September 13

“To take up the Cross of Christ is no great action done once for all; it consists in the continual practice of small duties which are distasteful to us.”

J. H. NEWMAN

“Every morning, receive thine own special cross from the hands of thy heavenly Father.”

SCUPOLI

“If thou bearest thy cross willingly, it will bear thee. If thou bearest it unwillingly, thou increasest thy load, and yet thou must bear it.”

THOMAS à KEMPIS

“Thou hast not always promised me rest from my burden, but Thou hast always offered me rest in my burden.”

MATHESON

September 12

“I cannot mount to heaven beneath this ban;
Can Christian hope survive so far below
The level of the happiness of man?
Can angels’ wings in these dark waters grow?
A spirit voice replied, ‘From bearing right
Our sorest burthens, comes fresh strength to bear;
And so we rise again towards the light,
And quit the sunless depths for upper air.
Meek patience is as diver’s breath to all
Who sink in sorrow’s sea, and many a ray
Comes gleaming downward from the source of day,
To guide us re-ascending from our fall,
The rocks have bruised thee sore, but angels’ wings
Grow best from bruises, hope from anguish springs.’”

CHARLES TURNER

“We need as much the cross we bear
As air we breathe, as light we see;
It draws us to Thy side in prayer,
It binds us to our strength in Thee.”

A. L. WARING

September 11

“Thou art my rock and my fortress; therefore for Thy name’s sake lead me, and guide me.”

PSALM xxxi 3

“Lead, kindly light, amid the encircling gloom,
Lead Thou me on;
The night is dark, and I am far from home,
Lead Thou me on.
Keep Thou my feet, I do not ask to see
The distant scene, one step enough for me.”

J. H. NEWMAN

“The crosses which we make for ourselves by our over-anxiety as to the future are not heaven-sent crosses. We tempt God by our false wisdom, seeking to forestall His arrangements, and struggling to supplement His providence by our own provisions. The fruit of our wisdom is always bitter. God suffers it to be so that we may be discomfited when we forsake His fatherly guidance. The future is not ours; we may never have a future; or if it comes, it may be wholly different from all we foresaw.”

Fénélon

September 10

“I sorrowed that the golden day was dead,
Its light no more the country-side adorning;
But whilst I grieved, behold the east grew red
With Morning.

“I sighed that merry Spring was forced to go,
And doff the wreaths that did so well become her;
But whilst I murmured at her absence – lo
‘Twas summer.

I mourned because the daffodils were killed
By burning skies that scorched my early posies;
But while for these I pined, my hands were filled

With roses.

“Half broken-hearted I bewailed the end
Of friendship, than which none had once seemed nearer;
But whilst I wept I found a closer friend
And dearer.

“Thus I learned old pleasures are estranged,
Only that something better may be given –
Until, at last, we find this earth exchanged
For Heaven.”

September 9

“God brings good out of evil, and sometimes what we call evil is not so evil in reality as what we in our ignorance would put in its place. These perplexities cannot always be explained; but many of them can and are. Many times what we fancied was hurtful has been of the greatest service; what we flinched from has made us happier; what we dreaded has come and gone and left a blessing behind it. Many a time what we longed for has been denied us, and the denial has made us happier than if we had obtained it. He must be very short-sighted indeed who cannot see in his own life many instances of his having been led by paths that he did not know.”

Bishop TEMPLE

“I see the wrong that round me lies,
I feel the guilt within;
I hear with groan and travail-cries
The world confess its sin.

“Yet, in the maddening maze of things,
And tossed by storm and flood,
To one fixed stake my spirit clings,
I know that God is good.

“The wrong that pains my soul below
I dare not throne above;
I know not of His hate – I know
His goodness and His love.”

WHITTIER

September 8

“Know well, my soul, God’s hand controls
Whate’er thou fearest;
Round him in calmest music rolls
Whate’er thou hearest.

“What to thee is shadow, to Him is day,
And the end He knoweth,
And not on a blind and aimless way
The spirit goeth.”

WHITTIER

“We are all of us like the weavers of the Gobelins, who, following out the pattern of a well-known artist, endeavour to match the threads of divers colours on the wrong side of the woof, and do not see the result of their labours. It is only when the texture is complete that they can admire at their ease those lovely flowers and figures, those splendid pictures, worthy of the palaces of kings. So it is with us. We work, we suffer, and we see neither the end nor the fruit. But God sees it, and when He releases us from our task, He will disclose to our wandering gaze what He, the great artist, everywhere present and invisible, has woven out of those toils that now seem so sterile, and He will then deign to hang up, in his palace of gold, the flimsy web that we have spun.”

FREDERIC OZONAN

September 7

“The deliverance of the soul from all useless and selfish and unquiet cares, brings to it an unspeakable peace and freedom; this is true simplicity. This state of entire resignation and perpetual acquiescence produces true liberty; and this liberty brings perfect simplicity. The soul which knows no self-seeking, no interested ends, is thoroughly candid; it goes straight forward without hindrance; its path opens daily more and more to ‘perfect day’, in proportion as its self-renunciation and its self-forgetfulness increase; and its peace, amid whatever troubles beset it, will be as boundless as the depths of the sea.”

Fénélon

“I think not of to-morrow,
Its trial or its task;
But still, with child-like spirit,
For present mercies ask.
With each returning morning,
I cast old things away;
Life’s journey lies before me –
My prayer is for to-day.”

September 6

“Our life is determined for us, and it makes the mind very free when we give up wishing, and only think of bearing what is laid upon us and doing what is given us to do.”

GEORGE ELIOT [pen-name of Mary Ann Evans]

“The one secret of life and development is not to devise and plan, but to fall in with the forces at work – to do every moment’s duty aright – that being the part allotted to us; and let come – not what will, for there is no such thing – but what the Eternal Thought wills for each of us, has intended for each of us from the first. If men would but believe that they are in process of creation, and consent to be made – let the Maker handle them as the potter his clay, yielding themselves to respondent motion and submissive hopeful action with the turining of His wheel, they would ere long find themsxelves able to welcome every pressure of that Hand on them, even when it was felt in pain, and sometimes not only to believe but to recognise the Divine end in view, the bringing of a son into glory.”

G. MACDONALD

“We mustn’t be in a hurry to fix and choose our own lot, we must wait to be guided.”

GEORGE ELIOT [pen-name of Mary Ann Evans]

September 5

“If we are really, and always, and equally ready to do whatsoever the King appoints, all the trials and vexations, arising from any change in His appointments, great or small, simply do not exist. If He appoints me to work there, shall I lament that I am not to work here? If He appoints me to wait indoors to-day, am I to be annoyed because I am not to work out of doors? If I meant to write His messages this morning, shall I grumble because He sends interrupting visitors, rich or poor, to whom I am to speak them, or ‘show kindness’ for His sake, or at least obey His command, ‘Be courteous’? If all my members are really at His disposal, why should I be put out if to-day’s appointment is some simple work for my hands or errand for my feet, instead of some seemingly more important doing of head or tongue?”

F. R. HAVERGAL

“The little worries which we meet each day
May lie as stumbling blocks across our way,
Or we may make them stepping-stones to be
Of grace, O Lord, to Thee.”

A. E. HAMILTON

September 4

“’There is nothing in the drudgery og domestic duties to soften’ – you quote that. No, but a great deal to strengthen with the sense of duty done, self-control, and power. Besides, you cannot calculate how much corroding dust is kept off, - how much of disconsolate dull despondency is hindered. Daily use is not the jeweller’s mercurial polish, but it will keep your little silver pencil from tarnishing.”

STOPFORD BROOKE

“Teach me, my God and King,
In all things thee to see,
And what I do in anything
To do it as for Thee.

“All may of Thee partake,
Nothing can be so mean
Which with this tincture, ‘for Thy sake’,
Will not grow bright and clean.

“A servant with this clause
Makes drudgery divine;
Who sweeps a room as for Thy laws
Makes that and the action fine.

“This is the famous stone
That turneth all to gold;
For that which God doth touch and own
Cannot for less be told.”

GEORGE HERBERT

September 3

“May it not be a comfort to those of us who feel we have not the mental or spiritual power that others have, to notice that the living sacrifice mentioned in Rom. xii I, is our ‘bodies’? Of course, that includes the mental power, but does it not also include the loving, sympathising glance, the kind, encouraging word, the ready errand for another, the work of our hands, opportunities for all of which come oftener in the day than for the mental power we are oftenb tempted to envy? May we be enabled to offer willingly that which we have.”

“I ask thee for a thoughtful love,
Through constant watching wise,
To meet the glad with joyful smiles,
And wipe the weeping eyes,
A heart at leisure from itself,
To soothe and sympathise.”

A. L. WARING

September 2

“An occasional effort even of all ordinary holiness may accomplish great acts of sacrifice, or bear severe pressure of unwanted trial, especially if it be the subject of observation. But constant discipline in unnoticed ways, and the spirit’s silent unselfishness, becoming the hidden habit of life, give to it its true saintly beauty; and this is the result of care and lowly love in little things. Perfection is attained most readily by this constancy of religious faithfulness in all minor details of life, consecrating the daily efforts of self-forgetting love.”

T. T. CARTER

“Whoso neglects a thing which he suspects he ought to do, because it seems to him too small a thing, is deceiving himself; it is not too little but too great for him, that he doeth it not.”

E. B. PUSEY

“The best perfection of a religious man is to do common things in a perfect manner. A constant fidelity in small things is a great and heroic virtue.”

ST. BUONAVENTURA

September 1

“We complain of the slow, dull life we are forced to lead, of our humble sphere of action, of our low position in the scale of society, of our having no room to make ourselves known, of our wasted energies, of our years of patience. So do we say that we have no Father who is directing our life; so do we say that God has forgotten us; so do we boldly judge what life is best for us; and so by our complaining do we lose the use and profit of the quiet years. Oh, men of little faith! Because you are not sent out yet unto your labour, do you think God has ceased to remember you? Because you are forced to be outwardly inactive, do you think you, also, may not be, in your years of quiet, ‘about your father’s business’? . . . It is a period given to us in which to mature ourselves for the work which God will give us to do.”

STOPFORD BROOKE

“We are too fond of our own will. We want to be doing what we fancy mighty things; but the great point is, to do small things, when called to them, in a right spirit.”

R. CECIL

August 31

“Don’t object that your duties are so insignificant; they are to be reckoned of infinite significance, and alone important to you. Were it but the more perfect regulation of your apartments, the sorting away of your clothes and trinkets, the arranging of your papers, - ‘Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might’, and all thy worth and constancy. Much more, if your duties are of evidently higher, wider scope; if you have brothers, sisters, a father, a mother, weigh earnestly what claim does lie upon you, on behalf of each, and consider it as the one thing needful, to pay them more and more honestly and nobly what you owe. What matter how miserable one is, if one can do that? That is the sure and steady disconnection and extinction of whatsoever miseries one has in this world.”

CARLYLE

“Be useful where thou livest, that they may
Both want and wish thy pleasing presence still.
. . . . . . Find out men’s wants and will,
And meet them there. All worldly joys go less
To the one joy of doing kindnesses.”

GEORGE HERBERT

August 30

“That aptitude for teaching which God has bestowed upon a woman may perish through want of exercise; it may be called forth by exercise. It may be turned into vanity and display; it may be redeemed to the highest and yet the lowliest uses. It may be overlaid with mere formal instruction; it may be quickened and directed by honest practical education. It may be regarded as a special gift which exalts individuals of the sex; it may be cultivated as a common gift of which all have some measure, and of which no one is to boast. It may be left to the accidents and impulses of the world; it may be carefully watched over and cherished as something exceedingly precious, which neither its possessors nor society can afford to waste.”

F. D. MAURICE

“He is the best teacher of others who is best taught himself; that which we know and love we cannot but communicate.”

Dr ARNOLD

“In life, as in art, and as in mechanics, the only profitable teaching is the teaching by example.”

FROUDE

August 29

“The tiniest bits of opinion sown in the minds of children in private life, afterwards issue forth to the world and become a public opinion; for nations are gathered out of nurseries, and they who hold the leading strings of children may even exercise a greater power than those who hold the reins of government.”

“He made it a rule (from which he never departed), not to take a child suspected of a fault, at unawares, by sudden question or hasty accusation, the stronger thus taking an unfair advantage of the weaker and defenceless creature, who, in the mere confusion of the moment, might be tempted to deny or equivocate. . . .
“He was careful, too, not to confuse or ‘confound’ his children by a multiplicity of small rules. Certain broad distinct laws of conduct were laid down. ‘It is difficult enough to keep the Ten Commandments,’ he would say, ‘without making an eleventh in every direction.’ This, combined with his equable rule, gave them a sense of utter confidence and perfect freedom with him. They knew what they were about, and where to find him, for he had no ‘moods’ with them, while with theirs he could yet sympathise and be patient.”

From Life of Charles Kingsley

August 28

“All true guidance consists in calling up from within the souls of men the powers that are living and working in the secret abysses of those souls.”

Bishop TEMPLE

“What is wanted is not to suggest a course of action, but a habit of thought, which will modify not one or two actions only, but all actions which come within the scope of that thought.”

HELPS

“From the life of Christ he had learnt this great principle of education: to make men recognise their own spiritual capabilities by throwing himself upon those capabilities.”

From Life of F. W. Robertson

“It is the way, the way of victory, the way of love, the faith that conquers the world, - that power of a pure heart to see the best, and exercise faith beyond experience.”

ANNIE KEARY

August 27

“He pointed out that while in truth those who are in authority have a solemn duty to perform in correcting evil, still it is equally a duty to administer all such corrections so lovingly, and with so simple a desire for God’s glory and the real good of the person corrected, as to take away the sting of reproof. He went so far as to say that it is better to withhold a deserved rebuke than to administer it ungraciously, and that judicious silence was far preferable to the truth roughly told. ‘You will catch more flies with a spoonful of honey than with a whole barrel of vinegar’, he used to say.”

From Life of S. Francis de Sales

“Even a punishment may become unjust unless it is administered in the spirit of love.”

JEAN INGELOW

“’To speak the truth in love’, to reprove wisely and tenderly, is a lesson which it may take a lifetime to learn; but it must be striven after if we would keep the balance true between wisdom and feeling. Let us not have sympathy at the expense of sound practical common sense, or we shall do more harm than good.”

ELLICE HOPKINS

August 26

“Find fault, if you must find fault, in private if possible; and some time after the offence rather than at the time. The blamed are less inclined to resist when they are blamed without witnesses; both parties are calmer, and the accused party is struck with the forbearance of the accuser, who has seen the fault, and watched for a private and proper time for mentioning it.”

SYDNEY SMITH

“There is more dignity and hope of success in a simple expression of disapprobation on the discovery of a fault, accompanied by a declaration that all further explanation is reserved for a calmer moment, than in any heated reprimands.”

Mdme. NECKER DE SAUSSURE

“He had the rare art of giving comfort, advice, and even blame with such humble gentleness, such entire freedom from any assumption of superiority, that it could not wound the sorest heart, nor irritate even the most rebellious spirit.”

From Life of F. W. Robertson.

August 25

“Remember, in speaking to any one you wish to help, that the more earnest and unconscious of self you are, the better you will help them. Probably the words you think most telling will affect them least, while those you think nothing of, God will use for their good. Leave all results with God. You are not always digging up the seeds in your garden to see how they are growing. Trust all to God, and He will bless your work. . . .
“Remember, God always works, very slowly and very surely; the bud is formed slowly, opens slowly. We must work as God works, not with the great strides self-love would like to work with.”

H. MONSELL

“A man is relieved and gay when he has put his heart into his work and done his best; but what he has said or done otherwise shall give him no peace.”

EMERSON

“All we do which is good or permanent is done in us or through us, consciously or unconsciously, by a divine Spirit, with Whom, if we work cheerfully and obediently, the work thrives, if proudly and resistingly, it is marred.”

F. D. MAURICE

August 24

“There is a rest and a heaven, which souls weary of this earth may find, but it is discovered best in the world’s midst, seeking its good, and doing His will who lived and died to save it.”

Dr. J. KER

“The rewards of duty are not rest from labour, but greater tasks.”

FOLLEN

“For this of old is sure,
That change of toil is toil’s sufficient cure.”

LEWIS MORRIS

“To the giver shall be given;
If thou would’st walk in light
Make other spirits bright;
Who, seeking for himself alone, ever entered heaven?
In blessing we are blest,
In labour find our rest;
If we bend not to the world’s work, heart and hand and brain,
We have lived our life in vain.”

C. SEYMOUR

August 23

“The woman singeth at her spinning wheel
A pleasant chant, ballad, or barcarole;
She thinketh of her song, upon the whole,
Far more than of her flax; and yet the reel
Is full, and artfully her fingers feel
With quick adjustment, provident control,
The lines, too subtly twisted to unroll,
Out to a perfect thread. I hence appeal
To the dear Christian Church – that we may do
Our Father’s business in these temples mirk,
Thus swift and steadfast, thus intent and strong;
While thus, apart from toil, our souls pursue
Some high, calm, spheric tune, and prove our work
The better for the sweetness of our song.”

ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING

“There are, in this loud stunning tide
Of human care and crime,
With whom the melodies abide
Of th’ everlasting clime;
Who carry music in their heart
Through dusky lane and wrangling mart,
And ply their daily task with busier feet
Because their hearts some holy strain repeat.”

KEBLE

August 22

“Leave results to God.”

ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING

“Like many other reformers, she at first hoped for a more quick return for her labours; but as the years went on, she learned, as they have learned, that God had greater designs in view than any which came within their human calculations.”

From Life of Catherine of Siena

“Quiet, patient work often brings startling results. The heart is melted at last and the conscience touched.”

Bishop WALSHAM HOW

August 21

On working a Guild. “It is a matter in which we can only pray for wisdom to deal with individual cases; but it has often seemed to me that a good rule to adopt would be ‘Love them, and pray for them, and leave them alone as much as possible.’ – To be ever on the watch for results is not good. It is like pulling up the growing plant to examine its progress. It is well to remember that though ‘Duties are ours – results are God’s’”

“I am glad to think
I am not bound to make the world go right;
But only to discover and to do,
With cheerful heart, the work that God appoints.
I will trust in Him,
That He can hold His own; and I will take
His will, above the work He sendeth me,
To be my chiefest good.”

JEAN INGELOW

"Much of the ability to do good is in the disposition to do it. The very breathing of a benevolent heart is a species of doing good.”

HARVEY

August 20

“One lesson, Nature, let me learn of thee,
One lesson which in every wind is blown,
One lesson of two duties kept at one,
Though the loud world proclaim their enmity –

Of toil unsevered from tranquillity!
Of labour, that in lasting fruit outgrows
Far noisier schemes, accomplished in repose,
Too great for haste, too high for rivalry!

Yes, while on earth a thousand discords ring,
Man’s fitful uproar mingling with his toil,
Still do thy quiet ministers move on,

Their glorious tasks in silence perfecting;
Still working, blaming still our vain turmoil,
Labours that shall not fail, when man is gone.”

MATTHEW ARNOLD

“And work all silently
And simply . . . as God does it all;
Distort our nature never for our work,
Nor count our right hands stronger for being hoofs,
The man most man with tend’rest human hands
Works best for Man – as God in Nazareth.”

ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING

August 19

“In your occupations try to possess your soul in peace. It is not a good plan to be in haste to perform any action that it may be the sooner over. On the contrary, you should accustom yourself to do whatever you have to do with tranquillity, in order that you may retain the possession of yourself and of settled peace.”

Madame GUYON

“By putting off things beyond their proper times, one duty treads upon the heels of another, and all duties are felt as irksome obligations, - a yoke beneath which we fret and lose our peace. In most cases the consequence of this is, that we have no time to do the work as it ought to be done. It is therefore done precipitately, with eagerness, with a greater desire simply to get it done than to do it well, and with very little thought of God throughout.”

F. W. FABER

“A pure, single, stable spirit is not distracted though it may be employed in many works; for that it doeth all to the honour of God, and being at rest within, seeketh not itself in anything it doth.”

THOMAS à KEMPIS

August 18

“This spirit of ‘Restful Dependence’ is an inward rest, which in most cases is brought out of great effort, great struggling. . . . It is a rest which enables us to work, not apart from God, but in harmony with God. and so there is no waste of force as there is when we work in merely the natural way. . . . We have rushed from place to place, feeling that something must be done, and that we must go and do it ourselves, that very moment! And afterwards we found that if only we had knelt down and committed it to God, the work would have been far better done. We should have had God with us next day, or whenever God’s time had come, whereas on that day, when we ran about so quickly, we were working by ourselves, and of course the Finite cannot do as much as the Infinite; man cannot accomplish as much as God. Work done out of harmony with God comes to nothing, but work done in a rightful spirit, drinking in of the Love of God, is eternal work. It is divine work, though done by human instrumentality, therefore it shall last when heaven and earth shall pass away.”

Bishop WILKINSON

“However she appears before me in these bright working years of her life, it is always with the same gentle manners and movements, never too hurried or too important to attend to other people’s affairs, however tedious or trivial, or to give a helping hand when it was wanted.”

From Life of Annie Keary

August 17

“In quietness and in confidence shall be your strength.”

ISAIAH XXX 15

“Casting all your care upon Him; for He careth for you.”

I PETER V 7

“A great many people imagine that the pressure of burden and care is wholesome; to take life hard is considered praiseworthy. It is looked upon as a kind of self-indulgence to take life easy. Now there is no doubt that a spirit of intensity and care, up to a certain point, is required for a wholesome condition of mind. But a care that brings burdens, that takes away light, that deprives us of happiness, has passed beyond the wholesome line. Now if this spirit of care did any good or led to any desirable result, there would be some justifying reason for it. But instead of that it does harm; it is not only useless, it is mischievous. There are two atmospheres in which you may work, the atmosphere of trust and the atmosphere of worry. The atmosphere of trust is a religious atmosphere, and the atmosphere of worry is a worldly atmosphere.”

August 16

“Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might.”

SOLOMON

“I should never have made my success in life if I had not bestowed upon the least thing I have ever undertaken the same attention and care that I have bestowed upon the greatest.”

C. DICKENS

“I hate to see a thing done by halves; if it be right, do it boldly; if it be wrong, leave it undone.”

GILPIN

“What shall I do to gain eternal life?
Discharge aright
The simple dues with which each day is rife –

Yea, with thy might.

Ere perfect scheme of action thou devise
Will life be fled;
While he who ever acts as conscience cries
Shall live, tho’ dead.”

SCHILLER

August 15

“The longer I live, the more I am certain that the great difference between men, between the feeble and the powerful, the great and the insignificant, is energy, invincible determination. A purpose once fixed, then death or victory. That quality which will do anything that can be done in this world.”

BUXTON

“Don’t speak of what you are going to do. Do it.”

W. H. HUNT

“Try thyself inwardly till thou findest the highest thing thou art capable of doing, faculties and outward circumstances being both duly considered, and then do it.”

J. S. MILL

August 14

“Whoever determines to seek the cure of the world’s woes in the simple endeavours to follow the life and teaching of Christ, believing Him to be the living link between God and man, must be content to be considered hopelessly orthodox and poky and behind the age by aspiring young spirits, and must regard ‘the reproach of Christ’ as a very small fragment of the crown of thorns. I rejoice more and more every day that I am called to live in close fellowship with the poor and the ignorant, and to contribute ever so little to the feeding of the secret springs from which the regenerative forces of society proceed. Those springs are fed by a million drops, and perhaps a single individual life can only contribute one drop; but it is in this slow obscure way, I believe, that the world is to be renewed. Only let us be sure that we give our drop. Mine might have been much fuller, if I had better used my opportunities.”

E. S. A.

“Let us be content in work
To do the thing we can, and not presume
To fret because it’s little.”

ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING

August 13

“And then, lastly, the rich men, rich in character, must know that no man can give character to other men without self-sacrifice. Labour, personal effort, personal intercourse with the poor, these must come in before the work can be done. You cannot do your duty to the poor by a society, your life must touch their life. You try to work solely by a society, and what does it come to? Is it not the old story of the book of Samuel? The traveller appeals to you, and you spare to take of your own thought and time and sympathy to give to the wayfaring man that is come to you. They are too precious, you say. ‘There is thought, time, sympathy, down at the charity bureau to which I have a right by virtue of a contribution I have made, go down and get a ticket’s worth of that.’

“The poor are always with us. The wayfarers come to us continually, and they do not come by chance. God sends them. And as they come with their white faces and their poor shuffling feet, they are our judges. Not merely by whether we give, but by how we give, and by what we give, they judge us. One man sends them entirely away. Another drops a little easy, careless, unconscientious money into their hands. Another man washes and clothes. Another man teaches them lessons. Thank God there are some men and women here and there, full of the power of the Gospel, who cannot rest satisfied till they have opened their very hearts, and given the poor wayfaring men the only thing which really is their own, themselves, their faith, their energy, their hope in God. Of such true charity-givers, may He who gave Himself for us increase the multitude among us every day.”

PHILLIPS BROOKS

August 12

“The first thing that men must do in order that they may really, thoroughly relieve the poor, is to profoundly recognise that there can be no complete and permanent relief, until not merely men who have money shall have given it to men who have no money, but until men who have character shall have given it to men who are deficient in that last and only real possession. Not till you make men self-reliant, intelligent, and fond of struggle, fonder of struggle than of mere help – not till then have you relieved poverty. If you could give every poor man in this town of ours a house, a wardrobe, and a balance in the bank tomorrow, do you think there would not be poor men and rich men here among us still? There must be, so long as there are some men with the spirit of independence, the light of intelligence, and the love of struggle; and other men who have none of those things, which make the only true riches of a manly man. And the second thing is this, the rich men of our community must be truly rich themselves, or they can have nothing worth giving to the poor, nothing with which they can permanently help their poorer brethren. Only a class of men independent, intelligent, and glorying in struggle themselves, can really send independence, intelligence, and the dignity of struggle, down through a whole city’s life. This is the reason why your selfish and idle rich man, who has neither of these great human properties, does nothing for the permanent help of poverty. The money which he gives is no symbol. It means nothing. O, let us be sure that the first necessity for giving the poor man character is that the rich man should have character to give him.

August 11

“This is true philanthropy, that buries not its gold in ostentatious charity, but builds its hospital in the human heart.”

HARLEY

“In his day men gave themselves, not a guinea, when an appeal was made. Love had not then found out that it could buy itself off for an annual subscription; it was mad enough to toil and suffer in the heat of the day. Only spiritual insolvents think of compounding with God for a guinea when they owe him their whole life.”

Dr. PARKER

“I am more and more convinced that the best of institutions must be a poor apology for all of us doing our duty to our neighbour as he comes along; though our diseased state needs them – as we needed Christ to die.”

E. B. BAYLY

August 10

“Charity too is a frightful evil – not real charity but subscription charity. Every human being has scope enough for all the money and all the effort he can spare in behalf of misfortunes which are known to himself personally, or to members of his home-circle. The gigantic subscription lists which are vaunted as signs of our benevolence, are monuments of our indifference.
. . . . . . . . . . .
“I am beginning seriously to believe that all bodily aid to the poor is a mistake, and that the real thing is to let themselves straight; whereas by giving alms you keep them permanently crooked. Build school-houses, pay teachers, give prizes, frame workmen’s clubs, help them to hep themselves, lend them your brains; but give them no money, except what you sink in such undertakings as above.”

ED. DENISON

“He gives nothing but worthless gold
Who gives from a sense of duty.
. . . . . .
The Holy Supper is kept indeed,
In whatso we share with another’s need;
Not what we give; but what we share,
For the gift without the giver is bare;
Who gives himself with his alms feeds three,
Himself, his hungering neighbour and Me.”

LOWELL

August 9

“Speaking roughly, we might say that the characteristic difference between ancient and modern philanthropy is that the former aims at curing, while the latter aims at preventing; the former is moral, the latter intellectual as well as moral. Thus if it was the task of the early Christians to relieve disease, it is ours to use our new knowledge of sanitary laws for the prevention of disease; if it was theirs to assist the poor, it is ours to destroy the causes of pauperism; if it was the privilege of the first disciples in one emotional shock to convert a sinner from darkness to light by the mere mention of the name of Jesus, it is our less startling duty to remove from our poorer brethren the irresistible temptations to crime, taught by sad experience, that the want of food frequently means the want of spiritual as well as bodily strength, and the absence of education means the presence of brutality, and the absence of the physical decencies of life means the presence of moral indecency; and, in a word, that man’s unpitied misery means Satan’s opportunity.”

E. A. ABBOTT

“Sanitary reform in itself may mean nothing more than better drainage, fresher air, freer light, more abundant water; to the ‘Governor among the nations’ it means lessened impossibility that men should live to Him.”

J. C. BROWN, from Ethics of George Eliot

August 8

“In all this there was no excitement, no predilection for one class of work above another; no enthusiasm for any one-sided object; but an humble, profound, and most religious conscientiousness that work is the appointed calling of man on earth, the end for which his various faculties were given, the element in which his nature is ordained to develop itself, and in which his progressive advance towards Heaven is to lie. . . . He felt every moment that he was doing or was not doing God’s work. He threw into every act, every labour, the consciousness of the divine mission given to all Christians by the Master.”

From Life of Dr Arnold

“In him the sight of evil, and the endeavour to remove it, were hardly ever disjoined.”

From Life of Dr Arnold

“For a brave man to know that an evil is, is simply to know that it has to be vanquished.”

FAIRBAIRN

August 7

“There is a perennial nobleness, and even sacredness in work.”

“Blessed is he who has found his work; let him ask no other blessedness.”

“Labour is life; from the inmost heart of the worker rises his God-given force, the sacred, celestial, Life-essence breathed into him by almighty God; from his inmost heart awakens him to all nobleness, to all knowledge, ‘self-knowledge’, and much else, so soon as work fitly begins.”

“Work is of a religious nature; work is of a brave nature; which it is the aim of all religion to be.
“All true work is sacred; in all true work, were it but true hand-labour, there is something of divineness.”

CARLYLE

August 6

“The loss, if loss there be, is mine,
And yet not mine if understood;
For one shall grasp and one resign,
One drink life’s rue, and one its wine,
And God shall make the balance good.

“O power to do! O baffled will!
O prayer and action! ye are one;
Who may not strive may yet fulfil
The harder task of standing still,
And good but wished with God is done!”

WHITTIER

“God doth not need
Either man’s work or His own gifts. Who best
Bear His mild yoke, they serve Him best; His state
Is kingly; thousands at His bidding speed,
And post o’er land and ocean without rest;
They also serve who only stand and wait.”

MILTON

August 5

“Freely we serve
Because we freely love.”

MILTON

“Be sure no earnest work
Of any honest creature, howbeit weak,
Imperfect, ill-adapted, fails so much,
It is not gathered as a grain of sand
To enlarge the sum of human action used
For carrying out God’s ends. No creature works
So ill, observe, that therefore he’s cashiered.
The honest man must stand and work,
The woman also – otherwise she drops
At once below the dignity of man,
Accepting serfdom. Free men freely work.
Whoever fears God, fears to sit at ease.”

ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING

August 4

“The only true secret of assisting the poor is to make them agents in bettering their own condition.”

GEORGE ELIOT [pen-name of Mary Ann Evans]

“It is essential to remember that each man has his own view of his life, and must be free to fulfil it; that in many ways he is a far better judge of it than we, as he has lived through and felt what we have only seen. Our work is rather to bring him to the point of considering, and to the spirit of judging rightly, than to consider or judge for him.

. . . . . . . . . . . .

“I am convinced that one of the evils of much that is done for the poor, springs from the want of delicacy felt and courtesy shown to them, and that we cannot beneficially help them in any spirit different to that in which we help those who are better off.”

OCTAVIA HILL

August 3

“Visit whom, when, and where you will, but let your visits be those of women to women. Consider to whom you go, to poor souls whose life, compared with yours, is a long malaise of body, soul, and spirit, and do as you would be done by; instead of reproving and fault-finding, encourage. . . .
“Do not interrupt and vex her with remedies which she does not understand, for troubles which you do not understand. But speak comfortably to her, and say, ‘I cannot feel with you, but I do feel for you.’ . . . I am convinced that the only way to help these poor women, humanly and really, is to begin by confessing that you do not know how to help them. . . . You must regulate your conduct to them and in their houses, even to the most minute particulars, by the very same rules that apply to persons of your own class. . . . Approach, then, these poor women as sisters. . . . learn lovingly and patiently, aye, and reverently . . . to understand their troubles, and by that time they will have learnt to understand your remedies.”

C. KINGSLEY, from Practical Lectures to Ladies

“We should treat the poor with the same delicacy of thoughtful respect as if they belonged to a higher class.”

Bishop WALSHAM HOW

August 2

“Bear ye one another’s burdens.”

GAL. vi. 2

“God has furnished us with constant occasions of bearing one another’s burdens. For there is no man living without his failings; no man that is so happy as never to give offence; no man without his load of trouble; no man so sufficient as never to need assistance; none so wise but the advice of others may, at some time or other, be useful for him; and, therefore, we should think ourselves under the strongest engagements to comfort, and relieve, and instruct, and admonish, and bear with one another.”

THOMAS à KEMPIS

“Now thou may’st give
The famished food, - the prisoner liberty, -
Light to the darkened mind, - to the lost soul
A place in heaven! Take thou the privilege
With solemn gratitude. Speck as thou art
Upon earth’s surface, gloriously exult
To be co-worker with the King of Heaven.”

Mrs SIGOURNEY

August 1

“It is the business of anybody who can, to set right what anybody has set wrong.”

“What, in a world where cries for help
Must ever sound till sin shall cease,
Can be a goodlier work than this, -
Griefs to assuage, joys to increase?

“To cheer the oppressed, with righteous words
And aid them with a labouring arm;
The slaves of tyrant ignorance
To rescue, and then shield from harm;

“To offer cups of water pure
From rocky truth’s coll, plenteous well,
To souls confused with feverish woes
Unspoken and unspeakable.

“O, if no partner in the pains
By which love labours for my race,
Death, that takes home and crowns the brave,
Can but insure my long disgrace.”

LYNCH

July 31

“Must all expenditure increase the material happiness of man? Are we never doing man good except when we are providing for his outward wants, or giving him an education which will enable him to get on in the world? Even in matters like food and dress, are we forced to restrain our expenditure to that which is absolutely necessary? Expenditure beyond the necessary on these things is certainly unproductive, but is it always useless? I answer that we are bound, not only to assist the poor, but also to charm our society, to shew that we have thought of others by our desire to delight them. Within certain limits, expenditure on dress is useful in producing a social ease and charm. When it is entirely neglected in a household, for instance, it produces domestic quarrels, and it really means not only carelessness of person but carelessness of pleasing.”

STOPFORD BROOKE

“What asks our father of his children save
Justice and mercy and humility,
A reasonable service of good deeds,
Pure living, tenderness to human needs,
Reverence, and trust, and prayer for light to see
The Master’s foot-prints in our daily ways?
No knotted scourge, nor sacrificial knife,
But the calm beauty of an ordered life
Whose every breathing is unworded praise.”

WHITTIER

July 30

“Expenditure on food and dress for the sake of display is vile expenditure. In itself it is coarse, for its aim is not beauty, and it is unintelligent, for it is blindly led by fashion. It is, moreover, wicked, for it is destroying wealth, and the destruction of wealth is theft. But it is allowable within certain limits, when its aim is to give a refined pleasure to others, when it is a symbol of love, sympathy, or friendship.
“The notion that mere expenditure does good to the poorer classes, or adds to the general wealth, is a fallacy. To create a demand for perishable goods is not to employ our labour usefully. The capital you spent yesterday on ugly ornaments, or on delicacies for a supper, is destroyed as a means of benefiting the working classes, or adding to the wealth of the country, as absolutely as if you had thrown it into the Thames.”

STOPFORD BROOKE

“The great industries have cheapened luxuries and stimulated the passion for them. They have destroyed the human fellowship of craftsman and chief. They have degraded labour, in a large degree, into speculation. They have deprived labour of its thoughtful freedom, and turned men into ‘hands’. They have given capital a power of dominion and growth perilous above all to its possessor.
“So it has come to pass that in our fierce conflicts we are in peril of guiding our conduct by a theory of rights, and not by a confession of duties; of losing life in a search for the means of living.
“The first words attributed to man born outside the Paradise of God are words which disclose the secret of all social evil. ‘Am I,’ said the earliest murderer, ‘my brother’s keeper?” . . . Yes; and the same answer must come as often as the thoughtless, the self-indulgent, the idle, propose the question now.”

Bishop WESTCOTT

July 29

“One’s own! what a charm there is in the words! How long it takes boy or man to find out their worth! How fast most of us hold on to them! Faster and more jealously the nearer we are to that general Home into which we can take nothing, but must go naked as we came into the world. When shall we learn that He who multiplieth possessions multiplieth troubles, and that the one single use of things which we call our own, is that they may be His who hath need of them.”

TOM HUGHES

“I am certain that the good of human life cannot lie in the possession of things which for one man to possess is for the rest to lose; but rather in things which all can possess alike, or where one man’s wealth promotes his neighbour’s.”

SPINOZA

“’This tent is mine,’ said Yussouf, ‘but no more
Than it is God’s; come in and be at peace.’”

LOWELL

July 28

“And remember, in the second place, what would happen if all the little people in the world held up their littleness like a shield before them, as you hold up yours. Grant that you are as small as you think you are, you are the average size of moral and intellectual humanity. Let all the Merozes in the land be humble like you, and where shall be the army? Only when men like you wake up and shake the paralysis of their humility away, shall we begin to see the dawn of that glorious millennium for which we sigh; which will consist not in the transformation of men into angels, nor in the coming forth of a few colossal men to be the patterns and the champions of life, but simply in each man, through the length and breadth of the great world, doing his best.”

PHILLIPS BROOKS

“Do what lieth in thy power and God will assist thy good will.”

THOMAS à KEMPIS

“God only asks from you what He gives you power to do.”

Bishop WALSHAM HOW

July 27

“No man is so poor as to have nothing worth giving; as well might the mountain streamlets say they have nothing to give the sea because they are not rivers.
“Give what you have; to some one it may be better than you dare to think.”

LONGFELLOW

“Do not despond because your means of doing good appear trifling or insignificant; for though one soweth and another reapeth, yet it is God that giveth the increase; and who can tell whether He will not cause that which is sewn to bear fruit an hundred fold?”

JEAN INGELOW

“There must be a perpetual crusade carried on against small evils – very wearing sometimes. It is necessary to believe that in thus setting in order certain spots on God’s earth, still more in presenting to a few of His Children a somewhat higher standard of right, we are doing His work, and that He will not permit us to lose sight of His large laws, but will rather make them evident to us through small details.”

OCTAVIA HILL

July 26

“All work must be done very simply and quietly because God puts it into our hands to do, and then He will undoubtedly bless it. Do not allow yourself to become overwhelmed with work. You may be fully aware of your unfitness, and long for another to do it better, but if God has told you to do certain work for Him, then you must do it. Another might certainly do it better, but you have nothing to do with that. God has sent you to do it and no one else. He will give you all the strength you need to enable you to do it rightly. ‘My God shall supply all your need.’ Do not let self creep in. It is only self that makes you think about it at all, and say you cannot do it. You can do it perfectly well if He tells you to do it and it is not self-sought. Even if it be spiritual work, and you fear the souls of others may suffer through you, you need not fear. He has called you, and He will help you. Only trust to Him, and remember it is not you who do it, but He who works through you. Keep very quiet and calm, and rest in God, then He will not let you feel overwhelmed. Be as simple and natural as possible about everything. Try always to see clearly that right is right and wrong is wrong.”

H. MONSELL

“All our natural endowments, all our personal histories, all our contrasted circumstances, are so many opportunities for peculiar work.”

Bishop WESTCOTT

July 25

“Humanity is great;
And if I would not rather pore upon
An ounce of common, ugly, human dust,
An artisan’s palm, or a peasant’s brow,
Unsmooth, ignoble, save to me and God,
Than track old Nilus to his silver roots.
. . . . . . . . . . . . set it down
As weakness, - strength by no means,
We, we are shocked at Nature’s falling off,
We dare to shrink back from her warts and blains;
We will not, when she sneezes, look at her
Not even to say, ‘God bless her’. That’s our wrong.
For that she will not trust us often with
Her larger sense of beauty and desire,
But tethers us to a lily or a rose
And bids us diet on the dew inside,
Left ignorant that the hungry beggar-boy
Bears yet a breastful of a fellow-world
To this world undisparaged, undespoiled,
And (while we scorn him for a flower or two,
As being, Heaven help us, less poetical)
Contains himself both flower and firmament,
And surging seas and aspectable stars,
And all that we would push him out of sight
In order to see nearer. Let us pray
God’s grace to keep God’s image in repute.”

ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING

"He who feels contempt
For any living thing, hath faculties
That he hath never used, and thought with him
Is in its infancy.”

WORDSWORTH

July 24

“There is some soul of goodness in things evil
Would men observingly distil it out.”

SHAKESPEARE

“We must learn to see the good in the midst of much that is unlovely.”

GEORGE ELIOT [pen-name of Mary Ann Evans]

“I would be bold, and bear
To look into the swarthiest face of things,
For God’s sake who made them.”

ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING

“Everyone must admire the courage which she displayed, but those who know by experience what the lowest of the masses in our large towns are like – how all decency and every vestige of humanity seems to be stamped out of their nature – will alone be in a condition to appreciate her power. That power should more properly be called the utmost cultivation of all her faculties. This enabled her first to see the image of God, defiled and darkened though it might be, impressed upon every living soul, - to feel her kinship with it, to lay her hand, not upon the defilements and impurity, but through the means of her infinite love and tenderness, upon the one spot yet capable of being healed, thus kindling the faintest spark into a living flame.”

From Biography of Sister Dora

July 23

“’Father of all’! he urges his strong plea
Thou lovest all; Thy erring child may be
Lost to himself, but never lost to Thee.

“All souls are Thine; the wings of morning bear
None from that Presence which is everywhere.
Nor hell itself can hide, for Thou art there.

“Through sins of sense, perversities of will,
Through doubt and pain, through guilt and shame and ill
Thy pitying eye is on Thy creature still.

“Wilt thou not make, Eternal Source and Goal!
In Thy long years, life’s broken circle whole,
And change to praise the cry of a lost soul?”

WHITTIER

“I dislike extremely a passage in which you appear to consider the disregard of individuals as a lofty condition of mind. My own experience and development deepen every day my conviction that our moral progress may be measured by the degree in which we sympathise with individual suffering and individual joy.”

GEORGE ELIOT [pen-name of Mary Ann Evans]

July 22

“Despise no soul, however debased, grimed, or soiled. These souls are God’s. . . . For all souls Jesus died. . . . At least, O Christians, pray for them. Give God what God can justly claim. ‘All souls are mine.’”

KNOX LITTLE

“Who heeds not how the lower gusts are working,
Knowing that one sure wind blows on above,
And sees beneath the foulest faces lurking
One God-built shrine of reverence and love.
Who feels that God and Heaven’s great deep are nearer
Him to whose heart his fellow-man is nigh.
Who does not hold his soul’s own freedom dearer
Than that of all his brethren, low or high.
Who to the right can feel himself the truer
For being gently patient with the wrong,
Who sees a brother in the evil-doer,
And finds in Love the heart’s blood of his song.”

LOWELL

“Many who talk loudly of progress and the perfectibility of the human race do not see the beauty and worth of every human soul, even in the midst of its utmost ignorance or bondage to sin.”

From Catherine of Siena

July 21

“I think we made rather too many rules, and that we re-made them too often. I make fewer now, and easier ones, and let them much more alone. I wonder if I really keep them better? But if not, may God, I pray Him, send me back the restless zeal, the hunger and thirst after righteousness, which He gives in early youth! It is so easy to become more thick-skinned in conscience, more tolerant of evil, more hopeless of good, more careful of one’s own comfort and one’s own property, more self-satisfied in leaving high aims and great deeds to enthusiasts, and then to believe that one is growing older and wiser. And yet those high examples, those good works, those great triumphs over evil, which single hands effect sometimes, we are all grateful for, when they are done, whatever we may have said of the doing. But we speak of saints and enthusiasts for good, as if some special gifts were made to them in middle age which are withheld from other men. Is it not rather that some few souls keep alive the lamp of zeal and high desire which God lights for most of us while life is young?”

Mrs EWING

“Consider Him . . . lest ye be wearied and faint in your minds.
“Ye have not yet resisted unto blood, striving against sin.”

HEB. xii 3

July 20

“Great men, taken up in any way, are profitable company. We cannot look, however imperfectly, upon a great man, without gaining something by him. He is the living light-fountain which it is good and pleasant to be near, - the light which enlightens, which has enlightened, the darkness of the world, - in whose radiance all souls feel that it is well with them. . . . No nobler feeling than this of admiration for one higher than himself dwells in the breast of man. It is to this hour, and at all hours, the vivifying influence in man’s life. Religion I find stands upon it; not Paganism only, but far higher and truer religions, - all religions hitherto known. Hero-worship, heart-felt, prostrate admiration, submission – burning, boundless, for a noblest Godlike form of man, - is not that the germ of Christianity itself? The greatest of all heroes is One whom we do not name here. . . . No sadder proof can be given by a man of his own littleness than disbelief in great men.”

CARLYLE

“A man conscious of enthusiasm for worthy aims is sustained under petty hostilities by the memory of great workers who had to fight their way, not without wounds, and who hover in his mind as patron saints, invisibly helping.”

GEORGE ELIOT [pen-name of Mary Ann Evans]

July 19

“For the world still needs
Its champion of old, and finds him still.
Not always now with mighty sinews and thews
Like mine, though still these profit, but keen brain
And voice to move men’s souls to love the right
And hate the wrong; even tho’ the bodily form
Be weak, of giant strength, strong to assail
The hydra heads of Evil, and to slay
The monsters that now waste them: Ignorance,
Self-seeking, coward fears, the hate of Man
Disguised as love of God. . . . . . . .
And tho’ men cease
To worship at my shrine, yet not the less
I hold, it is the toils I knew, the pains
I bore for others, which have kept the heart
Of manhood undefiled, and nerved the arm
Of sacrifice, and made the martyr strong
To do and bear, and taught the race of men
How godlike ‘tis to suffer thro’ life, and die
At last for others’ good!”

LEWIS MORRIS (from Herakles)

July 18

“Nay, best it is, indeed,
To spend ourselves upon the general good;
And, oft misunderstood,
To strive to lift the limbs and knees that bleed;
This is the best, the fullest meed.
Let ignorance assail or hatred sneer;
Who loves his race he shall not fear;
He suffers not for long
Who doth his soul possess in loving and grows strong.

“Ay, labour, thou art blest,
From all the earth thy voice, a constant prayer,
Soars upward day and night;
A voice of aspiration after right;
A voice of effort yearning for its rest;
A voice of high hope conquering despair.”

LEWIS MORRIS

The holiest task by Heaven decreed,
An errand all divine,
The burden of our common need
To render less, is thine.

“The paths of pain are thine. Go forth
With patience, trust, and hope;
The sufferings of a sin-sick earth
Shall give thee ample scope.”

WHITTIER

July 17

“There is work for all of us. And there is special work for each, work which I cannot do in a crowd, or as one of a mass, but as one man, acting singly according to my own gifts, and under a sense of my personal responsibilities. . . . I have a special work to do, as one individual, who, by God’s plan and appointment, have a separate position, separate responsibilities, and a separate work; a work which, if I do not do it, must be left undone.”

RUSKIN

“Therefore, though few may praise, or help, or heed us,
Let us work on with head, or heart, or hand,
For that we know the future ages need us;
And we must help our time to take its stand.

“Each single struggle has its far vibration,
Working results that work results again;
Failure and death are not annihilation,
Our tears exhaled will make some future rain.”

R. A. VAUGHAN

July 16

“It was Wednesday evening, and Merle walked down through the fields to preach, burning with one thought – the worth of a man.
“What Tom’s one year of Christian life had done! And all around were lives as precious – not all as gifted, but everyone as capable of being filled with the spirit of God – sinking to the low level of a careless, tippling life – drifting up to the great cities, where we call them ‘redundant masses’, and wonder how to endure the pressure of so great a multitude – and each unit might be a temple of the Holy Ghost. For Tom himself might have sunk with all the rest, into the slough, had no hand arrested him. And Christians can live to dress and dine, and think it much to spend an hour a week in surface labour, while this tremendous ruin of the most precious thing created is going on.”

E. B. BAYLY

There is work which everyone of us ought to be doing at our very doors. You have a fellowship, everyone of you, in this solidarity of evil. You cannot wipe off from your souls, as with a wet cloth, as though it were no concern of yours, the stains left by the sins of others. From each one of you radiates invisibly an interminable web work, of which the implicated consequences, if summed together, are incalculable. But if it be so in evil. . . . so is it also, thank God! with any good you do; it may put on white robes, and go forth as an angel to bless the world. Oh, if we could all, everyone of us, be made to feel how awful is our common responsibility for the general evil, how urgent is our individual duty to labour for the common good, we should see in a regenerated world the fulfilment of the olden prophecy. . . . “

Archdeacon FARRAR

July 15

“There drift through this great city thousands of outcasts, women who have sinned, men who have never heard a word of kindness from their very birth. They are the hundredth sheep. If you wish to be to them, when they cross your path, like Christ and God, do not stand apart, help to save a few from the terror of despair. Have you never asked yourself how much you may have done indirectly to swell those dreadful ranks, how thoughtlessness again and again repeated in matters that pertain to everyday life – for so wonderfully is society knit together – may have driven many into the outcast life.
“The ruin of many a woman lies at the door of the fine lady who hurries her workwoman to finish her dress, or who, to save herself a little trouble, or that she may indulge a momentary expense, refuses to pay her bills. One would think from the way in which the payment of debts has to be dragged out of the rich, that they think tradesmen can coin money to pay their under-workers. The wages of poor women are kept down, and their money held back, by this selfish thoughtlessness, and when wages are low, women are driven to ruin.”

STOPFORD BROOKE

“Remember now and always that life is no idle dream, but a solemn reality based upon eternity, and encompassed by eternity. Find out your task; stand to it; ‘the night cometh when no man can work.’”

CARLYLE

July 14

“Oh, dark is the background to the sunny landscape of our comfortable lives. Behind our rich houses and costly comforts are bleak rooms and worn clothes, through which the wintry wind drives its dagger, where starvation creeps into the bed with mother and child and eats into blood and bone, where, at the best, life is a long and weary strife against the force of laws which pitilessly inflict their worst sentence upon the innocent and weak. This is a ghastly burden, and it lies heavy upon millions in this country.”

STOPFORD BROOKE

“I have just been looking over a newspaper, one of the most painful and solemn studies in the world, if it be read thoughtfully. So much of sin and so much of suffering in the world are there displayed, and no one seems able to remedy either. And then the thought of my own private life, so full of comforts, is very startling when I contrast it to the lot of millions whose portion is so full of distress or trouble. May I be kept humble and zealous, and may God give me grace to labour in my generation for the good of my brethren, and for His glory!”

Dr ARNOLD

July 13

“Honour the Lord with thy substance, and with the first-fruits of all thine increase.”

PROV. iii. 9

“Wealth is honourable, and may be used most blessedly when men regard themselves as being what indeed they are – stewards of it, and not the owners; when they know how to acquire without avarice, and how to expend without grudging; but the wealth of the callous, the selfish, the greedy, the luxurious – their gold and silver is rusted, and its rust shall be a witness against the, and shall eat their flesh as it were fire. . . . If only every man and woman among you recognised the plain truth that you can no longer shift onto others’ shoulders the sacred responsibilities which God, and no other, lays individually upon you; if, in other words, Christians could only be aroused to be Christians, to feel as Christians, to live as Christians, to labour as Christians, we should soon sweep away the subterranean horrors of this deep, dar, under-world of woe that underlies life’s shining surface – dim, populous dens of multitudinous toil unheeded by the heedless.”

Archdeacon FARRAR

July 12

It seems to me a great and good lesson to go through these crowded places (speaking of Covent Garden market) to see what life is – the life of the millions, not of the few – and then to think of our aesthetics, as Kingsley said, and our life one long pursuit of enjoyment, and disappointment if we do not get it. . . . But suppose that cry goes up to the ears of God, and He asks, Whom did you relieve? Whom did you clothe? Whom did you feed with your tens, hundreds, or thousands? Assuredly, protest against Kingsley who will, he stood on a deep, awful truth. God will yet take account of the selfishness of wealth, and His quarrel has yet to be fought out.”

From Life of F. W. Robertson

“The sight of so many whom God has made as good as oneself with such an apparent want of everything, at once makes one ashamed of one’s own treasures, and desirous to claim them and rejoice in whatever one can enter into with them.”

F. D. MAURICE

“The Lord’s words made clear beyond doubt that ‘the blessing of power is the blessing of great cares’, that the sign of authority is the readiness to serve.”

Bishop WESTCOTT

July 11

“Man has rights by nature. . . . They may all be comprised in the right which belongs to every rational being, to exercise his powers for the promotion of his own and others’ Happiness and Virtue. These are the great purposes of his existence. For these his powers were given, and to these he is bound to devote them. He is bound to make himself and others better and happier, according to his ability. His ability for this work is a sacred trust from God, the greatest of all trusts. He must answer for the waste or abuse of it.”

W. E. CHANNING

“If there is anything which brings still more sadness to the heart than the degradation of the ignorant, it is surely the thought of those called by their own hearts, by education and the needs of others, to some noble purpose, who are yet content to dream away their lives, indifferent spectators of the sorrows, sins, and wrongs of men, when they might have been leaders in the battle against evil. The age of heroic deeds is not gone by. It cannot be but that a ready answer will be given to the voice as of a trumpet call – ‘Et nos vincamus aliquid!’ ‘Let us, too, conquer something!’”

From Life of C. Lowder

July 10

“’We know not what we do’, some cry; but they ought to know. They ought to think that more evils are wrought by want of thought than by want of heart, and that thoughtlessness when encouraged or unchecked, or long protracted after warnings given, becomes want of heart. The impulse of pity is checked by selfishness, the desire of helping by vanity and love of show, by disinclination to break in upon an easy-going life; and the practice of love being troublesome, divine charity dies at last.”

STOPFORD BROOKE

“What, my soul, was thy errand here?
Was it mirth or ease,
Or heaping up dust from year to year?
‘Nay, none of these.’

“What hast thou wrought for Right and Truth,
For God and man,
From the golden hours of bright-eyed youth,
To life’s mid span?”

WHITTIER

July 9

“It is a calumny on men to say that they are roused to heroic action by ease, hope of pleasure, recompense – sugar plums of any kind, in this world or the next! In the meanest mortal there lies something nobler. . . . It is not to taste sweet things, but to do noble and true things, and vindicate himself under God’s heaven, as a God-made man, that the poorest son of Adam dimly longs. Show him the way of doing that, the dullest day-drudge kindles into a hero. They wrong man greatly who say he is to be seduced by ease. Difficulty, abnegation, martyrdom, daeth, are the allurements that act on the heart of man. Kindle the inner genial life of him, you have a flame that burns up all lower considerations. Not happiness, but something higher; one sees this even in the frivolous classes, with their ‘point of honour’, and the like. Not by flattering our appetites; no, by awakening the Heroic that slumbers in every heart, can any religion find followers.”

CARLYLE

“Let us only have a religious purpose, grand, inspiring, and devout, and we shall not have to complain of a want of zeal.”

Christian Life

July 8

“We can’t choose happiness either for ourselves or for another; we can’t tell where that will lie. We can only choose whether we will indulge ourselves in the present moment, or whether we will renounce that for the sake of obeying the divine voice within us, for the sake of being true to all the motives that sanctify our lives. I know this belief is hard; it has slipped away from me again and again, but I have felt that if I let it go for ever, I should have no light through the darkness of this life.”

GEORGE ELIOT [pen-name of Mary Ann Evans]

“Things which could never have made a man happy, develop a power to make him strong. Strength, and not happiness, or rather only that happiness which comes by strength, is the end of human living.”

PHILLIPS BROOKS

“To love God is our Happiness, to trust in Him is our Repose, to surrender ourselves entirely to His will is our Strength.”

CHARLES BEARD

July 7

“One kind of moral training uses self-sacrifice as punishment. Because you have done so much which you ought not to have done, therefore you shall surrender so much which it would give you pleasure to possess. Another uses self-sacrifice as an expression of the essential badness of the thing surrendered. Because the earth is inherently, intrinsically wicked, therefore come away from it, and be separate; because the body is accursed, therefore pluck out thy right eye, cut off thy right hand. But to Jesus self-sacrifice always is a means of freedom. That is what always gives to the self-denials which He demands a triumphant and enthusiastic air.

“Not because you have not deserved to enjoy it, not because it is wicked to enjoy it, but because there is another enjoyment more worthy of your nature, for which the native appetite shall show itself in you the moment that you really lay hold of it, therefore let this first enjoyment go; and by this conception of the purpose of self-sacrifice, Christ’s law and limit of self-sacrifice is always settled.”

“Whose service is perfect freedom.”

Book of Common Prayer [Anglican]

July 6

“The mark of a saint is not perfection, but consecration. A saint is not a man without faults, but a man who has given himself without reserve to God.”

Bishop WESTCOTT

“All truly consecrated men learn little by little that what they are consecrated to is not only joy or sorrow, but a divine idea and a profound obedience, which can find their full outward expression not in joy, and not in sorrow, but in the mysterious and inseparable mingling of the two. . . .
“Under a cloud of circumstances we must walk; but there is behind it that law and that truth which really made the life of Jesus - the law of obedience and the truth of sonship – then for us, too, light shall come through the cloud, and mingling with the darkness make that new condition in which it is best for a man’s soul to live, that sweet and strong condition in which both joy and sorrow may have place, but which is greater than either of them – the condition which He called peace.”

PHILLIPS BROOKS

July 5

“The way of God is the way of sacrifice. But let us not mistake the meaning of the word.
“It has been well said that ‘in the hours of clear reason we should say that we had never made a sacrifice’; and again it may be said, no less well, that all which we delight to recall is sacrifice.
“For sacrifice properly describes not loss to man but devotion to God; not suffering, but dedication; not the foregoing of that which we might have enjoyed, but the conversion of that which was offered to us for a time into an eternal possession; the investment of things unstable and fleeting with a power of unchangeable joy.”

Bishop WESTCOTT

“It is that deep principle of all true life which represents the affinity – latent, oppressed by circumstances, repressed by sin, but always there – between our human nature and the Divine, and through subjection to which we reassume our birthright as ‘the sons of God’; conscience to see, and will to choose – not what shall please ourselves, but – the highest and purest aim that life presents to us.”

J. C. BROWN. from Ethics of George Eliot

July 4

“The growth of higher feeling within us is like the growth of the faculty, bringing with it a sense of added strength. Constancy and faithfulness mean something else besides doing what is easiest and pleasantest to ourselves. They mean renouncing whatever is opposed to the reliance others have in us – whatever would cause misery to those whom the course of our lives has made dependent on us. . . . Her sympathies went out more readily towards enthusiasm for the discharge of duties than for the assertion of rights.”

From a Review on George Eliot

“It is this power of perishing to give rise to something beyond and greater than itself, or being worn out in the act of producing something nobler than itself, that constitutes the worth of any created thing, and not its capacity of its own enjoyment, however useful this enjoyment may be in keeping it in healthful working order.”

JAMES RAM

July 3

“It is when a man begins to know the ambition of his life not simply as the choice of his own will but as the wise assignment of God’s love; and to know his relations to his brethren not simply as the result of his own impulsive affections but as the seeking of his soul for these souls because they all belong to the great Father-soul; it is then that life for that man begins to lift itself all over, and to grow towards completion upward through all its length and breadth. That is a noble time, a bewildering and exalting time in any of our lives, when into everything that we are doing enters the spirit of God, and thenceforth moving ever up toward the God to whom it belongs, that Spirit, dwelling in our life, carries our life up with it; not separating our life from the earth, but making every part of it, while it still keeps its hold on earth, soar up and have to do with heaven; so completing life in its height, by making it divine.”

PHILLIPS BROOKS

“Ye loved the Lord with all your hearts;
In Him ye loved the souls of men;
Your joy was freely to impart
Your best, and ask for nought again;
No selfish greed, no lack of power,
Defiled your bounties’ kindly shower.

“Whate’er ye planned, began, achieved,
Ye kept one pure and steadfast aim,
To make the Christ yet more believed,
To win more worship to His Name;
And every truth and rule ye taught
Into your daily life was wrought.”

July 2

“All things else, joy, beauty, life itself, are of account only to the degree in which they are consciously used to subserve that higher life. His ultimate standard of value to which everything, alike in art and in social and political relations, is referred, is – not success, not enjoyment, whether sensuous, sentimental, or aesthetic, but – the measure in which may thereby be trained up that higher life of humanity.”

J. C. BROWN, from Ethics of George Eliot.

“Who with a toward or untoward lot,
Prosperous or adverse, to his wish or not,
Plays, in the many games of Life, that one
Where what he most doth value must be won;
Whom neither shape of danger can dismay,
Nor thought of tender happiness betray;
Who, not content that former worth stand fast,
Looks forward, persevering to the last.”

WORDSWORTH

“Self-ease is pain, thy only rest
To labour for a worthy end.”

WHITTIER

July 1

“What is our life? It is a mission to go into every corner we can reach, and reconquer for God’s beatitude His unhappy world back to Him. It is a devotion of ourselves to the bliss of the Divine Life, by the beautiful apostolate of kindness.”

FABER

“If there be some weaker one,
Give me strength to help him on;
If a blinder soul there be,
Let me guide him nearer Thee.
Make my mortal dreams come true
With the work I fain would do;
Clothe with life the weak intent,
Let me be the thing I meant;
Let me find in Thy employ
Peace that dearer is than joy;
Out of self to love be led
And to heaven acclimated,
Until all things sweet and good
Seem my natural habitude.”

WHITTIER

June 30

“We live in an age when there is a fashion in philanthropy as well as a fashion in religion. Do we atone by an interest in large questions – a common fault – for a failure towards lesser claims? We live in an age when, at all costs, men seek for personal aggrandisement, or for the intoxication of passing pleasure. We, each of us, must see to it lest our ingrained selfishness is destroying the ‘diligence’ of the Christian. Can it be that our life is being frittered away in nothings when men around us are in the direst need? Can it be that we occupy ourselves with ‘great interests’ when unworthy suspicions, or cruel slanders, or petty unkindnesses, or thoughtless acts of neglect, are emptying the lives that lie within our arm-sweep of the power of happiness and the influence for improvement that are entrusted to us to use. Let us see to it. every day in every life gives social opportunities, and therefore responsibilities at the last.”

KNOX LITTLE

“Do not dare to live without some clear intention toward which your living shall be bent. Mean to be something with all your might. . . . Do not dare to think that a Child of God can worthily work out his career, or worthily serve God’s other children, unless he does both in the love and fear of God their father.”

PHILLIPS BROOKS

June 29

“A life without purpose is a languid, drifting thing; . . . Every day we ought to renew our purpose, saying to ourselves: This day let us make a sound beginning, for what we have hitherto done is naught; - Our improvement is in proportion to our purpose; - We hardly ever manage to get completely rid of one fault, and do not set our hearts on daily improvement; - Always place a definite purpose before thee; get the habit of mastering thine inclination.”

“The great clock at Westminster booms out its chimes to the tune of

‘Lord, thro’ this hour
Be Thou my Guide,
So by Thy power
No foot shall slide.’”

Archdeacon FARRAR

“Do as well as you can to-day, and perhaps to-morrow you may be able to do better.”

NEWTON

June 28

“Tell me not, in mournful numbers
‘Life is but an empty dream!’
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
And things are not what they seem.

“Not enjoyment and not sorrow,
Is our destined end or way;
But to act, that each to-morrow
Finds us farther than today.

“Trust no future, howe’er pleasant!
Let the dead Past bury its dead!
Act, - act in the living present!
Heart within and God o’erhead!

“Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time; -

“Footprints, that perhaps another,
Sailing o’er life’s solemn main,
A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,
Seeing, shall take heart again.

“Let us, then, be up and doing,
With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing,
Learn to labour and to wait.”

LONGFELLOW

June 27

“Life never seems so clear and easy as when the heart is beating faster at the sight of some generous, self-risking deed. We feel no doubt then what is the highest prize the soul can win; we almost believe in our power to attain it.”

GEORGE ELIOT [pen-name of Mary Ann Evans]

“It is true of a human life that it finds its highest enjoyment n the consciousness of progress. Our times of greatest pleasure are when we have won some higher peak of difficulty, trodden under foot some evil, refused some pleasant temptation for truth’s sake, been swept out of ourselves by love, and felt day by day in such high labours so sure a growth of moral strength within us, that we cannot conceive of an end of growth.”

STOPFORD BROOKE

“Live rightly, so shalt thou acquire
Unknown capacities of joy.”

C. PATMORE

June 26

“’Tis not for man to trifle! Life is brief,
And sin is here;
Our age is but the falling of a leaf,
A dropping tear.
We have no time to sport away the hours,
All must be earnest in a world like ours.

“Not many lives, but only one have we,
One, only one,
How sacred should that one life ever be,
That narrow span!
Day after day filled up with blessed toil,
Hour after hour still bringing in new spoil.

“Our being is no shadow of thin air,
No vacant dream,
No fable of the things that never were
But only seem;
‘Tis full of meaning as of mystery,
Though strange and solemn may that meaning be.”

“Duty may regulate the hours of life towards others. Love takes charge of its moments.”

June 25

“It should not seem to be so very wonderful a thing that men should attain to the ability to say ‘I am willing to die’. . . . It seems to me a much better, grander, and nobler thing to say, ‘I am willing and ready to live, right here, to-day, in my circumstances; ready to take up my burden, to carry my load, to do my work, to wait God’s time’.”

M. D. SAVAGE

“We know what strength, what resolution, what scattering of idle doubts, what concentration of aim, come when we once have avowed our choice.
“Numberless temptations are removed by the mere fact that our part is taken.
“The obligation of our cause is upon us.”

Bishop WESTCOTT

“An ideal may seem unattainable, but when it is distinctly acknowledged as the object of aspiration, it will be found close at hand.”

Bishop WESTCOTT

June 24

“Now, believe me, God hides some ideal in every human soul. At some time in our life we feel a trembling, fearful longing to do some good thing. Life finds its noblest spring of excellence in this hidden impulse to do our best. There is a time when we are not content to be such merchants or doctors, or lawyers, as we see on the dead level or below it. The woman longs to glorify her womanhood as sister, wife or mother. . . . Here is God – God standing silently at the door all day long – God whispering to the soul that to be pure and true is to succeed in life, and whatever we get short of that will burn up like stubble, though the whole world try to save it.”

ROBERT COLLYER

“No dwarfing of your growth in years that are past, no apparent dryness of your inward springs of life, no crookedness or deformity in any of your past development, can in the least mar the perfect work that He will accomplish, if you will only put yourselves absolutely in His hands, and let Him have His own way with you.”

H. W. S.

June 23

“O may I join the choir invisible
Of those immortal dead who live again
In minds made better by their presence; live
In pulses stirred to generosity,
In deeds of daring rectitude, in scorn
For miserable aims that end with self,
In thoughts sublime that pierce the night like stars,
And with their mild persistence urge man’s search
To vaster issues

. . . . .

This is life to come,
Which martyred men have made more glorious
For us who strive to follow. May I reach
That purest heaven, be to other souls
The cup of strength in some great agony,
Enkindle generous ardour, feed pure love,
Beget the smiles that have no cruelty –
Be the sweet presence of a good diffused,
And in diffusion ever more intense,
So shall I join the choir invisible
Whose music is the gladness of the world.”

GEORGE ELIOT [pen-name of Mary Ann Evans]

June 22

“I would earnestly ask my sisters to keep clear of both the jargons now current everywhere (for they are equally jargons), of the jargon, namely, about the ‘rights’ of women, which urges women to do all that men do, including the medical and other professions, merely because men do it, and without regard to whether this is the best that women can do; and of the jargon that urges women to do nothing that men can do, merely because they are women, and should be ‘recalled to a sense of their duty as women’, and because ‘this is women’s work, and that is men’s’, and ‘these are the things that women should not do’, which is all assertion and nothing more. Surely woman should bring the best she has, whatever that is, to the work of God’s world, without attending to either of these cries. For what are they, bot of them, the one just as much as the other, but listening to the ‘what people will say’, to opinion, to the ‘voices from without’? And as a wise man has said, no one has ever done anything great or useful by listening to the voices from without. . . . Go your way straight to God’s work, in simplicity and singleness of heart.”

FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE

“For it is beautiful only to do the thing we are meant for.”

June 21

“Duties high, noble, silently important as any that can fall to a human creature, duties that, if well discharged, constitute woman in a soft, beautiful, almost sacred way, Queen of the World, and which, by her natural faculties, graces, strength, and weaknesses, are every way indicated as especially hers.”

CARLYLE

“I saw her upon nearer view,
A Spirit, yet a Woman too!
Her household motions light and free,
And steps of virgin liberty;
A countenance in which did meet
Sweet records, promises as sweet;
A Creature not too bright or good
For human nature’s daily food;
For transient sorrows, simple wiles,
Praise, blame, love, kisses, tears and smiles.

“And now I see with eye serene
The very pulse of the machine;
A Being breathing thoughtful breath,
A traveller betwixt life and death;
The reason firm, the temperate will,
Endurance, foresight, strength and skill;
A perfect Woman, nobly planned,
To warn, to comfort, and command;
And yet a Spirit still and bright
With something of an angel light.”

WORDSWORTH