October 27

“Abou Ben Adhem (may his tribe increase!)
Awoke one night from a great dream of peace,
And saw, within the moonlight of his room,
Making it rich and like a lily in bloom,
An Angel, writing in a book of gold.
Exceeding peace had made Ben Adhem bold,
So to the presence in the room he said:
‘What writest thou?’ the Vision raised his head,
And in a voice made all of sweet accord,
Answered: ‘The names of those that love the Lord!’
‘And is mine one?’ said Abou. ‘Nay not so,’
Replied the Angel. Abou spake more low
But cheerily still, and said, ‘I pray thee, then,
Write me as one that loves his fellow-men.’
The Angel wrote and vanished. The next night
He came again with a great wakening light,
And showed the souls whom love of God had blest,
And lo! – Ben Adhem’s name led all the rest!”

LEIGH HUNT

“Beloved, let us love one another; for love is of God; and everyone that loves is born of God, and knows God.
“He that loves not, knows not God; for God is Love.”

I JOHN iv 7, 8

October 26

“I have noticed that wherever there has been a faithful following of the Lord in a consecrated soul, several things have inevitably followed, sooner or later. Meekness and quietness of spirit become in time the characteristics of the daily life. A submissive acceptance of the will of God, as it comes in the hourly events of each day; pliability in the hands of God to do or to suffer all the good pleasure of His will; sweetness under provocation; calmness in the midst of turmoil and bustle; yieldingness to the wishes of others, and an insensibility to slights and affronts; absence of worry or anxiety; deliverance from care or fear, - all these, and many similar graces, are invariably found to be the natural outward development of that inward life which is hid with Christ in God.”

H. W. S.

“There cannot be a secret Christian. Grace is like ointment in the hand, it betrayeth itself. If you truly feel the sweetness of the Cross of Christ, you will feel constrained to confess Christ before men.”

Christian Life

October 25

“To examine its evidence is not to try Christianity; to admire its martyrs is not to try Christianity; to compare and estimate its teachers is not to try Christianity; to attend its rites and services with more than Mahometan punctuality is not to try or know Christianity. But for one week, for one day, to have lived in the pure atmosphere of faith and love to God, of tenderness to man; to have beheld earth annihilated, and Heaven open to the prophetic gaze of hope; to have seen evermore revealed behind the complicated troubles of this strange, mysterious life, the unchanged smile of an Eternal Friend, and everything that is difficult to reason solved by that reposing trust which is higher and better than reason – to have known and felt this, I will not say for a life, but for a single blessed hour, that, indeed, is to have made experiment of Christianity.”

W. A. BUTLER

“Be ye doers of the Word, and not hearers only.”

S. James i, 22

October 24

“Life should be the same as love. There is no life worth having which does not give as much as it receives, or rather, as much as it can receive. It is not wrong in youth to take pleasure, but to take it and not give it, that is base. . . . Brighten darkened lives, soften the rude, make a sunshine of peace in stormy places, cover the faults and follies of men with the flower of love. . . . That is the best religion, the life of Christ, the very life of God.”

STOPFORD BROOKE

“O brother man! Fold to thy heart thy brother;
Where pity dwells, the peace of God is there;
To worship rightly is to love each other,
Each smile, a hymn, each kindly deed, a prayer.

“Follow with reverent steps the great example
Of Him whose holy work was ‘doing good’;
So shall the wide earth seem our Father’s temple,
Each loving life a psalm of gratitude.”

WHITTIER

“The widest love, in other words, is personal; not an undefined sentiment, but the practical recognition of a real claim.”

Bishop WESTCOTT

October 23

“’Coming nearer and nearer to Christ,’ we say; that does not mean creeping into refuge where we can be safe. It means becoming better and better men; repeating His character more and more in ours. The only true danger is sin, and so the only true safety is holiness.”

PHILLIPS BROOKS

“The smallest present victory over an evil temper, the slightest possible exertion in the cause of charity, the power to say no, on one actual occasion to the rising of a sinful desire, or to the indulgence of a dangerous inclination, is worth far more as a proof of the inworking of the Saviour’s love, than any amount of trustful hope, of touching tenderness, or rapt contemplation.”

Dr VAUGHAN

“The precepts of Jesus are the essential elements of His religion. Regard these as your rule of life, and you build your house upon a rock. Live them out in deed, and you have entered the kingdom of heaven – you even now enter it.”

CHANNING

October 22

“The belief in a divine education, open to each man and to all men, takes up into itself all that is true in the end proposed by culture, supplements and perfects it. It is right that we should have an aim of our own, with something peculiar in it, determined by our individuality and our surroundings; but this may readily degenerate into exclusive narrowness, unless it has for a background the great thought, that there is a kingdom of God within us, around us, and above us, in which we with all our powers and aims are called to be conscious workers. Towards the forwarding of this silent, ever-advancing kingdom, our little work whatever it be, if good and true, may contribute something. And this thought lends to any calling, however lowly, a consecration which is wanting even to the loftiest self-chosen ideals. But even if our aim should be frustrated and our work come to naught, yet the failure of our most cherished plans may be more than compensated. In the thought that we are members of this kingdom, already begun, here and now, yet reaching forward through all time, we shall have a reserve of consolation better than any which success without this could give.”

Principal J. C. SHAIRP

“A political victory, a rise of rents, the recovery of your sick, or the return of your absent friend, or some other favourable event, raises your spirits, and you think good days are preparing for you. Do not believe it. Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.”

EMERSON

October 21

“Again and again men try to produce spiritual life in themselves and others by, as it were, compulsion from without. They fast a little, they go early to morning prayer, they practice small austerities; and then, refreshed by these exercises, and satisfied with their consciences, they join with tenfold vigour in all the excitements of the season, and rejoice that they can so easily make God and the world go hand in hand. What is the result? The imposed observances do not belong to the inner life, have no natural harmony with it, and the entire want of adaptation between the two makes itself felt. . . . In Christ’s pregnant words, ‘The rent is made worse.’ No! that will not do. There must be life before there is useful or lasting form. Religious observances of every kind must be the natural expression of the heart, or else, being untrue, they produce habitual hypocrisy.”

STOPFORD BROOKE

"It takes a soul to move a body – it takes a high-souled man
To move the masses even to a cleaner stye.
It takes the ideal to blow an inch inside
The dust of the actual; and your Fouriers failed
Because not poets enough to understand
That life develops from within.”

ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING

October 20

“’Then you don’t consider that it is something of the nature of a solecism to introduce religious topics into ordinary social intercourse?’
“’Religious! What precisely is religion?’ asked the girl passionately. ‘Is it going to church on Sundays? Is it singing hymns? Is it even the scrupulous praying of one’s daily prayers? Is that all that it means for us – all that it can be made to mean? If so, keep it silent then, keep it straitly in its place. If it might be made to mean something less pathetically unhopeful, less unprofitably dreary – if, for instance, it might be made to mean a more carefully beautiful human life, with finer and higher sympathies and manners for everyday uses of life; if it might suggest a quicker and more keen-sighted compassion for unobtrusive sorrows, a less cruel contempt for uncomprehended failure and mistake, a less open and sickening worship of wealth for wealth’s sake, a stronger and more fervent desire to lessen but for one day, one hour, some small part of the great, crushing burden that we help to lay on the hapless shoulders of others – if religion might, but ever so remotely, mean these, or any of these, then, in God’s name, let us speak of it.’”

M. LINSKILL

“Religion consists, not in knowledge, but in a holy life.”

Bishop TAYLOR

October 19

“Religion has been treated as if it were a special exercise of a special power, not as if it were the possible loftiness of everything that a man could think, or be, or do. The result has been that certain men, and certain parts of men, have stood forth as distinctively religious, and that the possible religiousness of all life has been but very imperfectly felt and acknowledged. This has made religion weak. Man’s strongest powers, man’s intensest passions, have been involved in the working out of his career, and in the development of his relations with his fellow-men. What has been left over from religion has been the weakest part of him, his sentiments and fears; and so religion, very often, has come to seem a thing of mystic mood and frightened superstitions.”

PHILLIPS BROOKS

“Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this. To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world.”

S. JAMES i 27

October 18

“Cry aloud, spare not, lift up thy voice like a trumpet, and show my people their transgression, and the house of Jacob their sins. . . . Wherefore have we fasted, say they, and thou seest not? Wherefore have we afflicted our soul, and thou takest no knowledge? Behold, in the day of your fast ye find pleasure, and exact all your labours.
“Behold, ye fast for strife and debate, and to smite with the fist of wickedness; ye shall not fast as ye do this day, to make your voice to be heard on high.
“Is it such a fast that I have chosen? A day for a man to afflict his soul? Is it to bow down his head as a bulrush, and to spread sackcloth and ashes under him? Wilt thou call this a fast, and an acceptable day to the Lord?
“Is not this the fast that I have chosen? To loose the bands of wickedness, to undo the heavy burdens, and to let the oppressed go free, and that ye break every yoke?
“Is it not to deal thy bread to the hungry, and that thou bring the poor that are cast out to thy house? When thou seest the naked, that thou cover him; and that thou hide not thyself from thine own flesh?
Then shall thy light break forth as the morning, and thine health shall spring forth speedily; and thy righteousness shall go before thee; the glory of the Lord shall be thy reward.
“Then shalt thou call, and the Lord shall answer; thou shalt cry, and he shall say, Here I am. If thou take away from the midst of thee the yoke, the putting forth of the finger, and speaking vanity;
“And if thou draw out thy soul to the hungry, and satisfy the afflicted soul; then shall thy light rise in obscurity, and thy darkness be as the noon day;
“And the Lord shall guide thee continually.”

ISAIAH lviii

October 17

“It was thought in the old time that the best way of serving God was by the sacrifice of rams and lambs; but men grew gradually into the blessed belief that a lowly heart and a contrite spirit – these, and these only – are the sacrifices acceptable to God. From costly offerings, elaborate ritual, and useless ceremonial, men grew into the belief that the visitation of the orphan and the widow, and a charitable life, were the Ritual of true Religion.”

GEORGE DAWSON

“Religion does not consist in the performance of certain ceremonial acts at specified times, outside which acts and times it has no place; but consists in framing our whole life, and all our acts, upon a distinct view of our position as created beings, charged, by the fact of our creation, with duties both to our fellow creatures and to our Creator.”

EDWARD DENISON

“It must never be absent from the mind that Religion is not a set of opinions, but life in Jesus Christ.”

From Ecce Deus

October 16

“O Lord and Master of us all;
Whate’er our name and sign,
We own Thy sway, we hear Thy call,
We test our lives by Thine.

“To The our full humanity,
Its joys and pains, belong;
The wrong of man to man on Thee
Inflicts a deeper wrong.

Who hates, hates Thee, who loves becomes
Therein to Thee allied;
All sweet accords of hearts and homes
In Thee are multiplied.

“Thy litanies, sweet offices
Of love and gratitude;
Thy sacramental liturgies,
The joy of doing good.

“The heart must ring Thy Christmas bells,
Thy inward altars raise;
Its faith and hope Thy canticles,
And its obedience praise.”

WHITTIER

October 15

“We are apt to feel as if nothing we could do on earth bears a relation to what the good are doing in a higher world; but it is not so. Heaven and earth are not so far apart. Every disinterested act, every sacrifice to duty, every exertion for the good of ‘one of the least of Christ’s brethren’, every new insight into God’s works, every new impulse given to the love of truth and goodness, associates us with the departed, brings us nearer to them, and is truly heavenly as if we were acting, not on earth, but in Heaven. The spiritual tie between us and the departed is not felt as it should be. Our union with them daily grows stronger, if we make daily progress in what they are growing in.”

CHANNING

. . . “After Christ, work turns to privilege,
And henceforth one with our humanity
The six-day Worker, working still in us,
Has called us freely to work on with Him
In high companionship. So, happiest!
I count that Heaven itself is only work
To a surer issue. Let us work indeed.”

ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING