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
Monday, July 27, 2009
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.”
“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!’”
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?”
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.”
“Let us only have a religious purpose, grand, inspiring, and devout, and we shall not have to complain of a want of zeal.”
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.”
“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.”
“To love God is our Happiness, to trust in Him is our Repose, to surrender ourselves entirely to His will is our Strength.”
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.”
“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.”
“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.”
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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
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
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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
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