themselves in our favour, and that we wish to be esteemed by them as other than we really are?"
Pascal.
"A man should never be ashamed to say he has been in the wrong, which is but saying, in other words, that he is wiser to-day than he was yesterday."
Pope.
JUNE 5
"Too many take the ready course to deceive themselves; for they look with both eyes on the failings and defects of others, and scarcely give their good qualities half an eye: on the contrary, in themselves they study to the full their own advantages, while their weaknesses and defects (as one says) they skip over, as children do the hard words in their lessons that are troublesome to read; and making this uneven parallel, what wonder if the result be a gross mistake of themselves."
Archbishop Leighton.
"To hide a fault with a lie is to replace a blot by a hole."
"It is a great folly not to part with your own faults,
which is possible, but to try instead to escape from
other people's faults, which is impossible."
Marcus Aurelius.
"The greatest of faults, I should say, is to be conscious of none."
Carlyle.
JUNE 6
"Obstinacy is will asserting itself without being able to justify itself. It is persistence without a plausible motive. It is the tenacity of self-love substituted for the tenacity of reason or conscience."
Amiel's Journal.
"If any man is able to convince me and show me that I do not think or act right, I will gladly change; for I seek the truth by which no man was ever injured. But he is injured who abides in his error and ignorance."
Marcus Aurelius.
"It is never too late to give up our prejudices."
Thoreau.
"When one's character is naturally firm, it is well to be able to yield upon reflection."
Vauvenargues.
JUNE 7
"Any man of many transactions can hardly expect to go through life without being subject to one or two very severe calumnies. Amongst these many transactions, some few will be with very ill-conditioned people, with very ignorant people, or, perhaps, with monomaniacs; and he cannot expect, therefore, but that some narrative of a calumnious kind will have its origin in one of these transactions. It may be fanned by any accidental breeze of malice or ill-fortune, and become a very serious element of mischief to him. Such a thing is to be looked upon as pure misfortune coming in the ordinary course of events; and the way to treat it is to deal with it as calmly and philosophically as with any other misfortune. As some one has said, the mud will rub off when it is dry, and not before. The drying will not always come in the calumniated man's time, unless in favourable seasons, which he cannot command."
Helps.
"If any one tells you such a one has spoken ill of you, do not refute them in that particular; but answer, had he known all my vices, he had not spoken only of that one."
Epictetus.
JUNE 8
"I am beholden to calumny that she hath so endeavoured and taken pains to belie me. It shall make me set a surer guard on myself, and keep a better watch upon my actions."
Ben Jonson.
"As to people saying a few idle words about us, we must not mind that, any more than the old church-steeple minds the rooks cawing about it."
George Eliot.
"The power men possess to annoy me I give them."
Emerson.
"Assailed by scandal and the tongue of strife, His only answer was—a blameless life."
Cowper.
JUNE 9
"Flattery is a false coinage which would have no currency but for our vanity."
La Rochefoucauld.
"If we did not flatter ourselves, the flattery of others could do us no harm."
La Rochefoucauld.
"Self-love is the greatest Flatterer in the World."
La Rochefoucauld.
"The Devil has no stauncher ally than want of perception."
Philip H. Wickstead.
JUNE 10
"There are two states or conditions of pride. The first is one of self-approval, the second one of self-contempt. Pride is seen probably at its purest in the last."
Amiel's Journal.
"The foundation of pride is the wish to respect one's self, whatever others may think; the mainspring of vanity is the craving for the admiration of others, no matter at what cost to one's self-respect."
The Heart of Rome, F. Marion Crawford.
"Any revelation of greatness overwhelms petty thoughts.... The presence of death turns enemies into friends. In the same way the petty feelings of pride and vanity would lose much of their power if people had the overwhelming feeling which comes from the contemplation of Almightiness, All-goodness, and All-love. There would be a marked change in all human relations if men turned from the presence of the Thrice Holy to face one another; if thoughts of self and for self were driven out of their minds by worship."
The Service of God, Canon Barnett.
JUNE 11
"It is indeed a desirable thing to be well descended, but the glory belongs to our ancestors."
Plutarch.
"Conceit spoils many an excellency. Some persons are so proud of their goodness, or of their attainments, or of their position, or of their character, or of their family, that they become offensive to many who would otherwise be won by their merit. Pride mars, blights, and withers whatever it touches. It begets assumptions that are very belittling as well as hard to bear. A man weakens his influence and retards his personal and public interests by giving it full control. Its exhibition may be natural; but noble manhood, high moral character, regard to the feelings of others and Christianity all demand its suppression."
JUNE 12
"What hypocrites we seem to be, whenever we talk of ourselves! Our words sound so humble, while our hearts are so proud."
Guesses at Truth, edited by Archdeacon Hare.
"By despising himself too much a man comes to be worthy of his own contempt."
Amiel's Journal.
"Just as criticism alone ministers to pride and then to death, so creation, even of the smallest kind, ministers to humility. And that stands to reason: the slightest act of shaping instantly opens before you an ever-expanding sea, and the vision of the infinite is the death of vanity and pride."
The Gospel of Joy, Stopford Brooke.
"Humility is the hall-mark of wisdom."
Jeremy Collier.
JUNE 13
"We ought to have this measure of charity for egotistical people—a willingness to suppose that they actually believe themselves to be what they assume to be. It is quite possible for a person to be in such a fog of misapprehension that everything about him—his little world, his personal interest—will loom abnormally large. When the fog is dispelled, he will see things as they are, and estimate them and himself accordingly.
"Egotism of this kind is pardonable; and there is a great deal of it which is peculiar to the mists and strange refractions of youth. When the sun of a clearer and larger knowledge chases away the fog, a right-minded young person emerges from this egotistical, too self-conscious period of his life, and finds a new adjustment for himself in the great and serious world."
"He who is always enquiring what people will say,
will never give them opportunity to say anything great
about him."
"Reputation is in itself only a farthing candle, of
wavering and uncertain flame, and easily blown out;
but it is the light by which the world looks for and
finds merit."
Lowell.
JUNE 14
"'Freedom' is not the power to do what we like, but to be what we ought to be."
Charles Gore.
"There is no commoner danger than that of accepting the code of the society in which you live as the rule of right."
Bishop Temple.
"Strive all your life to free men from the bondage of custom and self, the two great elements of the world that lieth in wickedness."
Charles Kingsley.
"What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule ... is harder, because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it."
Emerson.
JUNE 15
"It is not the many who reform the world; but the few who rise superior to that Public Opinion which crucified our Lord many years ago."
Charles Kingsley.
"We are tempted to measure ourselves by others, to acquiesce in an average standard and an average attainment. We forget that while we are not required to judge our neighbours, we are required to judge ourselves."
Bishop Westcott.
"Moral courage is obeying one's conscience, and doing what one believes to be right in face of a hostile majority; and moral cowardice is stifling one's conscience, and doing what is less than right to win other people's favour."
Dr. John Watson.
JUNE 16
"Opinion has its value and even its power: to have it against us is painful when we are among friends, and harmful in the case of the outer world. We should neither flatter opinion nor court it; but it is better, if we can help it, not to throw it on to a false scent. The first error is a meanness; the second an imprudence.... Be careful of your reputation, not through vanity, but that you may not harm your life's work, and out of love for truth. There is still something of self-seeking in the refined disinterestedness which will not justify itself, that it may feel itself superior to opinion. It requires ability to make what we seem agree with what we are,—and humility to feel that we are no great things."
Amiel's Journal.
"Suppose any man shall despise me. Let him look to that himself. But I will look to this, that I be not discovered doing or saying anything deserving of contempt."
Marcus Aurelius.
Spiritual Balance and Proportion
JUNE 17
"A well-governed mind learns in time to find pleasure in nothing but the true and the just."
Amiel's Journal.
"Not only does sympathy lead us to see the opinions of others in a truer light, it enables us to form a sounder judgment on our own; for as long as a man looks only 'on his own things,' he fails to see them in true proportion."
Lucy Soulsby.
"If we can live in Christ and have His life in us, shall not the spiritual balance and proportion which were His become ours too? If He were really our Master and our Saviour, could it be that we should get so eager and excited over little things? If we were His, could we possibly be wretched over the losing of a little money which we do not need, or be exalted at the sound of a little praise which we know that we only half deserve and that the praisers only half intend? A moment's disappointment, a moment's gratification, and then the ocean would be calm again and quite forgetful of the ripple which disturbed its bosom."