The Making of Character, Professor MacCunn.
DECEMBER 15
"The gentleness of our Lord in rebuking, has an effect which gentleness often has, it awakens compunctions in those to whom it is shown. A child, who by severity is set on its defence or drawn into falsehood, is often melted into full confession by being loved and trusted more than it deserves."
Pastor Pastorum, Henry Latham.
"Our Lord's reply is again gentle; to be hard on a fault that was confessed would have dried up that confidence which flowed so freely."
Pastor Pastorum, Henry Latham.
"Better make penitents by gentleness than hypocrites by severity."
S. Francis de Sales.
DECEMBER 16
"Children have more need of models than of critics."
Joubert.
"It is by imitation, far more than by precept, that we learn everything; and what we learn thus we acquire not only more effectually, but more pleasantly. This forms our manners, our opinions, our lives."
Burke.
"Meanwhile there is much that we can do. It need not be said that home is the most effective school of character. On the duties of home I cannot dwell now. But there is a more general influence of common tone and habits of which serious account ought to be taken. We are at all times unconsciously educating others by our own example. Our standard of duty in the discharge of business and in the use of leisure necessarily influences the desires and the actions of those who look to us for guidance. The young are quick-eyed critics, and the sight of quiet devotion to work, of pleasure sought in common things—and all truly precious things are common—will enforce surely and silently some great lessons of school. We do not, as far as I can judge, rate highly enough our responsibility for the customary practices of society. Not infrequently we neutralise our teaching through want of imagination by failing to follow out the consequences of some traditional custom. We seem to be inconsiderate when we are only ignorant."
Bishop Westcott.
DECEMBER 17
"Christ did not denounce wealth any more than He denounced pauperism. He did not abhor money; He used it. He did not abhor the company of rich men; He sought it. He did not invariably scorn or even resent a certain profuseness of expenditure. With a fine discrimination, He, while habitually discouraging it, yet recognised that, here and there, there was place for it. What he denounced was the love of, the lust of riches; the vulgar snobbishness that chose exclusively the fellowship or the ways of rich men; the habit of extravagance; in one word, greed and luxury and self-indulgence. He taught men, first of all and last of all, that they were stewards, that in the final analysis of men and things neither they nor theirs were their own.
We must not only affirm the brotherhood of man: we must live it. For then the State, and in the State, the home, the Church, and the individual shall become the incarnation of a regenerated humanity, and earth, this earth, our earth, here and to-day, the vestibule of heaven!"
The Citizen in Relation to the Industrial Situation,
Bishop Potter.
DECEMBER 18
"The expenditure of money is no easy matter. It is wrong to let the poor want. It is wrong to starve the nature which asks for other things than food. There is only one principle of guidance. Whatever is done must be done in thought for others, and not in thought for ourselves. Money on luxuries which end in ourselves is wrongly spent; money spent on luxuries—on scents, sounds and sights—which directly or indirectly pass on to others is rightly spent. The limit of luxury is the power of sharing."
The Service of God, Canon Barnett.
"All that depends on individual choice—our recreations, our expenditure—can be brought to one test, which we are generally able to apply: Does this or that help me to do my work more effectively? To us most literally, even if the confession overwhelms us with shame, whatsoever is not of faith is sin."
Bishop Westcott.
"Imitate a little child.... While you gather and use this world's goods with one hand, always let your other be fast in your Heavenly Father's hand, and look round from time to time, and make sure that He is satisfied."
S. Francis de Sales.
DECEMBER 19
"I will take heart to lay down what I hold to be a fundamental rule, that, while we endeavour to gain the largest and keenest power of appreciating all that is noblest in nature and art and literature, we must seek to live on as little as will support the full vigour of our life and work. The standard cannot be fixed. It will necessarily vary, within certain limits, according to the nature and office of each man. But generally we shall strive diligently to suppress all wants which do not tend through their satisfaction to create a nobler type of manhood, and individually we shall recognise no wants which do not express what is required for the due cultivation of our own powers and the fulfilment of that which we owe to others. We shall guard ourselves against the temptations of artificial wants which the ingenuity of producers offers in seductive forms. We shall refuse to admit that the caprice of fashion represents any valuable element in our constitution, or calls into play any faculties which would otherwise be unused, or encourages industry. On the contrary, we shall see in the dignity and changelessness of Eastern dress a typical condemnation of our restless inconstancy. We shall perceive, and act as perceiving, that the passion for novelty is morally and materially wasteful: that it distracts and confuses our power of appreciating true beauty: that it tends to the constant displacement of labour: that it produces instability both in the manufacture and in the sale of goods to the detriment of economy. We shall, to sum up all in one master-principle, estimate value and costs in terms of life, as Mr. Ruskin has taught us; and, accepting this principle, we shall seek nothing of which the cost to the producer so measured exceeds the gain to ourselves."
Christian Social Union Addresses, Bishop Westcott.
DECEMBER 20
"If money be not thy servant, it will be thy master. The covetous man cannot so properly be said to possess wealth, as that wealth may be said to possess him."
Bacon.
"The covetous man is like the camel, with a great haunch on his back; heaven's gate must be made higher and broader, or he will hardly get in."
Adams.
"Who shuts his hand hath lost his gold,
Who opens it hath it twice told."
George Herbert.
"Wealth in every form, material, intellectual, moral, has to be administered for the common good. God only can say of any possession 'My own.'"
Bishop Westcott.
DECEMBER 21
"How the sting of poverty, or small means, is gone when one keeps house for one's own comfort, and not for the comfort of one's neighbours."
Dinah Maria Muloch.
"I wish that more of us had the courage to be poor; that the world had not gone mad after fashion and display; but so it is, and the blessings we might have are lost in the effort to get those which lie outside the possible."
Alice Carey.
"To have what we want is riches; but to be able to do without is power."
George MacDonald.
DECEMBER 22
"The truest hospitality is shown not in the effort to entertain, but in the depth of welcome. What a guest loves to come for, and come again, is not the meal, but those who sit at the meal. If we remembered this, more homes would be habitually thrown open to win the benedictions upon hospitality. It is our ceremony, not our poverty, it is self-consciousness oftener than inability to be agreeable that makes us willing to live cloistered. Seldom is it that pleasantest homes to visit are the richest. The real compliment is not to apologise for the simple fare. That means trust, and trust is better than fried oysters."
W. C. Gannett.
"Hospitality must be for service, and not for show, or it pulls down the host."
Emerson.
DECEMBER 23
"I pray you, O excellent wife, not to cumber yourself and me to get a rich dinner for this man or this woman who has alighted at our gate, nor a bedchamber made ready at too great a cost. These things, if they are curious in, they can get for a dollar at any village. But let this stranger, if he will, in your looks, in your accent and behaviour, read in your heart and earnestness, your thought and will, which he cannot buy at any price in any village or city, and which he may well travel fifty miles and dine sparely and sleep hard in order to behold. Certainly, let the board be spread and let the bed be dressed for the traveller; but let not the emphasis of hospitality lie in these things. Honour to the house where they are simple to the verge of hardship, so that there the intellect is awake and reads the laws of the universe."
Emerson.
"I should count myself fortunate if my home were remembered for some inspiring quality of faith, charity and aspiring intelligence."
Hamilton W. Mabie.
DECEMBER 24
A CHRISTMAS CAROL
"It chanced upon the merry, merry Christmas Eve,
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 rounds, 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!
Tho' 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 angels singing.'"
Charles Kingsley.
DECEMBER 25
"And now once more comes Christmas Day. Once more, borne abroad on the words of simple-minded shepherds, runs the story. God and man have met, in visible, actual union, in a life which is both human and divine.... Lift up yourselves to the great meaning of the Day, and dare to think of your Humanity as something so sublimely precious that it is worthy of being made an offering to God. Count it a privilege to make that offering as complete as possible, keeping nothing back, and then go out to the pleasures and duties of your life, having been truly born anew into His Divinity, as He was born into our Humanity, on Christmas Day."
Phillips Brooks.
"Let not the hearts, whose sorrow cannot call
This Christmas merry, slight the festival;
Let us be merry that may merry be,
But let us not forget that many mourn;
The smiling Baby came to give us glee,
But for the weepers was the Saviour born."
Coleridge.
DECEMBER 26
"But Christmas is not only the mile-mark of another year, moving us to thoughts of self-examination: it is a season, from all its associations, whether domestic or religious, suggesting thoughts of joy. A man dissatisfied with his endeavours is a man tempted to sadness. And in the midst of the winter, when his life runs lowest and he is reminded of the empty chairs of his beloved, it is well he should be condemned to this fashion of the smiling face. Noble disappointment, noble self-denial, are not to be admired, not even to be pardoned, if they bring bitterness. It is one thing to enter the kingdom of heaven maimed; another to maim yourself and stay without. And the kingdom of heaven is of the childlike, of those who are easy to please, who love and who give pleasure."
Across the Plains, R. L. Stevenson.
DECEMBER 27
"To grow old is more difficult than to die, because to renounce a good once and for all, costs less than to renew the sacrifice day by day and in detail. To bear with one's own decay, to accept one's own lessening capacity, is a harder and rarer virtue than to face death. There is a halo round tragic and premature death; there is but a long sadness in declining strength. But look closer: so studied, a resigned and religious old age will often move us more than the heroic ardour of young years. The maturity of the soul is worth more than the first brilliance of its faculties, or the plenitude of its strength, and the eternal in us can but profit from all the ravages made by time. There is comfort in this thought."
Amiel's Journal.
"To know how to grow old is the master-work of wisdom, and one of the most difficult chapters in the great art of living."
Amiel's Journal.
DECEMBER 28
"We must not take the faults of our youth into our old age; for old age brings with it its own faults."
Goethe.
"It is only to the finest natures that age gives an added beauty and distinction; for the most persistent self has then worked its way to the surface, having modified the expression, and to some extent, the features, to its own likeness."
Mathilde Blind.
"The most beautiful existence, it seems to me, would be that of a river which should get through all its rapids and waterfalls not far from its rising, and should then in its widening course form a succession of rich valleys, and in each of them a lake equally but diversely beautiful, to end, after the plains of age were past, in the ocean where all that is weary and heavy-laden comes to seek for rest."
Amiel's Journal.
The Love and Grace and Tenderness of Life
DECEMBER 29
"Neither toil, nor the end of toil in oneself or in the world, is all vanity, in spite of the preacher; but there is enough vanity in both to make one sit loose to them. What seems to grow fairer to me as life goes by is the love and grace and tenderness of it; not its wit and cleverness and grandeur of knowledge—grand as knowledge is—but just the laughter of little children and the friendship of friends, the cosy talk by the fireside, the sight of flowers and the sound of music."
J. R. Green.
"Life is sweet, brother.... There's night and day, brother, both sweet things; sun, moon and stars, brother, all sweet things; there's likewise the wind on the heath. Life is very sweet, brother; who would wish to die?"
Borrow.
DECEMBER 30
"Be patient still; suffer us yet a while longer; with our broken purposes of good, with our idle endeavours against evil, suffer us a while longer to endure, and (if it may be) help us to do better. Bless to us our extraordinary mercies; if the day come when these must be taken, brace us to play the man under affliction. Be with our friends; be with ourselves. Go with each of us to rest; if any dream, be their dreams quiet; if any awake, temper to them the dark hours of watching; and when the day returns, return to us our sun and comforter, and call us up with morning faces and with morning hearts—eager to labour—eager to be happy, if happiness shall be our portion—and if the day be marked for sorrow, strong to endure it."
Vailima Prayers, R. L. Stevenson.
DECEMBER 31
"Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky
The flying cloud, the frosty light:
The year is dying in the night;
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.
"Ring out the old, ring in the new,
Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.
"Ring out the grief that saps the mind,
For those that here we see no more;
Ring out the feud of rich and poor,
Ring in redress to all mankind.
"Ring out a slowly dying cause,
And ancient forms of party strife;
Ring in the nobler modes of life,
With sweeter manners, purer laws.
"Ring out the want, the care, the sin,
The faithless coldness of the times;
Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes,
But ring the fuller minstrel in.
"Ring out false pride in place and blood,
The civic slander and the spite;
Ring in the love of truth and right,
Ring in the common love of good.
"Ring out old shapes of foul disease;
Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;
Ring out the thousand wars of old,
Ring in the thousand years of peace.
"Ring in the valiant man and free,
The larger heart, the kindlier hand;
Ring out the darkness of the land,
Ring in the Christ that is to be."